What the Police Can--And Cannot--Do About Crime
MILLIONS of Americans in 1970 are gripped by an anxiety that is not caused by war, inflation or recession --important as those issues are. Across the U.S., the universal fear of violent crime and vicious strangers--armed robbers, packs of muggers, addict burglars ready to trade a life for heroin--is a constant companion of the populace. It is the cold fear of dying at random in a brief spasm of senseless violence--for a few pennies, for nothing.
Last fall the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence painted an eerie picture of the urban future: downtown areas deserted after dark save for police patrols, apartment buildings ringed by private guards, whole cities terrified of strangers and infused with a fortress mentality. From Baltimore to Los Angeles, that future is closer at hand than anyone imagined. Banks and department stores are building inside parking garages to reduce muggings of nighttime workers. Downtown restaurants and theaters are closing early for lack of business. Vigilante groups and private security agencies are flourishing. Half the nation's 60 million households contain at least one gun.
To be sure, Americans are several times more likely to be hurt in auto accidents or household mishaps than to be raped, robbed or murdered. Only about 10% of robbery victims are badly injured; fewer than 1% are killed. The nation's well-being is far more insidiously undermined by embezzlers, price fixers and organized racketeers than by muggers or car thieves. But that is cold comfort. The "war on crime" is beginning to look as unwinnable as the one in Indochina. The latest FBI statistics show a 13% rise in serious crimes during the first three months of 1970.
Worse, the most crime-prone segment of the population--poor urban youths aged 15 to 24--will increase disproportionately at least until 1975. Sheer demography adds a racial factor: half the nation's blacks are under 21. Though victims of black crime are overwhelmingly black, it is chiefly young black males who commit the most common interracial crime: armed robbery.
Frustrated Minority
After a decade of assorted riots, the nation's 400,000 policemen are armed with more lethal weapons than some of history's major wars required plus Mace and Pepper Fog, undercover agents, computers and helicopters. The best cops have also learned new techniques for cooling crowds instead of using those weapons. Yet street crime--the worst problem--is so rampant that police are fast becoming the nation's most frustrated minority. In fact, roughly half of all serious crimes are never reported, often because numbed victims expect no help from overburdened police. Between 70% and 80% of police effort is spent not on crime but on hushing blaring radios, rescuing cats and administering first aid. Countless additional police hours are wasted on crimes without true victims, like drunkenness and gambling. Even the best police work is undone by clogged courts and punitive prisons that breed more crime. Of all reported major offenses, the experts say, only 12% lead to arrests, only 6% to convictions and only 1% to prison. Thus, in the U.S. today, the chances of being punished for a serious crime are three in 100. Moreover, one-third of the inmates released from the nation's so-called correctional system later commit other crimes.
To help meet these challenges, the
Federal Government is funneling a record $268 million to local lawmen this year--four times last year's outlay. More controversially, Congress and state legislatures are considering measures that would allow police to expand wiretapping and enter suspicious dwellings without knocking. In most areas, public opinion has seldom been so pro-cop. A recent Gallup poll revealed that a majority of Americans view crime control as their No. 1 priority, and even longtime dissenters are beginning to have second thoughts. Though many radicals still think of police as "pigs"--with some justification in a number of cities --liberals who used to minimize crime are now recognizing that police have a serious task on their hands. Large numbers of blacks, realizing that crime victimizes them more often than any other group, are clamoring for more protection. Here and there, voters are even giving police political power. Ex-cops are now city councilmen in Los Angeles, New York and Seattle. In Minneapolis last fall, Detective Charles Stenvig was elected mayor by a landslide. And in city after city, police associations are winning ever-larger voices in municipal management.
All the law-and-order clamor has yet to do much for police morale--and is unlikely to. Criminologists, lawyers and thoughtful police officials are gradually recognizing that police problems go deeper than Supreme Court decisions that allegedly handcuff cops, and beyond the constant risk of sudden death in defense of unappreciative citizens. Nor is the real trouble the continuing emergence of new social abrasions--the mushrooming growth of hard-drug addiction, the bombings of urban buildings (four embassies in Washington were blasted last week), the crescendo of riots and demonstrations unmatched since the 1930s.
These days the malaise is deeper. The realization is growing that even the best police work, as it is currently set up in the U.S., is little more than a symbolic response to crime. Police can do little to prevent the creation of criminals. The dark reservoirs of anger and disappointment besetting the nation inevitably erupt into violence; a society flush with consumer goods multiplies crime incentives and opportunities. In short, crime has taken on a chronic quality that seems beyond the power of the present police system to change.
