In what was perhaps the clumsiest piece of buck-passing ever perpetrated, Police Commissioner Timilty last Friday traced Boston's juvenile delinquency back to the "Dean End Kids." Mr. Timilty's statement, which was made following the daring capture of five 13-year-old members of the Green Hornet Gang, deplored "the harm these pictures are doing to young minds," and ended on a note of despair: "There is nothing the police can do about them."

Quite apart from the fact that in all their pictures the Kids have undergone a miraculous, almost evangelical, reform, there is another and more obvious fallacy in the Commissioner's dialectic. The play which gave the young actors their name was produced in an attempt to expose the causes for a condition that had long existed in all large American cities. Largely as a result of the play and its celluloid counterparts, welfare agencies have benefitted from increased public interest and support in the work of juvenile guidance.

The Commissioner, who probably thinks Loretta Young is responsible for the Suez Canal, should not despair so soon. There is a great deal the police can do besides picking on children half their size, here or in Hollywood. And if their powers of observation are too dull to see what is to be done, maybe they should go to a few "Dead End" movies themselves.