POLICE: THE THIN BLUE LINE
He is facing, daily and nightly, people who would gladly see him dead, and he knows it. He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country, which is precisely what, and where, he is.
--Nobody Knows My Name, by James Baldwin
THE soldier of the cities is the cop, I his front line the American ghetto. Harlem, Watts, Roxbury, Hough, Hunters Point, the South Side, Dixie Hills, Bedford-Stuyvesant: these are the battlegrounds whose names are inscribed in rubble and resentment and fear of worse conflagrations to come. Already this year, serious disturbances have broken out in 211 cities and towns. Even when they are quiet, vast areas of the American metropolis today resemble combat zones, volatile, bitter and suspicious.
Police forces around the country are stepping up recruiting. Armories are stocking weaponry that ranges from small, knockout-spray atomizers to tanks. Training is being reoriented and intensified. And slowly--sometimes too slowly--the best forces are beginning to re-examine the concepts that have guided policemen for generations, trying to look upon the citizens of the slums not as foes but as fellow men and a commanding social challenge.
Nowhere is more being done in these respects than in Los Angeles, scene of the first cataclysmic riots of the '60s. No police chief is acting more vigorously or imaginatively to prevent new outbreaks than Los Angeles' Thomas Reddin, 52, who understands that the cop today must not only be a well-trained soldier but a "streetcorner sociologist." Says Reddin: "This is the year when the public will suddenly realize that the policeman has more to do with the state of our nation than any other man on the streets today."
State of Siege. Every major city is now prepared to deal with a summer of violence. The state of siege that results from crime and assault is even more widespread and lasts year round, from January to December. The President's Commission on Law Enforcement found last year that one out of every three Americans is afraid to walk alone in his own neighborhood after dark.
In Boston, office girls refuse to work alone after 6. In Kansas City, hospitals have trouble finding night nurses. Prudent Chicagoans try not to ride the el after dark, and attendance at White Sox games is down, not merely because of the team's poor record. Nearly everywhere, often without even consciously thinking about it, city dwellers are adjusting their lives, their residences and their jobs to the fear of physical violence. Parks that once were playgrounds on hot summer nights are now virtually empty. Iron bars and heavy mesh cover exposed windows, while doors are double-and triple-locked.
For the first time since it began publishing 33 years ago, the Gallup poll reports that crime is the nation's No. 1 domestic concern. And "crime in the streets"--a catchall phrase for everything from muggings to insurrections--may well have displaced Viet Nam as the prime issue in the presidential campaign. The FBI reckons that urban crime jumped 88% in the first seven years of the decade--and 17% over 1967 in the first three months of 1968. Granting a sizable margin of inaccuracy in reporting, the figures are probably a fair approximation of the facts. In response to such statistics, Congress last month promised local police forces major financial backing ($400 million over the next two years) for the first time in history. Even the Post Office has put its weight behind the policeman. Instead of celebrating Boy Scouts or blue jays, a recent 60 special-issue stamp showed a kindly cop-escorting a small boy, with three words in banner red: LAW AND ORDER.
Undoubtedly, the nation's police are better today than they ever were in the past. But manifestly they are not good enough. For every step forward, there have been two steps backward in the growth of slum populations; for every advance in understanding of minorities, there have been two retreats in growing ghetto resentment and despair. Widespread corruption is by no means a thing of the past. A study prepared for the President's crime commission, leaked this month, claimed that in ghetto areas of three cities--Chicago, Boston and Washington--27% of the police regularly committed offenses that would normally be classed as felonies or misdemeanors. Minor shakedowns for meals, drinks and small favors were so common as not to be included. Third degrees and savage beatings have been largely done away with since the '30s, but a New Jersey grand jury was ordered last week to investigate charges that Paterson police used unnecessary force in quelling recent disturbances in Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Without question, New York City police used extreme, sometimes brutal tactics against students during spring demonstrations at Columbia University. "As far as police practice is concerned," says Stanford Social Scientist Richard Blum, "the U.S. has to be considered an un derdeveloped country."
