The Top Cops

Tom Reddin is not the only chief cop in the U.S. trying to adapt the police establishment to the demands of the '60s. Among the others:

St. Louis' Curtis Brostron, 63, has probably involved his department more intimately with the ghetto than any other force. The city was singled out for special praise by the President's riot commission. Storefront offices in the slums are not so much police stations as referral stations--each staffed by a cop, a sanitation man and a member of the state employment service--for a whole spectrum of social problems, from health to jobs. Police are given partial credit for keeping St. Louis relatively quiet. Other problems remain unsolved. St. Louis has a rising crime rate and is a major Midwest base for organized crime.

Washington's Patrick Murphy, 47, was criticized for not being tougher on rioters in the disturbances that followed the death of Martin Luther King. Yet Murphy's restraint not only kept down the death toll (only ten died) but also prevented a major outbreak from turning into a city-wide conflagration. In seven months, he has done more to modernize the creaky District force than previous directors did in years. Last week new guidelines were handed down to curb indiscriminate arrests for "disorderly conduct"; the President's riot panel discovered that just such arrests sparked many of the disturbances of the '60s. The changes are coming none too soon, and Washington, which has a higher proportion of Negro residents than any other major U.S. city (66%), is still volatile and riot-prone.

Atlanta's Herbert Jenkins, 61, the only policeman on the riot commission, is impatient with conventional attitudes. With no help from a state headed by racist Governor Lester Maddox, Jenkins keeps relative calm in one of the Deep South's fastest-growing cities. He hired the first Negro officers in 1948, an almost unheard-of step in the South at that time, and spoke up for Negroes long before riots made such talk politic. "If a police officer is so thin-skinned that he is afraid of being called a 'nigger lover' because he is doing his duty," Jenkins once said, "then he is in the wrong kind of business."

New York City's Howard Leary, 56, has the biggest job of any cop, with the widest range of problems and perhaps the most maddening bureaucracy. He points out that his city has almost ten times as many violent crimes as London (63,412 v. 7,302 last year), despite the British capital's edge in population. The big city has the unique distinction of harboring five of the 24 Cosa Nostra families and most of the nation's narcotics addicts. Almost alone, however, it has escaped major riots since 1964.

Quinn Tamm, 58, is not a policeman at all, but he is one of the most influential voices for police reform in the country. He has been behind most of the chiefs' innovations and has been a prime mover in efforts to interest the colleges in crime and college men in crime fighting. A former assistant director of the FBI, Tamm became executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 1961, quickly turned it from a genial club into a highly expert organization that not only trains police administrators but, on request of city governments, studies individual departments. Its recommendations are rarely ignored. Since the I.A.C.P.'s jolting indictment of the Baltimore force in 1965, every top cop in the country has learned to judge his department in terms of not only what it has done to curb crime but, more importantly, what it should be doing to adjust to the problems of a fast-changing and impatient society.

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