What Makes a Better Policeman

CURRENT discussions of the problems of the American police seem fraught with paradox. While everyone seems to agree about remedies, criticisms of the police arise out of radically different conceptions of the police function. Some people see the police as the chief means of ending or reducing “crime in the streets"; others see them as an agency by which white society confines and suppresses black ghettos; still others view them as an organization caught on the grinding edge of a class conflict among competing standards of order and propriety. Yet despite these utterly disparate diagnoses, the prescribed treatment tends to be quite conventional and generally endorsed—higher salaries, better training, clearer policies, more modern equipment. And a further paradox: despite this apparent agreement on what should be done, little, in fact, happens. In some places, voters and politicians appear to be universally sympathetic to the needs of the police, but they are unwilling to appropriate more money to meet those needs. In other places, the extra funds have been spent but the criticisms remain—little, apparently, has changed.

One reason for this confusion or inaction lies, I believe, in the fact that the police perform a number of quite different functions. The controversies in which the police are embroiled reveal this as various disputants emphasize crime prevention, or law enforcement, or the maintenance of order, or political power. Liberty, order, legitimacyimportant and fundamental values are in conflict. The adherents of various points of view take refuge in a common (and perhaps peculiarly American) set of proposals: spend money, hire better men, buy more things. I suspect that spending more money and hiring better men are essential to police improvement, but I also suspect that one reason so little extra money is spent and so few men are hired is that beneath our agreement on means, we remain in deep disagreement on ends. Spend the money on what, and why? What is a “better" policeman, anyway?

This is not a new issue. The history of the American municipal police is in great part a history of struggles to define their role in our society. What makes the controversy so intense today is only partly that it is linked to the question of race; indeed, in the past the police have repeatedly been in conflict with new urban migrants of whatever color. The reason for the heat generated by the police question is probably the same as the reason for the emotions aroused by the crime issue: we compare present circumstances with an earlier period when we thought we had solved the problem. Police behavior, like crime, was not a major issue in the 1940s and 1950s. When the police did become an issue, it was usually because a department was found to be corrupt, and that discovery produced a standard response—bring in a reform chief, reorganize the force, and get back to work.

CROOK CATCHERS

That work was law enforcement, or so it was thought. The job of the police was to prevent crime and catch crooks. Corruption was a serious problem because it seemed to mean that crime was not being prevented and crooks were not beingcaught. Organized criminals were buying protection, or petty thieves were putting in a “fix,” or the police themselves were stealing on the side. Reforming a department not only meant ending corruption and alliances with criminals; it also meant improving training and developing new methods—more courses on crime detection, tighter departmental discipline to prevent misconduct, better equipment to facilitate getting to the scene of a crime and analyzing clues. When the public was invited to inspect a refurbished department, it was shown the new patrol cars, the new crime laboratory, the new communications center, and perhaps the new pistol range. The policeman was portrayed as a “crime fighter,” and to an important degree, of course, he was.

But that was not all or even the most important thing he was. Given the nature of the crime problem, it was impossible for him to be simply a crime fighter. Most crime is not prevented and most criminals are not caught, even in the best-run, best-manned departments. Murder, for example, is a “private” crime, occurring chiefly off the streets and among “friends” or relatives. No police methods can prevent it, and only general domestic disarmament, an unlikely event, might reduce it. Many, if not most, assaults are similarly immune from police deterrence. Most crimes against property-burglary, auto theft, larceny—are also crimes of stealth, and though the police might, by various means, cut the rate somewhat, they cannot cut it greatly because they cannot be everywhere at once. Street crimes—robberies, muggings, purse snatches —are more susceptible to police deterrence than any other kind, though so far few, if any, departments have had the resources or the community support to carry out a really significant strategy to prevent street crime.

The result of this state of affairs is that though some police departments are regarded as “backward” and others as “modern” and “professional,” neither kind seems able to bring about a substantial, enduring reduction of the crime rate. If this is true, then the characterization of the police as primarily crime fighters places them in a potentially embarrassing position, that of being judged by a goal they cannot attain. In the 1950s, when crime rates were either stabilized or ignored, this awkward situation and the police response to it were not apparent.

