This Chief and any one Commissioner had power to hold up most of the acts of the other three Commissioners.

It was made easy for the four Commissioners to come to a deadlock among themselves; and if this danger was avoided, it was easy for one Commissioner, by intriguing with the Chief, to bring the other three to a standstill.

The Commissioners were appointed by the Mayor, but he could not remove them without the assent of the Governor, who was usually politically opposed to him.

In the same way the Commissioners could appoint the patrolmen, but they could not remove them, save after a trial which went up for review to the courts.
As was inevitable under our system of law procedure, this meant that the action of the court was apt to be determined by legal technicalities.
It was possible to dismiss a man from the service for quite insufficient reasons, and to provide against the reversal of the sentence, if the technicalities of procedure were observed.

But the worst criminals were apt to be adroit men, against whom it was impossible to get legal evidence which a court could properly consider in a criminal trial (and the mood of the court might be to treat the case as if it were a criminal trial), although it was easy to get evidence which would render it not merely justifiable but necessary for a man to remove them from his private employ--and surely the public should be as well treated as a private employer.