The Cop and the Anthem — O. Henry

A homeless man spends an entire evening deliberately trying to get himself arrested, and the police will not cooperate — until the one moment he decides to go straight, at which point an officer finally stops him for doing nothing at all. O. Henry's short story is a compact case study in how vague, discretionary vagrancy laws actually worked on the street, and why that should trouble anyone training to practise law today.

In two minutes

The Cop and the Anthem follows Soapy, a homeless New Yorker who tries and fails at a string of deliberate petty crimes to get arrested and spend winter in a warm jail cell, only to be arrested for loitering the moment he resolves — after hearing a church anthem — to reform his life, an ending O. Henry uses to expose the arbitrariness of how vagrancy and public-order offences were policed.

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