What most policemen were doing even when they were being thought of as crime fighters was not so much enforcing the law as maintaining order. In a recent study, I have tried to show what makes up the routine workload of patrolmen, the police rank which has the largest number of men. The vast majority of police actions taken in response to citizen calls involve either providing a service (getting a cat out of a tree or taking a person to a hospital) or managing real or alleged conditions of disorder (quarreling families, public drunks, bothersome teen-agers, noisy cars, and tavern fights). Only a small fraction of these calls involve matters of law enforcement, such as checking on a prowler, catching a burglar in the act, or preventing a street robbery. The disorders to which the police routinely respond are not largescale. Riots and civil commotions are, in any given city, rare occurrences, and when they happen, the police act en masse, under central leadership. Rather, the maintenance of order involves handling disputes in which only two or three people participate and which arise out of personal misconduct, not racial or class grievances.

There has . . . been a traditional political resistance to educating the police. The root of this resistance lies deeply imbedded in what seems to me to be a prevailing, but rarely stated, political attitude that if the police are encouraged to become professional, and thus are made more effective, they will become a much less controllable arm of the executive branch of government and hence less amenable to the interests of political influences that almost always lead to partial rather than impartial enforcement of law.

— Robert Sheehan, “Police Education and Training,” Law and Disorder, Tufts University.

The difference between order maintenance and law enforcement is not simply the difference between “little stuff” and “real crime” or between misdemeanors and felonies. The distinction is fundamental to the police role, for the two functions involve quite dissimilar police actions and judgments. Order maintenance arises out of a dispute among citizens who accuse each other of being at fault; law enforcement arises out of the victimization of an innocent party by a person whose guilt must be proved. Handling a disorderly situation requires the officer to make a judgment about what constitutes an appropriate standard of behavior; law enforcement requires him only to compare a person’s behavior with a clear legal standard. Murder or theft is defined, unambiguously, by statutes; public peace is not. Order maintenance rarely leads to an arrest; law enforcement (if the suspect can be found) typically does. Citizens quarreling usually want the officer to “do something,” but they rarely want him to make an arrest (after all, the disputants are usually known or related to each other). Furthermore, whatever law is broken in a quarrel is usually a misdemeanor, and in most states, an officer cannot make a misdemeanor arrest unless he saw the infraction (which is rare) or unless one party or the other will swear out a formal complaint (which is even rarer).

Because an arrest cannot be made in most disorderly cases, the officer is expected to handle the situation by other means and on the spot, but the law gives him almost no guidance on how he is to do this; indeed, the law often denies him the right to do anything at all other than make an arrest. No judge will ever see the case, and thus no judge can decide the case for the officer. Alone, unsupervised, with no policies to guide him and little sympathy from onlookers to support him, the officer must “administer justice” on the curbstone.

EARLY PATTERNS

In the nineteenth century, it was widely recognized that the maintenance of order was the chief function of the police. Roger Lane’s informative history, Policing the City: Boston, 1822-1885 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), recounts how that department, the oldest in the United States, was first organized as a night watch to keep the peace in the streets. Beginning in 1834, men drafted from the citizenry were required to take their turns in seeing (as the governing statute required) “that all disturbances and disorders in the night shall be prevented and suppressed.” Wild creatures, human and animal alike, were to be kept off the street, and a hue and cry was to be set up should fire or riot threaten.

The job of law enforcement—that is, of apprehending criminals who had robbed or burgled the citizenry—was not among the duties of the watchmen; indeed, it was not even among the duties of the government. A victim was obliged to find the guilty party himself. Once a suspect was found, the citizen could, for a fee, hire a constable who, acting on a warrant, would take the suspect into custody. Even after detectives—that is, men charged with law enforcement rather than the maintenance of order—were added to the force in the nineteenth century, they continued to serve essentially private interests. The chief concern of the victim was restitution, and to that end, the detectives would seek to recover loot in exchange for a percentage of the take. Detectives functioned then as personalinjury lawyers operate today, on a contingency basis, hoping to get a large part, perhaps half, of the proceeds.