The Census. Whereas most European states have centralized forces with uniform, nationwide standards, the U.S. has 40,000 separate law-enforcement agencies--with 40,000 different codes, 40,000 different policies, and 40,000 different ideas as to how the peace should be maintained. Los Angeles County has 50 police forces, including the L.A.P.D. Educational qualifications range from nonexistent to four years of college. Oddly enough, almost no force gives even a rudimentary psychological exam --surely an essential requirement for one of the most sensitive of all occupations. Many suburbs and small cities attempt to solve serious crimes with techniques that would have seemed elementary to Dr. Watson; some big-city police laboratories have every detection device that modern science can provide.
Duties vary just as widely. Boston police must not only conduct an annual door-to-door census, a chore that consumes ten weeks, but also have to issue permits for dogs, guns, private detectives, itinerant musicians, pawnbrokers, junk dealers, new-and used-car dealers, and hackney cabs. In Los Angeles, policemen going on duty must pause for a reading of schoolchildren's essays on the glories of the L.A.P.D. Red tape envelops every police department, but few can compete with New York's for sheer bulk. A New York cop who arrests a teen-age drug addict must fill out well over 100 forms--enough to make any but the most conscientious think twice before stopping a suspect. And the cop on the beat still uses the same weapons he did 100 years ago--the billy club and the gun--and often wields them with Dickensian abandon.
All too often he also has the attitudes of 100 years ago. While the best police heads have made strides in instilling professionalism in their forces, others, as in Boston, Pittsburgh and Memphis, have not taken even the first step. Few have recognized that in the turbid inner cities more than efficiency is needed, that the cop must indeed be a man of many parts. Among the few: New York's Howard Leary, Washington's Patrick Murphy, Atlanta's Herbert Jenkins, St. Louis' Curtis Brostron. And, of course, Tom Reddin.
The Glass House. Most Americans heard of Reddin only after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, when, for a period of 42 nearly sleepless hours, he directed the investigation of the murder and also expertly fielded newsmen's questions on nationwide TV. Most Californians knew of him long before, almost from the very day in February 1967 that he moved into the chief's office in L.A.'s new eight-story headquarters building, known to the force as the "Glass House."
The late William Parker, Reddin's predecessor, was the epitome of the police professional, a crusty authoritarian who had little truck with sociological theories. Taking over a scandal-tainted force in 1950, Parker made it as honest as any in the nation, boosting standards, competence and morale, and giving the L.A. police a paramilitary esprit. He did not, however, understand the new problems caused by the postwar influx of Mexican-Americans and Negroes. For several years before his death in 1966, the once progressive department stagnated as the ailing chief's ideas congealed into dogma and he labored to surround the department, in Reddin's words, with a "blue curtain of secrecy."
Black people, L.A. State Senator Mervyn Dymally told the McCone commission investigating the Watts riot, "generally expected the worst from the police--and generally received it." Even after Watts had been pacified in 1965, Parker could not help exulting: "We're on the top, and they're on the bottom."
Yet, with all the vaunted efficiency of L.A.P.D., Watts would never have been subdued without the aid of 13,900 National Guardsmen. Like most other cities at the time, L.A. had no contingency plan for a major uprising. "We were so anxious not to cause a riot that we backed off at first and let a riot develop," admits Reddin, who was then a deputy chief. "Using accepted practice on the second day, we isolated the area, reasoning that the rioters would riot themselves out and go home. So what happened? Other riots broke out in other areas." In the end, the insurrection encompassed a region roughly the size of San Francisco. There was little liaison with other agencies, particularly the National Guard, and commanders often could not communicate with patrol cars because their radios operated on different frequencies.
Like any other lost battle, Watts yielded its lessons, and Los Angeles' riot plan is now geared for all contingencies. Police response is carefully adjusted, like a Herman Kahn scenario, to the size of the disturbance--enough force to smother trouble quickly, but not enough to provoke greater resentment. In each division, half the patrol cars are always tagged for response to special riot alert; if the cars of one division should prove inadequate to halt a disturbance, half the cars in the city can be on the move within minutes. If half the department still cannot keep control, nearly the entire uniformed force of 4,000 can be mobilized for duty. Los Angeles' basic formula of speed and superior force is being copied by 100 other cities.