All these pressures are compounded in Washington, D.C., one of the world's most crime-ridden seats of government. No major American city has a larger share (73%) of black residents; few cities live in greater fear or ask more of their police. In an average week last year, the nation's seventh largest city recorded five homicides, six rapes, 200 auto thefts, 238 robberies and 442 burglaries. In the first quarter of 1970, crime in the capital rose 21.7%, far faster than it did in the nation as a whole. Churches have hired guards to protect ushers from being robbed after taking the Sunday collection. Tourists are advised not to leave their hotels alone after dark. Throughout the city the victims of crime range from presidential aides and foreign diplomats to black merchants and mothers on welfare.
Whatever their rank or race, all share a common demand: better police protection. In fact, they are slowly getting it --thanks mainly to the tireless efforts of Jerry Vernon Wilson, chief of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. In many ways, Wilson has the toughest police job in the U.S. Under intense political pressure, he must not only use a predominantly white force to curb crime in a black city but also cope with Washington's frequent mass demonstrations, such as last weekend's Honor America Day (see THE NATION). A tall North Carolinian of 42, Wilson is a self-educated man with a slow drawl, a quick mind, limitless cool--and a brutal candor that is almost unique among the nation's defensive bluecoats. His men often feel so dejected, he admits, that "there's a tendency to say, 'Oh well, just another robbery,' and not respond as we should."
The hot summer for which Wilson is bracing threatens to be enflamed by mob violence as well as street crime. Keeping mass demonstrations from turning into ugly rampages is Wilson's specialty. His method is not blind force but simple astuteness. At first, his approach made Attorney General Mitchell and his staff skeptical. But when the Justice Department briefed police forces around the country last month on the subject of summer demonstrations, it distributed a detailed description of Wilson's "model" methods.
Disciplined Ranks
Instead of restricting mass functions like the May 9 antiwar protest, Wilson begins his work by aiding them. He considers it part of his job to uphold the constitutional rights of free speech, petition and assembly. His staff participates in negotiations with march leaders that help coordinate city-provided toilet facilities, first-aid stations and speakers' platforms. Demonstrators are encouraged to train their own marshals to take the brunt of the policing. When the action starts, busloads of special riot-control squads are parked out of sight; visible officers usually wear no riot equipment. Though all officers avoid arrests as far as possible, minor violators are occasionally photographed, tracked down and arrested later.
For major events, Wilson takes command on the streets himself. When a few antiwar extremists refused to leave the Justice Department steps last November, he hurled the first canister of tear gas, then led his men in disciplined ranks down Constitution Avenue behind the fleeing protesters. Later, after Wilson used his bullhorn to order an unruly crowd from DuPont Circle, a middle-aged woman who lived near by asked why he did not use more force. Said Wilson: "Madam, before I answer your question, let me ask you one: Are you prepared to be arrested? I just ordered this area cleared." The woman scuttled off.
"The use of violence," Wilson says dryly, "is not the job of police officers." Blacks, whites and Congressmen of both parties are pleased by Wilson's aplomb. As one young longhair put it: "He's very definitely a nonneurotic pig."
Street crime, Wilson concedes, is less tractable. His basic approach is to flood difficult areas with highly qualified, tightly supervised patrolmen. His force is still 500 men short of its authorized strength of 5,100, but Wilson has intensified recruiting--in part by using a Pentagon program that releases servicemen five months early if they sign up to be cops. Thanks to his extensive lobbying before Congress, starting salaries have been raised to $8,500 (his own salary is $28,500). Wilson also lacks the usual police reluctance to use brainy officers: this fall he expects to have 50 recent graduates of Ivy League colleges on the streets, including the Harvard-educated son of Writer Ring Lardner. Most of them were recruited by one of the nation's first such cops, David Durk (see box, page 42).