Since in those days there was no law against compounding a felony, the detectives were tree to employ any methods they wanted to recover stolen property. And with this as their mission, it is not surprising, as Lane notes, that the best detectives were those who by background and experience were most familiar with the haunts and methods of thieves.

The emergence of a municipal police force out of its watchmen antecedents was not so much the result of mounting crime rates as of growing levels of civil disorder. In time, and with the growth of the cities to a size and heterogeneity too great to permit the operation of informal social controls, the problem of order maintenance became too severe to make reliance on part-time or volunteer watchmen feasible. The Boston Police Department was created to deal with riots, as was the Department in Philadelphia. The Boston police first acquired firearms in the aftermath of the Draft Riot of 1863, though they were not fully armed at public expense until 1884.

The Philadelphia case is illustrative of many. Like Boston, that city relied on watchmen rather than an organized, quasimilitary constabulary. But a series of riots among youthful gangs (the Rats, the Bouncers, the Schuylkill Rangers, and the Blood Tubs, among several) persuaded the city fathers that stronger measures were necessary. To a degree, the riots were under semiofficial auspices, thus magnifying the embarrassment the politicians faced. It seems that volunteer fire companies were organized to handle conflagrations. The youngtoughs who sat about waiting for fires to happen found this boring and, worse, unrewarding, whereupon some hit upon the idea of starting a fire and racing other companies to the scene to see who could put the blaze out more quickly, and just as important, who could pick up the most loot from the building. Though this competitive zeal may have been a commendable aid to training, it led to frequent collisions between companies speeding to the same fire, with the encounter often leading to a riot. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the Philadelphia policemen were created in part to control the Philadelphia firemen.

SOMETIMES ON SUNDAY

The growth and formal organization of the police department did not, in themselves, lead to changes in function. The maintenance of order was still the principal objective. What did lead to a change was twofold: the bureaucratization of the detectives (putting them on salary and ending the fee system) , and the use of the police to enforce unpopular laws governing the sale and use of liquor. The former change led to the beginning of the popular confusion as to what the police do. The detective became the hero of the dime novel and the cynosure of the public’s romantic imagination; he, and not his patrolman colleague, was the “real" police officer doing “real police work. Enforcing liquor laws caused the police to initiate prosecutions on their own authority rather than on citizen complaint, particularly in cases where the public was deeply divided regarding the wisdom of the law. In Philadelphia, enforcing the Sunday closing laws, especially with regard to saloons, was widely resented, and when the mayor ordered the police to do it, he was, according to a contemporary account, “caricatured, ridiculed, and denounced.” In Boston Mayor Jonathan Chapman was led to remark that police enforcement of temperance laws had created a situation in which “the passions of men are aroused and the community is kept in a constant state of ferment.”

What kept the police from being utterly destroyed by the liquor controversy was their determination to do no more than was absolutely necessary, given whatever regime was in power. Edward Savage, the able chief of the Boston force in the 1870s and 1880s, was a man of modest but much exercised literary talents, and in one of his better-known essays, entitled “Advice to a Young Policeman,” he set forth the essential rule of good police work: “In ordinary cases, if you find yourself in a position of not knowing exactly what to do, better to do too little than too much; it is easier to excuse a moderate course than an overt act.”

In addition, the police provided on a large scale a number of services to citizens, especially to those who, because of drink, indolence, or circumstance, were likely to become sources of public disorder. Roger Lane Calculates that in 1856 the Boston police provided “lodgings” to over nine thousand persons, not including those who had been arrested for drunkenness. By 1860 the total exceeded seventeen thousand. Perhaps because the police were the principal city agency to witness the lot of the poor, perhaps because one of the original collateral duties of the police chief was superintendent of public health, the officers provided a wide range of services in addition to lodgings—coal for needy families, soup kitchens for the hungry, and jobs as domestics for girls they thought could be lured away from a life of prostitution.

