Finest of the Finest

The latest Vietnik demonstration on the campus of the University of Cali fornia at Berkeley was a boring bust.

The students seem to be losing their enthusiasm for the amorphous affairs; but, more important, the Berkeley police are not losing theirs. They were on hand once more last week, as they have been since the first volatile protests started. Helmetless in the thick of a riot, cool in the midst of frenzy, the department's skillful crowd-control experts were quick to head off trouble before it started. Time and again the Berkeley cops have been called the most enlightened police force in the nation. Says no less a home-town citizen than California Supreme Court Chief Justice Rodger Traynor: "They know their town well; they know their townspeople well. I respect them as officers of the law in the largest sense."

Rare Praise. Such praise has not been earned overnight. Berkeley's "finest" have been building their reputation ever since the force was founded. In 1905, August Vollmer, a self-educated criminologist, noticed that the then 130-year-old city had no police force and decided to start one. His name is still legend in law enforcement circles for the methods that he pioneered. His stiff rules of conduct are now standardized as a code of ethics for police across the country. His department was the first to use blood, fiber and soil analysis in detection (1907); the first to use the lie detector (a Berkeley cop collaborated in inventing the polygraph in 1921); it was an early developer of a fingerprint classification system (1924) and the first to use radio-equipped squad cars (1928).

Perhaps most significant of all, Vollmer established a school of criminology on the Berkeley campus in 1916, and he sent his men to it. Early detractors used to laugh at the "college cops," but Vollmer's emphasis on an educated policeman has been carried forward and expanded under each of the three men who have succeeded him.

Addison Fording, the current chief, earned an engineering B.S. at Cal before coming up through the ranks himself. He now requires every Berkeley recruit to have at least two years of college, an extensive psychiatric examination before joining, and an average of 260 hours in classes during his first year. Senior patrolmen spend 50 hours a year studying. To attract and hold high-caliber men, Fording has successfully fought for good wages. As a result, Berkeley offers one of the highest police pay scales in the U.S.A sergeant starts at $862 a month. Says Fording: "You can't pay a policeman a garbage-man's salary and expect to get quality enforcement."

When he gets the sort of man he wants, the chief does not waste him. "It's ridiculous to spend money on an above-average person," says he, "and then admit that he cannot do every phase of police work." When a crime is committed in Berkeley, the beat cop directs all phases of investigation. Backup detectives offer assistance and expertise, but the case is the patrolman's responsibility all the way through the trial. They do the job so well that Judge

Rupert Crittenden, who has heard them testify in municipal court over the past five years, was moved to an expression of praise that is rare when courts talk about cops. "They present their cases cleanly and they're one hundred percent honest. I've seen them lose cases because they didn't want to fudge."

"He Knows." The Berkeley police face other problems with equal skill. The fact that courts are constantly changing, redefining and liberalizing the rights of prisoners has brought gripes from cops across the country. Fording is relatively unbothered. "Certainly court decisions have imposed increasing limitations," he admits. "Our job now is to live within the framework that the court has set up." To help do just that, he distributes a monthly reading list that covers recent legal changes as well as advances in investigative methods. The instruction works. In the difficult area of proving narcotics offenses, 198 arrests were made in Berkeley last year, and a mere 14 were thrown out because police had violated the tricky and changing search and seizure laws.

At a time when police forces from

New York to Los Angeles are fighting off the imposition of civilian review boards, the Berkeley force gets few complaints and already has a broadly based Citizens Committee for Public Safety, which the force itself was instrumental in founding. Says Mrs.

Frankie Jones, local N.A.A.C.P. leader:

"I have seen police at work all over, and there's not a police department in the United States that excels this one."

Far from distrusting and failing to co operate with the police, Berkeley residents actively support them; three times in recent months local citizens helped to foil crimes in progress and even leaped in to aid a lone patrolman under attack by young toughs. The force's able handling of the massive Vietnik marches last October earned them a hearty three cheers from the peace marchers them selves. In court it is not even unusual for a bemused defendant to call the accusing officer by his first name and shruggingly tell the judge: "Ask him.

He knows what happened."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.