Supervision has been greatly tightened and improved. At a demonstration against Vice President Humphrey at the Los Angeles Palladium last week (Humphrey, ill at home, was a no-show), supervisors made sure that police were restrained and effective. The protesters went home quietly. A year ago, when President Johnson appeared at Century City, the cops not only violated an elementary rule of crowd control by leaving the demonstrators no avenue for exit, but inflamed feelings with gross misuse of force, helping to turn a demonstration into a riot.
The S.W.A.T. Squad. Every frontline policeman in Los Angeles has been through a three-day riot-control school, and all have been told exactly what to do in event of riot. Officers would no longer work as individuals, but would be assigned to highly mobile, rapidly moving squads. "One man, operating as one man," says Reddin, "can control only one man. One man as part of a squad of ten can control several hundred people." When should a policeman shoot to kill? Reddin is notably evasive, refusing even to outline a situation when he himself would fire his revolver. Ultimately in Los Angeles, the decision is left up to the individual cop. Two hundred marksmen have been assigned to a squad named S.W.A.T. (Special Weapons and Tactics), designed to pick off snipers and to eliminate, presumably, the need for indiscriminate police gunfire, which took innocent victims in Newark and Detroit last year. On the target range they can hit the head of a man's silhouette at 300 yards. A $25,000 trailer has been fitted out as a mobile command post, with an armored underside to fend off Molotov cocktails, and a smaller van is available for secondary commanders. Fibre shields, straight out of Ivanhoe, and bulletproof vests have been bought for men in danger areas. The force this summer will have nearly 700 walkie-talkies (v. 58 in 1965) to link commanders with front-line cops.
Potential riots are far from the only problem. Los Angeles recorded an 8.1% crime rise in 1967 over 1966. Because of its sprawling size, which isolates branch offices and gives any getaway car 1,000 escape routes, it is No. 1 in bank robberies. Because of its proximity to Mexico, it is the marijuana capital of the world. The L.A.P.D. seized 21 tons of grass last year, enough to orbit a good-size army. Because of its balmy climate, it has, notes the chief, a "twelvemonth crime culture."
To cope with all this, Los Angeles has the smallest force in the country, relative to population (an estimated 2,840,632) and area (463.6 sq. mi.). The city employs only 1.9 cops per 1,000 residents v. 2.8 in Chicago, 3.2 in New York. Yet man for man, in part because the force is so highly motorized, it is probably one of the most efficient. The L.A.P.D. has a higher percentage of civilians than any other big-city force (three civilians for every ten in uniform); they handle many tasks, such as clerical work and traffic direction, that elsewhere sworn policemen usually perform, thus freeing all but a few regulars for active law-enforcement duty. An elite team of 225, known as the "Top Group," has been organized for special assignments, such as nabbing organized car-theft rings or stickup artists. A "community radio watch," composed of cabbies and truck drivers who have two-way radios, is being formed to alert police to violations. Eventually, Reddin guesses, the radio watchers could add 60,000 pairs of eyes without any cost to the police-surveillance network. Another laborsaving device is a new $450,000 computer, financed by the Federal Government, that will not only cut down on paper work but also, by constantly pinpointing changing crime target areas, will help commanders assign patrols when and where they are needed.
"The T.R. Times." Yet the biggest problem of the L.A., or any other police force, is not tactical. "Above all," says Reddin, "we found as a result of Watts that we had lost touch with the public that we were attempting to serve."
Keeping touch has been Reddin's main concern. California Criminologist A. C. Germann suggests that a good police chief must be as willing to talk to black nationalists as he is to the Optimists' Club. Reddin may not exactly rap with the Black Panthers, but he tries.
A gregarious and Brobdingnagian man (6 ft. 4 in., 215 Ibs.), he will talk with almost everyone. During his first year in office, his audiences numbered more than 70,000; he still spends four to five hours a day in some form of community relations, averages at least ,five speeches a week. "I know," he boasts, "every banquet hall in Los Angeles." The L.A.P.D. has not been excluded from Reddin's conviviality. Not only does he talk frequently with all levels, but every two weeks he sends the troops a little newsletter dubbed "The T.R. Times." One of its maxims: "Don't blow your cool."