In time, this service policy, which probably did much to mitigate the hostility between police and public occasioned by the enforcement of liquor laws, was curtailed on the complaint of the leaders of the organized charities who objected, apparently, to unfair competition. The advocates of “scientific charity,”it seems, did not believe the police were competent to distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor.

The relations between police and public even during the period of free soup were not consistently amicable. One issue was the appointment of Irish police officers. For political purposes, the Boston Whigs demanded that, as we would say today, “representatives of indigenous and culturallydeprived groups” be added to the force. Then as now, the “culturally deprived” were responsible for a disproportionate share of those arrested for crimes. Then as now, the police objected to the appointment of an irishman on the grounds that the man selected by the politicians was not qualified and had himself been arrested for a crime a few years earlier—it seems he had participated in a riot. The police, of course, denied that they were prejudiced but claimed that appointing a person on grounds of ethnicity would be destructive of morale on the force. The mayor insisted that the appointment take place. On November 3, 1851, the new man reported for work, announcing himself loudly and proudly as “Barney McGinniskin, fresh from the bogs of Ireland!”

THE CHIEF EVIL

By the end of the nineteenth century, the groundwork had been laid for the modern municipal police force, and for the modern problems of the police. The bureaucratization of the detectives and the police enforcement of liquor laws had not as yet overshadowed the order-maintenance function of the police, but two events of the twentieth century ensured that they would—Prohibition and the Depression. The former required the police everywhere to choose between being corrupted and making a nuisance of themselves; the latter focused public attention on the escapades of bank robbers and other desperadoes such as John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Bonnie and Clyde. Police venality and rising crime rates coincided in the public mind, though in fact they had somewhat different causes. The watchman function of the police was lost sight of; their law enforcement function, and their apparent failure to exercise it, were emphasized.

President Herbert Hoover did what most Presidents do when faced with a major political issue for which the solution is neither obvious nor popular —he appointed a commission. In 1931 the National Commission on Law Observance and Law Enforcement—generally known, after its chairman, as the Wickersham Commission—made its report in a series of volumes prepared by some of the ablest academic and police experts of the day. Though many subjects were covered (especially the question of whether immigrants were more criminal than native-born Americans), the volume on the police was of special importance. On page one, the first paragraph stated a twentieth-century conception of the police function and a new standard by which policemen were to be judged:

The general failure of the police to detect and arrest criminals guilty of the many murders, spectacular bank, payroll, and other hold-ups, and sensational robberies with guns, frequently resulting in the death of the robbed victim, has caused a loss of public confidence in the police of our country. For a condition so general there must be some universal underlying causes to account for it.

Now, of course there may have been some “universal underlying causes,”but the ones that come readily to mind—Prohibition, post-war readjustment, and the economic cycle—were not ones about which a presidential commission could at that time speak very candidly. Besides, it was far from clear what could be done about at least the second and third of these causes. What was necessary was to find a “universal cause” about which something could be done. Needless to say, two groups on whom we have long felt free to cast blame for everything from slums to hoof-and-mouth disease— the police and the politicians—seemed appropriate targets. Accordingly, the Commission wrote:

The chief evil, in our opinion, lies in the insecure, short term of service of the chief or executive head of the police force and in his being subject while in office to the control of politicians in the discharge of his duties,

SOME PROPOSALS

Following on this analysis, the Commission detailed a number of specific proposals—putting the police on civil service, buying modern equipment (“the wireless”), and of course, hiring better men and giving them better training. In truth, there probably was a need for some police reforms; many departments had become dumping grounds for the fat relatives of second-rate politicians, and modern bank robbers were in many cases more mobile and efficient than the police chasing them. But the “professional” view of the police went further than merely proposing changes in equipment and manpower; it argued in addition that since the police can prevent crime, if the crime rate gets out of hand, it is in good measure because the police are incompetent as a result of political influence.