Wilson hopes to have a full force by the end of this month. Meantime, he has increased the number of men on the beat by paying his officers to work an average 14 hours' overtime each week. He has made each of his six district inspectors personally responsible for cutting crime in his own area; two have been transferred in the past two months. Since fast response produces fast arrests--one of the few workable crime deterrents--Wilson has installed an elaborate computer system that pinpoints high-crime blocks for more efficient patrolling. In the most turbulent areas, he has increased the saturation of foot patrolmen. Using two-way radios ($875 each), officers can question the computers about a suspect's record and get an answer in one minute. Wilson pays radio dispatchers bonuses for instant action; one man recently got $350 for particularly fast descriptions that snagged five fleeing robbers. He also monitors the traffic on his own police radio and curtly demands written reports when he hears dispatchers or patrolmen responding too slowly.
To keep lines open to the city's blacks, Wilson attends community meetings about three evenings a week. He has increased the number of black patrolmen on his force, from 25% two years ago to 35% now--including two deputy chiefs. Nearly half his rookies in training are black. But, unlike other police chiefs, he has downplayed mere public relations. He knows only too well that a chief's lectures to community groups can be quickly undercut by incidents like one last year in which a white policeman fatally shot a black robbery suspect. The victim turned out to be an undercover cop.
So far, Wilson's white officers have been trained to treat blacks decently mainly as a matter of self-protection. A mistreated kid, for example, may hurt a cop when he gets big and dangerous. But ultimately, as Wilson sees it, every man on the beat must go beyond self-interest and somehow learn to see himself as a servant of all citizens --blacks as well as whites. Fast police response in the ghetto, Wilson thinks, is the best contribution that police can make to racial peace in his city.
Wilson's stress on service and sensitivity is not always translated into better behavior on the beat. Julius Hobson, a local black militant, claims that many D.C. cops are as harsh as ever to the black and the poor--except that "they are more clever than they used to be and usually hold back if there are cameras around." Though most of Wilson's men admire his brains and courage, subordinates have been known to blunt his directives. His order to avoid minor arrests during the November demonstrations was never announced to the cops in one district--they read about it in the newspapers. When he publicly criticized his men for overreacting to unruly demonstrators recently, the Washington Patrolmen's Association passed a resolution suggesting that he was not backing them.
"Well now," he wrote in a seven-page reply, "I don't stand behind my men. I stand in front of them. You know very well that I have had as many invectives and rocks thrown in my proximity as any 20 of those 200 men who unanimously voted to deplore my actions. I have done this so that I will know what goes on. I sincerely believe that if a chief of police wants to have the credibility in the government and the community to effectively support his men, then he must have the guts to recognize when things are done imperfectly and to stand up and say: 'We must improve.' "
Wilson is one of a new breed of top cops who have risen to command through administration instead of traditional detective work. "He's not a cop's cop, but a community cop," says one longtime observer of U.S. police departments. Yet Wilson's earliest thirst was for rough-and-tumble action. The son of a baker in Belmont, N.C., he dropped out of ninth grade, lied about his age and served for three years on a Navy minesweeper in World War II. Before his 17th birthday, he was a gunner's mate with five battle stars for preinvasion sweeps from Anzio to Okinawa.
He was bored by his first 15 months as a cop--in the Marine Corps military police. After returning to Belmont to finish high school, he recalls, "I thought about being a" lawyer until the school superintendent told me that lawyers were a dime a dozen." Instead, he joined the D.C. police in 1949. For six months he walked a somnolent beat in Georgetown, quietly arresting occasional drunks. Then, transferred to a clerk's job in the station house, Wilson taught himself a rare police skill: typing. Sixteen years, five promotions and numerous training courses later, he was working as head of the understaffed planning division--and chafing at the department's shortcomings.
When Lyndon Johnson set up a commission to probe D.C. crime, Wilson became the department's liaison man. The commission's members included Attorney William Rogers, now Secretary of State. They ranked the D.C. police as one of the worst managed in the nation, but were pleased with Wilson's receptivity to fresh ideas. Soon commission members began using their influence on Wilson's behalf. Over the objections of then Police Chief John Layton, Wilson became assistant chief in charge of field operations in 1968. Last summer, Layton was pressured to step aside, and Wilson became chief. "I am for change," he announced, "not the status quo."
Challenging Assignments
More like a Cabinet member than a cop, Wilson heads for work each morning at 7:15 in a car chauffeured by a police cadet. He speed-reads memos on the way. His office is furnished in Danish modern and hung with paintings on loan from the National Gallery of Art. He spends most days meeting subordinates and staging occasional unannounced inspection tours. At night, the officer on duty alerts him to emergencies; he is called four or five times a month.
