THE POLICE NEED HELP

NOTHING is tougher than being a policeman in a free society. For one thing, the U.S. Constitution guarantees as much individual liberty as public safety will allow. To uphold that elusive ideal, the policeman is supposed to mediate family disputes that would tax a Supreme Court Justice, soothe angry ghetto Negroes despite his scant knowledge of psychology, enforce hundreds of petty laws without discrimination, and use only necessary force to bring violators before the courts. The job demands extraordinary skill, restraint and character-qualities not usually understood by either cop-hating leftists, who sound as if they want to exterminate all policemen, or by dissent-hating conservatives, who seem to want policemen to run the U.S. in a paroxysm of punitive "law and order."

The U.S. policeman is forbidden to act as judge and jury--for that way lies the police state. Yet he also has enormous discretion to keep the peace by enforcing some laws and overlooking others. How does he exercise that discretion? Largely on the basis of common sense and common mores, plus his own private attitudes. Unfortunately, he now faces an era of drastically changing mores that challenges his most cherished creeds and conceptions.

Most Americans are not even sure what they want the police to police. "We ask our officers to be a combination of Bat Masterson, Sherlock Holmes, Sigmund Freud, King Solomon, Hercules and Diogenes," says Rocky Pomerance, Miami Beach police chief. Indeed, the U.S. often seems lucky to have any cops at all. Plato envisaged the policeman's lofty forebear as the "guardian" of law and order and placed him near the very top of his ideal society, endowing him with special wisdom, strength and patience. The U.S. has put its guardians near the bottom. In most places, the pay for an experienced policeman is less than $7,000 a year, forcing many cops to moonlight and some to take bribes. Fear and loneliness are routine hazards. Last year 76 American policemen were killed and 10,770 injured by assault. "Everything you do is more or less on your own," says Christos Kasaras, a patrolman on Manhattan's West Side. "Trouble starts, and there you are." The average cop feels that he is unappreciated or even actively disliked by the public he serves. Very often he is right--and thus all the more prone to confine his entire social as well as professional life to his fellow cops, a group that all too often sees the world as "we" and "they."

Search for Power

Who wants to be a cop? One of the most common types is the ex-high school athlete who went directly into a virile military unit like the Marines, and now seeks security in a job that requires no college degree. Often he aims to live far from the inner city--a lower-middle-class aspiration that produces white commuter cops who nervously regard black-ghetto patrols as raids behind enemy lines. According to Chicago Psychiatrist Clifton Rhead, a policeman needs distinct traits--a tendency to be suspicious, act fast, take risks, be aggressive and obey authority.

Despite the glaring lack of uniform standards across the country, most police recruits fit Dr. Rhead's prescription, as far as it goes. In Eastern and Midwestern cities, the typical recruit is a Roman Catholic of blue-collar background and Irish, Polish or perhaps Italian ancestry. Often, says Chicago Psychologist Arnold Abrams, he has been "exposed to an autocratic environment." Most recruits are eldest sons; most tend to be nervous around authority. In Detroit, says former Police

Commissioner Ray Girardin, they usually come from the bottom 25% of their high school class. U.C.L.A. Psychiatrist Charles Wahl adds that most policemen he has worked with had "harsh and punitive fathers."

Fortunately, more and more police departments now use psychiatrists or psychologists to screen applicants. The results are sometimes startling. In Chicago, between 1961 and 1963, an "excessive number" of applicants rejected for patrolman suffered from paranoia. "There is something about police power that attracts to its ranks a particular kind of person," explains Dr. Abrams, a member of the examining team. "It gives them an umbrella to legitimatize their pathology. They can act out their problems and be rewarded for it."

The same kind of analysis can, of course, be applied to the motives of judges, surgeons, soldiers and presidential candidates, to say nothing of journalists. In fact, police work also attracts large numbers of men who sincerely want to serve the public, delight in chores as disparate as solving murders and delivering babies, and have all the moral courage requisite to making that awesome police decision--to kill or not to kill.* In California, one study showed that 50% of one police force (Sausalito) had the same psychological profile as doctors and ministers. If most cops were not highly motivated, how could they stand the thankless job of doing society's dirty work?

Society s Spoiled Darlings

Politically, policemen are usually conservative. The policeman, says Berkeley Criminologist Gordon Misner, "pictures himself as the crime fighter standing alone against the Mongol hordes, without the support of the public, the politicians or the courts. You don't often find a liberal in policing. And if you do, by the time he's been in a while-longer, he's going to be voting for Governor Wallace."

In many respects policemen represent the most typical beliefs and attitudes of their communities, including what Los Angeles Chief Thomas Reddin deplores as a moralistic tendency to see things in terms of either-or. Not surprisingly, police tend to be appalled by abnormal behavior and rebellions against authority. Most scorn long hair, and homosexuality horrifies them. With their ingrained respect for work, they take a dim view of people living on welfare. Perhaps most irritating to cops are the white antiwar protesters, most of them collegians who have rejected advantages that policemen themselves lacked and toil to give their own children. "The police consider the beatniks spoiled darlings of society," says Berkeley Economist Margaret Gordon, who also serves on the city council. "Their rage and frustration at them can break out uncontrollably even in the historically well-disciplined and polite Berkeley police department." What most upset Chicago police during the Democratic Convention was obscenity from women and disrespect to the flag. When demonstrators blithely pulled down the Stars and Stripes in Grant Park, several cops at the scene could not hold back their tears.