Now, some members of the Commission were no doubt perfectly aware that the police do not cause crime, but, like many commissions anxious to make a strong public impression and generate support for desirable changes, they inevitably overstated the case in their report. A report that said that many improvements in police practice were necessary but that these improvements, if adopted, would have only a slight effect on the crime rate would not generate many headlines. (Thirty-seven years later, the Kerner Commission had not forgotten this lesson; what made the newspapers was not its proposals for action but its charge of “white racism.”)

The consequences of assigning to the police a law-enforcement, crime-prevention function to the exclusion of anything else were profound. If the job of the police is to catch crooks, then the police have a technical, ministerial responsibility in which discretion plays little part. Since no one is likely to disagree on the value of the objective, then there is little reason to expose the police to the decision-making processes of city government. Ergo, take the police “out of politics.” So powerful (or so useful) did this slogan become that within a few decades whenever a big-city mayor tried to pick his own police chief or take charge of his department for the purpose of giving it a new direction, the police themselves objected on the grounds that this was an effort to exercise “political influence” over the force.

Furthermore, if the technical objective of law enforcement was primary, then non-law-enforcement duties should be taken away from the police: no more soup kitchens; no more giving lodging to drunks; no more ambulance driving. These things are not “real police work.” Let the police see the public only in their role as law enforcers. Let the public, alas, see the police only as adversaries. Of course, these changes were more in the public’s mind than in everyday reality. If politics was taken out of the police, the police were not taken out of politics. They continued—in fact, with the decline of party machines, they increased—their involvement in electoral politics, city ball intrigue, and legislative lobbying. And whatever professional police leadership may have said, the patrolman on the beat knew that his job was not primarily law enforcement—he was still handling as many family fights and rowdy teen-agers as ever. But lacking support in the performance of these duties, he came also to believe that his job “wasn’t real police work,”and accordingly that it was peripheral, if not demeaning.

But perhaps the most important consequence was the police response to the public expectation that they could prevent crime. Their response was perfectly rational and to be encountered in any organization that is judged by a standard it cannot meet —they lied. If police activity (given the level of resources and public support available) could not produce a significant decline in crime rates, police record-keeping would be “adjusted” to keep the rates in line. Departments judged by professional standards but not controlled by professional leaders were at pains to show progress by either understating the number of crimes or overstating the number of crimes “cleared” by arrest. Often this was not the policy of the chief, but the result of judging officers by crime and arrest records.

In the public’s eye, the “hero cop” was Lhe man who made the “good pinch.” For a while (until the mass media abandoned the standards of the middleaged and the conservative in favor of the standards of the young and the radical), the ideal cop was the “G Man.”FBI agents, of course, are different from municipal police forces precisely because their task is law enforcement, and often enforcing important laws against quite serious criminals. Few special agents need to wade into a skid-row brawl. But within city departments, the emphasis on the “good pinch” grew. This was only partly because the newspapers, and thus the public, rewarded such accomplishments; it was also because the departments rewarded it. The patrolman could look forward, in the typical case, to remaining a patrolman all his life unless he could get promoted or be made a detective. Promotion increasingly came to require the passing of a written examination in which college men would usually do better than less articulate but perhaps more competent “street men.” Appointment as a detective, however, was in many departments available to men with a good arrest record (or a strategically placed friend in headquarters). If you want to get away from drunks, kids, and shrews, then make a pinch that will put you in line for becoming a click. Though there is in principle nothing wrong with rewarding men for having a good arrest record, one frequent result of this system has been to take the best patrolmen off the street and put them into a headquarters unit.