His social life consists of playing with his two sons, Brian, 9, and Kevin, 4, mowing his lawn and reading Kipling, textbooks on sociology, psychology and oil drilling--a subject that fascinates his precise mind. Occasionally he attends embassy parties with his wife Leone, a former police stenographer. "She gets a kick out of it," Wilson allows. Before driving off in their black 1970 Ford, the Wilsons carefully lock the doors and windows of their house in Northwest Washington. They have yet to be robbed.
For a while this winter, Wilson thought that other citizens might soon enjoy the same good luck. The growth rate of Washington crime dipped for five straight months. Unfortunately, the growth resumed in May, when crime jumped 5%. Such is the baffling cycle of success followed by failure that police chiefs face across the country. Among the most challenging urban assignments:
DETROIT'S chief of seven months, Patrick V. Murphy, 49, Washington's director of public safety until last year, was one of the strongest influences on Wilson's outlook. In Detroit, Murphy confronts the anger of white patrolmen against blacks: a year ago, two white cops were shot outside a meeting of black militants; last month the two remaining suspects were acquitted. To help broaden police minds, Murphy has ordered all officers to complete one year of college before being eligible for promotion and has initiated far-reaching management studies. To curb police shooting, Murphy uses subtle techniques. For one, sergeants must now write reports every time one of their men is involved in gunfire. Sergeants do not like writing reports and instruct their men accordingly. CHICAGO'S Police Superintendent James Conlisk, 51, has learned a lot. His department's image was not helped by the policemen who sprayed shots indiscriminately during a raid on the city's Black Panther headquarters last December. But Conlisk's handling of the "Days of Rage" organized last fall by the Weatherman faction of the S.D.S. was restrained enough to be cited by the National Commission on Violence as a polar opposite to the "police riot" that scarred the city during the 1968 Democratic Convention. Reportedly under orders from Mayor Richard Daley, Conlisk recently made the department's recruit training the most thorough in the nation, inserting five mandatory college-credit courses in the behavioral sciences and law enforcement. PHILADELPHIA'S Frank Rizzo, 49, has one of the most crisply managed departments in the nation. "You get tough, and we'll get tougher," he tells militants. Rizzo orders officers to avoid provocations by not using their patrol-car sirens during tense times; when civil disturbances threaten, he dispatches black officers who are part-time ministers to spread calming advice in the ghetto. His men make arrests for 40% of the crimes reported to them, twice the national average. Philadelphia's crime rate is the lowest of the nation's ten largest cities. When the city's pioneering civilian review board was disbanded last December, Rizzo was delighted, confident that he had already made his own departmental board more rigorous. It fired more men in a recent nine-month period than the civilian board had in nine years. Rizzo is now the odds-on favorite to succeed Mayor James Tate when Tate steps down next year. NEW YORK'S 32,000 "finest" became more efficient when Commissioner Howard Leary put 2,000 more patrolmen on the street by hiring civilians to do desk jobs and installed the nation's first system enabling citizens to dial 911 for all emergencies. Leary's men have earned commendations from the New York Civil Liberties Union for their restrained handling of demonstrations. But discipline can still break down, as it did two months ago, when the cops stood by on Wall Street while hundreds of hardhats beat up pedestrians as well as peace demonstrators. Leary has been unable to change hidebound promotion policies that, critics charge, still give credit for blood donations but not for educational advancement. Because the finest stubbornly protect one another, Mayor John Lindsay recently appointed a special citizens' commission to investigate the extent of police graft --and thereby provoked the patrolmen's association into trying to block the probe in court.
The biggest problem facing Wilson and his peers is how to mobilize citizen cooperation. When cops see the world as "them and us," crime prevention is difficult; when people trust police, leads and information on crime flow in and the job gets easier. Fortunately, some cops are freshly conscious of the need to overcome their own isolation. Seattle police recently pacified student demonstrators by affixing daffodils to their nightsticks. On Atlanta's Peachtree Street, where police and hippies once tangled, young officers have persuaded young civilians to help combat the use of hard drugs. When the department recently opened a store-front precinct station, officers gamely let two hippies emblazon the plate-glass window with the legend "Pig Pen."