Obviously policemen are just as entitled to personal prejudices as anyone else--so long as they control them better than anyone else. When scores of skull-cracking policemen "overreacted" against innocent bystanders in Chicago, they undermined the very order they meant to maintain. The fact that 56% of Americans approved (according to Gallup) makes such occurrences no more palatable. By responding as they did, Chicago police gave the true anarchists among the demonstrators a victory they never dared imagine. If a demonstrator can provoke a riot by hurling four-letter words at a policeman, the U.S. is in for more disorder than it even now fears.

Cold calm in the face of verbal provocation is the policeman's duty--even as it is the duty of a nurse in a hospital, or an attendant in an asylum. Rule No. 1 was laid down nearly 140 years ago, not long after Sir Robert Peel established the London Metropolitan Police, the first professional force in the English-speaking world. "No [officer] is justified in depriving anyone of his liberty for words only, and language, however violent . . . is not to be noticed. [A policeman] who allows himself to be irritated by any language whatsoever shows that he has not a command of his temper, which is absolutely necessary in an officer with such extensive powers by law."

Why is it necessary? Why should a policeman be required to stand filthy abuse from highly unattractive protesters? In part because, as the Supreme Court interprets it, the First Amendment commands American policemen to protect free speech. More important, a policeman who can ignore abuse is not only a good law officer, not only a moral victor, but a living symbol of a free society strong and calm enough to withstand any challenge. But this takes the kind of police and civilian leaders who respect the Constitution--and set the right tone for cops on the front line. Mayor Richard Daley hardly helped with his "shoot to kill" order after Chicago's Negro riots last April, or by implying before the Democratic Convention that protesters were hoodlums or Communists.

The truth is that such disasters as the Battle of Chicago are easily avoided by granting the demonstrators' legitimate demands, such as rallying in parks, and smothering the affair in a soft blanket of civic disinterest. This takes official determination to forget the High Noon syndrome, ample communication with demonstration leaders and masses of calm cops who flood the premises, making sure that any violence is committed only by small groups of isolated, discredited protesters. When 25,000 anti-Castro Cubans wanted to picket the Republican Convention, for example, Miami Beach Police Chief Pomerance quietly diverted all but 75 to Miami Stadium and carefully cooled off his frazzled men in a special air-conditioned lounge adjoining the convention hall. The whole episode barely made the scene on television.

The biggest police problem in the U.S. today, says Los Angeles' Chief Reddin, "is to find ways to equip the policeman so that he won't give in to the baiting and the frustrations." The problem requires more than rigorous discipline and court decisions that ban lawless police practices. Like most tense people, the police could use psychiatric help in discharging hostilities before they explode. The experience of Sausalito, a small city across the bay from San Francisco, offers suggestions. Once a month the entire police department of 29 men joins Psychiatrist Edward Shev for group-therapy discussions about tension, hippies, homosexuals, Negroes, peaceniks and anything else likely to bring the police uptight. Instead of lashing out, the Sausalito cop is now apt to ask coolly: "What do you want to go and provoke me for?" Significantly, no one has lodged a complaint against Sausalito police in two years. Their hostilities under control, the men are also freer to focus on serious crimes--residential burglaries and auto thefts have been cut in half. In similar sessions with local citizens, Houston cops are trying hard to understand minority-group problems.

Much police frustration would vanish overnight if salaries rose by 50%--to what many union plumbers make. Police brains would sharpen immensely if every department in the country stopped requiring even the best-educated rookies to start out as foot patrolmen. Instead, the police ought to ease archaic seniority and allow college graduates to start as management trainees. Equally important, police duties should be drastically reduced and refined. Certainly, police should not be responsible for carting drunks to jail--one-third of all arrests. A good case could be made for putting traffic control in the hands of some other body--and for repealing scores of antique laws that make it criminal to behave in ways that offended society in the past but are now irrelevant. "The white middle class uses criminal codes as garbage cans," says University of Michigan Law Professor Yale Kamisar. "Whenever it has a problem it doesn't want to treat adequately, it draws up a criminal statute."

The Three Types

The presidential crime commission offered a partial solution to overworked police forces: Split up the policeman's job three different ways. Under this plan, a "community service officer," often a youth from the ghetto, would perform minor investigative chores, rescue cats, and keep in touch with combustible young people. A police officer, one step higher, would control traffic, hold back crowds at parades, and investigate more serious crimes. A police agent, the best-trained, best-educated man on the ladder, would patrol high-crime areas, respond to delicate racial situations, and take care of tense confrontations.

Others have even more radical ideas. University of Chicago Sociologist Jerome Skolnick argues that the rigid military model for police is out of date, suggests that civilian clothes with mere badges would bring policemen closer to their fellow citizens. According to Arnold Sagalyn, formerly a top Treasury Department lawman, police should quit being lonely adversaries and help tackle urban problems--thus preventing a good many crimes that now plague police. Berkeley Psychiatrist Bernard Diamond argues that police forces should also stop recruiting primarily tough men who can "shoot it out." As he sees it, the right model is a potential community-relations expert.

Whatever the solution, the question for Americans is not what's wrong with the police, but what citizens can do to help. For all its Birchite origin, there is no real alternative to the right-wing slogan, "Support your local police." In its proper definition, support would mean paying higher taxes for higher wages to attract better policemen, and for modern equipment to match modern tasks. It would also mean a constant concern for constitutional rights--and utmost respect for the cop who guards freedom as zealously as he upholds order.

* A decision that usually must be made according to ill-defined rules. Under Illinois law, for example, a policeman is justified in using deadly force "only when he reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or another person, or when he reasonably believes that such force is necessary to make the arrest and the person to be arrested has committed or attempted to commit a forcible felony, or is attempting to escape by use of a deadly weapon, or otherwise indicates he will endanger human life or inflict great bodily harm unless arrested without delay."

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