Damping Rumors. At Reddin's direction, community-relations programs have been greatly expanded, with a deputy chief and a staff of 100. A community-relations officer, often a Negro, and a youth-service officer have been assigned to each ghetto station as emissaries to the neighborhood. Each station, in addition, has established a citizens' council that brings together 20 to 50 residents a month to discuss local problems with the police. One such meeting in Watts elicited a demand for a crackdown on bars serving as hangouts for prostitutes. The police listened, then acted against the bars. Another time a group from the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts brought in a suggestion for a community police service corps; they already had some 60 boys and girls, ages ten to 18, who wanted to help educate the community on the problems of law enforcement. Reddin immediately sponsored the unit, and Deputy Chief James Fisk scrounged around for office space, equipment and uniforms.
To damp down rumors that often lead to riots--a report that a pregnant Negro woman had been beaten by police helped precipitate the 1965 uprising --Los Angeles, like other cities, has set up rumor-control centers. If an inflammatory incident occurs, police immediately tell their side of the story to the local rumor-control officer. He calls four friends and each of them calls four more; the chain continues until a large part of the community knows that there are at least two sides to the story. "It's very loose-knit," admits Reddin, "but it gets the word out. And the people involved aren't known as finks."
So that residents can know who the man behind the badge is, Reddin also gave each cop business cards and name tags--an innocuous but nonetheless controversial departure in a once notoriously highhanded force. Another innovation is actually ancient. Reddin has returned to the streets a man who disappeared from Los Angeles when patrol cars came in: the cop on the beat. It is remarkable in a city where only the poor and the eccentric walk, and so far the experiment is on a tiny scale. About 30 are now pounding the pavements.
"This is beautiful community relations," argues the chief. "The policeman gets to know people. They identify with him, and the chances of one of them throwing a rock at him or at a police car are less. It's the most expensive way of deploying policemen, but in the long run it could very well turn out to be the least expensive." Other cities that had cut back on foot patrolmen are also discovering new virtues in old ways. "When I was walking a beat," remembers St. Louis' Chief Brostron, "the policeman knew the good people and the bad ones, the joints and the gambling dens. The officer in the car today doesn't have that contact." Still, with the huge expenses of foot patrol, no chief can possibly plan to abandon the economies or the speed of the prowl car or bring back the man on foot in anything like the old numbers.
Monsters with Badges. The Reddin blueprint pays attention to the young--rather self-consciously. Fourteen officers, each known as "Policeman Bill," are assigned to the city schools' first, second and third grades, where they tell children about the policeman's job. It all sounds a little cloying. Even so, before one "Policeman Bill's" visit, a survey showed, ghetto children portrayed cops as monsters with whips and flashing silver badges. After he left, they scrawled kindly father figures. To woo teenagers, almost always the troublemakers in ghetto disturbances, the L.A.P.D. has experimentally hired twelve youths for help on such minor but ticklish assignments as mediating family disputes. The program so far has shown encouraging signs of success.
Reddin's schemes for better commu nity relations have not worked miracles or turned Watts into a place where happy kiddies constantly listen to stories from avuncular cops. Nonetheless, police are relatively safe in Watts, something that cannot be said for all the nation's ghettos. Though most members of minorities like Reddin's ideas, many Negro militants still refuse to talk with the police. Some, like US (US is black people; whites would be THEM) Chief Ron Karenga, insist that Chief Parker's out-and-out hostility would be preferable to Reddin's firm amiability. The police, says Karenga, are still a neocolonial force in the ghetto. "They are not protecting us. They are controlling us." Karenga complains that the only function of Reddin's community councils is to release Negro frustrations through talk, without bringing effective action. Arthur Garcia, a Mexican-American spokesman, claims that only yes men sit on his community's councils. Felix Gutierrez, another Latin leader, notes that the L.A.P.D. still refuses to lower the height requirements so that Mexican-Americans, who tend to be shorter than other Angelenos, can join the force. (By contrast, New York has cut an inch off its previous 5 ft. 8 in. minimum to attract more Puerto Ricans.) One Mexican-American says that a riot in L.A.'s Latin ghetto would have been inconceivable two years ago; now, he fears, "things might start to blow around here."