Peace, Not War
In Los Angeles, Chief Edward Davis is trying to end the aloofness of squad-car cops by slowing the rapid rotation of police assignments. He hopes that citizens will get to know the cops for a change, and even support them. That idea is being carried out most fully in smaller cities, which are experimenting with "team deployment." In the new Denver suburb of Lakewood, for instance, all cops now look like anti-cops. Called "agents," most of them have college degrees and all wear blazers; they leave their nightsticks in their patrol cars, and will soon operate in neighborhood squads virtually without orders from headquarters. Similar teams in Syracuse introduce themselves to local residents by holding neighborhood kaffeeklatsches. In one spectacular case, two young gunmen held up a Syracuse motel and fled. The police dispatcher got more than a dozen calls from residents who described the fugitives in detail; team cops caught the culprits ten blocks away.
Unfortunately, such police innovation is still rare in the U.S. More than half the nation's 40,000 departments consist of one man with scant training and fewer resources. At the other extreme, big-city departments often become as isolated as Tibetan kingdoms. Unlike business, virtually all police forces discourage applicants for middle-management jobs by hiring only rookies or chiefs; as a result, most graduates of new college police programs shun local forces for jobs with the FBI or private guard agencies. The effect shows. No police chief is listed in Who's Who.
While police salaries have improved, the average patrolman's maximum weekly pay is still only about $149, compared with $233 for electricians. Although policemen recruited from the armed services or the ghettos are making cops more representative of the people they serve, a few have brought bellicose attitudes and drug problems with them. Chief Wilson's force has its share of both. Other difficulties can be formidable: In New York and California, black patrolmen are threatening to arrest white officers who allegedly beat up black prisoners. Moderate citizens in several cities have filed lawsuits charging police undercover agents with indiscriminate prying into the activities of peaceful demonstrators. In an age of intense diversity, police often fail to understand that their real job is not war but peace--or that unnecessary force makes counterviolence seem legitimate.
Beyond Police Power
Given the limits of police performance and the nation's slowness to combat social causes of crime, such as ghetto crowding and appalling schools, what else can be done? A lot. The most obvious suggestion is a federal law that would further discourage gun ownership by requiring registration not only of rifles (mandatory since 1968) but also of all the nation's 90 million-odd guns, which perform 63% of homicides and are crucial in many other crimes. Among other possible reforms: REDEFINE CRIME. The most fruitless police task is enforcing laws against drunkenness, drug abuse, gambling, homosexuality and prostitution, most of which are crimes in name only. Half the arrests made in the U.S. are for public drunkenness. Banning vice drives up its price, creates a rich market for underworld operators and makes it necessary--in the case of dope--for addicts to finance their habits by stealing. Systematic bribes from pushers, pimps and bookies are probably the most important source of police corruption.
From police chiefs to the drafters of the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code, reformers argue that legislators would strike a key blow against crime by repealing vice laws and providing more rehabilitation facilities for addicts and alcoholics. This would help free police to concentrate on the crime that matters most. On Manhattan's Bowery, for example, a pioneering program has cut arrests for drunkenness-related offenses by 80%. Now derelicts are given the choice of admission to a health center; about 67% accept.
REORGANIZE POLICE SOCIAL WORK. Because most social agencies work only regular business hours, policemen have to neglect crime fighting for calls involving family fights, complaints against landlords and medical emergencies. Police Expert Charles Rogovirn suggests relieving police of these burdens by making city social workers and counseling personnel available 24 hours a day. Alternatively, some police departments are experimenting with specialized units, such as the New York City teams that intervene in marital squabbles (TIME, March 23) or the community-service officers in several cities who give drug lectures in schools and help householders who have locked themselves out. MAKE CRIME INCONVENIENT. Bus companies in more than 25 major cities have virtually ended stickups by requiring passengers to deposit exact fares in locked strongboxes. Since more than 40% of stolen cars are left with keys in the ignition, all cars manufactured since April 1 have been equipped with key-warning buzzers. Harvard Urbanologist Edward Banfield urges even stronger incentives. Insurance companies, he says, should stop paying on theft policies to citizens who have not taken simple precautions.
KEEP POLICEMEN OUT OF COURT. In most cities, a cop who makes an arrest can waste eight hours of duty time waiting to testify at preliminary hearings, even before a trial begins. The delay discourages arrests and thus encourages crime. In New York, a project first proposed by the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice has ended much of that idling. In the minor cases that comprise a large portion of arrests, suspects are now checked out at the station house. Offenders with firm ties to jobs or families are simply issued summonses to appear at trial, and 95% do so. Policemen are usually back on the street in less than an hour. During its first two years of citywide operation, the system saved 46,000 eight-hour police tours --the equivalent of adding 209 men to the force. Washington has adopted a similar system.