POLICE REFORM: THE CHOICES AHEAD

Today, the conception of the police role underlying the foregoing arrangements is being questioned. Perhaps the landmark event was the 1967 report of the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, the executive director of which was James Vorenberg of the Harvard Law School. Unlike the Wickersham or Kerner Commission reports, this document made relatively few headlines, and the reason, I think, was that it did not provide the reporters with a catchy slogan. The nine volumes of the Vorenberg report insisted that the problems of crime and police work are complicated matters for which few, if any, easy solutions are available. There were no dramatic scandals to uncover; the police “third degree” (on which the Wickersham Commission, in the report drafted by Zechariah Chafee, lavished much attention) had declined in occurrence and significance. Most police departments had been taken out of the control of party machines (in some cases, it would appear, only to be placed under the influence of organized crime). Instead, the Commission devoted considerable attention to the order-maintenance function of the police:

A great majority of the situations in which policemen intervene are not, or are not interpreted by the police to be, criminal situations in the sense that they call for arrest. . . . A common kind of situation ... is the matrimonial dispute, which police experts estimate consumes as much time as any other single kind of situation.

The riots in Watts and elsewhere had, by the time the report appeared, already called the attention of the public to the importance (and fragility) of public order. The rise of demands for “community control” of various public services, including the police and the schools, has placed the problem of order on the political agenda. Whether the problems of managing disorder can best be handled by turning city government over to neighborhood groups is a complicated question. (Provisionally, I would argue that war becomes more, not less, likely when a political system is balkanized.) In any case, we have come full circle in our thinking about the function of the police.

Or almost full circle. The current anxiety about crime in the streets continues to lead some to define the police task as wholly or chiefly one of crime deterrence, and thus any discussion of redefining the police role or reorganizing police departments to facilitate performing their other functions tends to get lost in the din of charges and countercharges about whether or not the police have been “handcuffed.” This is unfortunate, not because crime in the streets is a false issue (the rates of street crime, I am convinced, are increasing in an alarming manner) , but because handling this problem cannot be left solely or even primarily to the police; acting as if it could raises false hopes among the citizens and places unfair and distorting demands on the police. At least as much attention to the courts and correctional systems will be necessary if much progress is to be shown in reducing street crime.

The simultaneous emergence of a popular concern for both crime and order does put in focus the choices that will have to be made in the next generation of police reforms. In effect, municipal police departments are two organizations in one serving two related but not identical functions. The strategy appropriate for strengthening their ability to serve one role tends to weaken their ability to serve the other. Crime deterrence and law enforcement require, or are facilitated by, specialization, strong hierarchical authority, improved mobility and communications, clarity in legal codes and arrest procedures, close surveillance of the community, high standards of integrity, and the avoidance of entangling alliances with politicians. The maintenance of order, on the other hand, is aided by departmental procedures that include decentralization, neighborhood involvement, foot patrol, wide discretion, the provision of services, an absence of arrest quotas, and some tolerance for minor forms of favoritism and even corruption.

There is no magic formula—no prepackaged “reform"—that can tell a community or a police chief how to organize a force to serve, with appropriate balance, these competing objectives. Just as slogans demanding “taking the police out of politics” or “putting the police in cars” have proved inadequate guides to action in the past, so also slogans demanding “foot patrolmen” or “community control” are likely to prove inadequate in the future. One would like to think that since both points of view now have ardent advocates, the debate has at last been joined. But I suspect that the two sides are talking at, or past, each other, and not to each other, and thus the issue, from being joined, is still lost in rhetoric.

A BASIC READING LIST

The books listed below will be of special interest to general readers who want to know more about the history, training, origins, and special problems of policemen in American life.

The Policeman and the Community, by Michael Banton. New York: Basic Books, 1965.

The Police, ed. by David J. Bordua. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967.

Police Power: Police Abuses in New York City, by Paul Chevigny. New York: Pantheon Books, 1969.

Arrest, by Wayne R. LaFave. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965.

Behind the Shield: The Police in Urban Society, by Arthur Niederhoffer. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1967.

The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, A report by the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967.

Task Force Report: The Police, by the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967.

Justice Without Trial, by Jerome H. Skolnick. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966.

Rights in Conflict, by Daniel Walker as submitted to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1968.

Varieties of Police Behavior, by James Q. Wilson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.

Police Administration, by Orlando W. Wilson. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1963.