Probably no force could find more than lukewarm approval in the ghetto today--so deep are the enmities, so profound the suspicions of the fuzz or, sometimes, "Chuck,"* The very presence of cops in the slums, many Negro militants maintain, represents society's goal to protect the white man's property and suppress the black man's right.
More than Anything. One of the most damning facts about the L.A. department is that its force of 4,000 has only 220 blacks. Police departments have assiduously sought to recruit Negro officers in the past few years, but most of them have not had much success (Exceptions: Washington, 21% of the force; Philadelphia, 20%; Chicago, 17%). Negro policemen are often looked on as Judases when they put on the blue uniform. "More than anything," laments a black patrolman in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant, "I want my people to like me. But they just don't like cops. This suit makes me an enemy to them just like any other cop."
The police station remains a place of fear. Precinct-house brutality is uncommon today but not unheard of. When he was Detroit Commissioner in the early '60s, relates U.S. Circuit Judge George Edwards, police sometimes told him that prisoners hurt themselves "falling on the precinct steps." He wondered how a handcuffed man, surrounded by four officers, could possibly suffer a "four-inch cut on the top of the head" in such a fashion and ordered his cops to tell him the facts. He never again received such a report--and, he adds, prisoners tended to "fall" less frequently. Oakland police were incredibly vicious during antidraft demonstrations last October; while Reddin defends the conduct of his men in the Century City melee, he has since issued orders that night sticks no longer be raised above the shoulder.
"Taking someone behind a door and beating hell out of him? Our officers wouldn't dare," says Reddin. "They know that if they did, they'd be prosecuted, and might just wind up in the joint." Undoubtedly, there are more subtle forms of physical abuse--an elbow in the back or a punch in the kidney. But the new worry, as Reddin readily admits, is psychological brutality--the condescending look, or the tone of voice that indicates to a man that he is a suspect merely because of his color, clothes or accent.
One innovation that might go a long way to ease community relations--as well as to disprove many charges of outright brutality--is a civilian board, a kind of ombudsman to review citizen complaints. But police everywhere look upon the notion with undisguised horror as an unwarranted invasion from the outside. "Today," says San Francisco's Chief Tom Cahill, "you cannot even look mean. That may be police brutality."
"Lawyers, doctors and judges all police their own," says Philadelphia's Commissioner Frank Rizzo. "Why does it have to be the policeman who is second-guessed? I don't enjoy being quarterbacked by nonprofessionals." Philadelphia, ironically, had a civilian review board for nearly ten years, examining more than 700 complaints and proving to the satisfaction of most outsiders that the concept does work. The police guild, however, succeeded in killing it in court last year.
Convenient Whipping Boy. Feeling somewhat besieged, policemen not only work together but spend their off-duty time together, and police families often have little social life outside the police-family orbit. "Other people generally don't like police," explains Christos Kasaras, a patrolman on Manhattan's West Side. The result is a kind of inbreed ing that tends to make police the victims of their own stereotypes.
Yet very often, as New York's Howard Leary observes, the policeman has reason to feel rankled: he is indeed what Leary calls "the convenient whipping boy" for many of society's ills. All things considered, it is almost a miracle that American cops, who receive little respect from anybody for perhaps the toughest job in the U.S., are as good as they are. "It is too easy to forget," says University of Chicago Sociologist Jerome Skolnick, "that police are only people," with the same frustrations and prejudices that others of similar backgrounds might have. "No matter what people call you," says Patrolman Kasaras, "you're supposed to contain yourself." The young policeman, adds Reddin, "deals with filth, the dregs of humanity, on a minute-to-minute basis. It's not hard for him to reach a point where he says that people are no damn good, so to hell with people." Yet as Miami Beach's Chief Rocky Pomerance only half-jokingly observes, "a policeman these days has to be part priest, part psychiatrist, part social worker, part karate expert--and he has to be able to make a decision in a few seconds that will stand up before complex legal scrutiny clear up to the U.S. Supreme Court."