SPEED-UP COURTS. When a crime victim must wait up to two years for a trial --a commonplace in big cities--he may drop the charges. Even if he hangs on, witnesses may forget or vanish. Court congestion also spurs prosecutors and judges to swap light sentences for guilty pleas--boosting convictions but pushing criminals back onto the streets. Perhaps worst of all, innocent prisoners who cannot make bail are unjustly punished while they wait.
The Bail Reform Act of 1966 allows federal judges to release many suspects without bail, setting it only if a defendant seems unlikely to return for trial. But the act increased the number of defendants who could commit new crimes while waiting. To cope with such repeaters, the Nixon Administration has argued vigorously for the "preventive detention" clause of its federal and D.C. crime bills. The clause would allow judges to hold a suspect for up to 60 days if they found that he might be dangerous to the community. Many lawyers oppose preventive detention on constitutional grounds. Adds the National Council on Crime and Delinquency: "The amount of dangerous crime prevented would be very small, and the damage to many nondangerous defendants would be considerable." In addition, opponents argue that the bills' provisions for hearings on a prisoner's detention might ironically clog the courts still farther.
One obvious solution to the problem of crimes committed by those awaiting trial is to provide more judges; President Nixon has requested 50 more judges for the D.C. courts. Delay can also be overcome by legal and political pressure for sound court management. In California, failure to provide trial within 60 days of indictment on felony charges entitles a defendant to a dismissal of his case. With the aid of computer systems that coordinate the appearance of all parties, the average trial is completed in two months. CORRECT CRIMINALS. The nation's neglect of its prisons and youth-probation system produces more and more hardened criminals. Improvements are clearly possible; one project of the California Youth Authority in Sacramento lets all juvenile criminals except murderers, rapists, drug pushers and armed robbers live at home, as long as they participate in a stiff schedule of school, group therapy and counseling. The cost for each participant is eight times that of regular parole with an overburdened and ineffective officer but far cheaper than institutional boarding, and twice as effective as either.
PAY THE BILLS. Federal aid for state and local police agencies--begun in earnest only two years ago--is now the fastest-growing item in the tight federal budget. Nixon has proposed that this year's $268 million appropriation for the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency be increased to $480 million next year, and Attorney General Mitchell wants $1 billion in 1972. Many of the first grants, dispensed through jerry-built state agencies, strayed to low-crime suburbs instead of cities. Nonetheless, the money is being spent with increasing wisdom, and it cannot fail to improve a criminal-justice system that still gets only $6.5 billion a year--barely two-thirds of 1% of the G.N.P. Local taxes for fighting crime will have to go up too. Between 1902 and 1962, the share of local budgets spent for police protection actually dropped from 4.5% to 3.5%; it now stands again at 4.5%. Aside from federal taxes, local police forces now cost the average citizen only a bargain-basement $14.48 per year. FIND OUT WHAT WORKS. At this point, almost none of the new reforms under way in U.S. police departments and courts are being evaluated to find out whether they are worth their cost. Congress has just shortsightedly denied an increase in funds for the Justice Department's new criminal-justice research institute; the institute's director resigned three months ago. What makes this so foolish is that scores of police departments have no systematic rationale for their present practices; some do not even know how cops spend their time once they leave the station house. Chief Wilson himself is not sure whether his techniques actually reduce crime or merely shift it elsewhere. A year ago, when his men mounted full-time stakeouts at some of the city's most vulnerable banks, holdups dropped drastically--but armed robberies of liquor stores, service stations and individuals increased sharply. No one even knows to what extent crime statistics are rising simply because police forces are working harder and citizens are thus willing to report more crime.
Clearly, much more can be done to sharpen police performance and help curb crime. But in ultimate terms, Jerry Wilson, like other police chiefs, is pessimistic. Despite his successes, he strongly suspects that crime will proliferate until Americans begin to ask as much of the courts, the prisons and the schools as they now do of the police. As he put it with typical candor in a recent Senate hearing: "Our criminal-justice system is a failure. We are not preventing crime, we are not apprehending and convicting enough offenders, we are not rehabilitating enough convicts." Until significant progress is made in each of these areas, Wilson believes, it is Pollyannaish to expect a decrease in the crime rate. In fact, the only realistic outlook is for an increase.
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