Outmoded administrative systems that force every recruit to start off in the lowest rank discourage the educated and the enterprising from becoming policemen. Every would-be police chief has to serve a menial apprenticeship; no one from outside, regardless of his qualifications, can come in at the middle. Some, like Reddin, favor lateral entry, commonplace in every other organization, but none have succeeded in changing the ossified structure of the police establishment. Pay is equally out of date; the median for patrolmen in big cities: $6,088.
One consequence is a dismayingly low percentage of college men in police work. Only a very few forces, including Los Angeles', require any higher education at all. Another is that more and more policemen have to moonlight to make ends meet--and in most cities are required to carry their guns off duty--as guards or cabbies. This can itself provoke violence. Arguing in a New York traffic tie-up last week, one off-duty cop shot another and was, in turn, shot by a third. Result: one dead, one seriously wounded.
Not only has society put the policeman on the front line in the ghetto, but it has saddled him with a multitude of problems that are social, medical or, as in traffic control, economic rather than criminal. Sometimes they are not even that, but only the moral expressions of an earlier generation. "The criminal code tends to make a crime of everything that people are against," says the President's crime commission. "The result is that it becomes society's trash bin. The police have to rummage around in this material, and are expected to prevent everything that is unlawful." More important, observes Sociologist Skolnick, some of the vice laws actually encourage criminality by creating a black market of illegal demands--prostitutes, narcotics, the numbers game--that can exist only with the connivance of corrupt cops.
All Your Time. Apart from nourishing corruption, vice laws tie many men down fighting infractions that most Americans are guilty of themselves or condone. Some 200 men assigned to the L.A. vice squad spend much of their time keeping tabs on minor gamblers, striptease clubs, prostitutes and sexual perverts. "Why, with all the homosexuals, bisexuals, transvestites, and trans-sexuals," declares San Francisco's Cahill, "it takes all your time figuring them out. It's shocking how little time we have left for major crime." The most bothersome and time-consuming task of all is handling public drunks, who, though hardly a serious menace to society, account for one-third of all arrests in the U.S.*
The Difference. Obviously, almost anything that will improve the police will cost money: better law enforcement cannot be purchased on the cheap. Not only are salaries too low, but too little is spent on equipment, buildings and, most of all, research. Most chiefs scoff at the much publicized gadgetry, such as "instant banana peel," a chemical that makes streets too slippery for rioters to stay on their feet. But police professionals are, somewhat belatedly, impressed by computers and faster communications techniques. Reddin, for example, wants three things from the technicians: a Dick Tracy-type wrist radio to connect the patrolman to the station house; a fast scanner to pick out suspects' fingerprints, and a dashboard computer console to tie patrol cars to giant memory banks in Sacramento and L.A. Computers could then tell, within three seconds, whether a suspect had a record.
Yet in the end, it is the individual cop who is the overseer of peaceful normalcy. Often under the most difficult circumstances, he is the thin blue line between law and disorder, civilization and anarchy. He is the man whom Tom Reddin and others like him are trying to lead--and change. Few experts promise quick results. As Tom Reddin puts it: "We're reversing a whole lifetime of a different kind of police work." Understandably, the policeman--even the "streetcorner sociologist"--is not so much concerned with social trends as with the job an older society gave him to do.
It is unfair, says Roger Wilkins, director of the federal Community Relations Service, "to expect the police, no matter how good, to be able to do a first-rate job where society has pulled back. The whole society has failed these people in the ghettos--and then it asks the police to go down and keep order." In the U.S. today, the policeman's role cannot be redefined simply by enlightened police chiefs, or vague calls for law and order, or courts resolved to protect the rights of the individual. It will take a degree of awareness and concern about the causes of violence and social insurrection that is not yet evident in American life.
* The word cop means many things to many people, and its origin is not certain. One explanation is that it is the abbreviation for Constable of Police; another traces it to the verb copper--to arrest or inform against. * Apparently from "Mr. Charlie," the equivalent of honky or whitey. -In an experimental program pioneered by the Vera Institute of Justice, New York is now sending many Bowery drunks to an infirmary, where they are dried out, counseled, and assisted in finding jobs. In six months, only 150 of the 650 men treated have been arrested again.
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