TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/60s/60urban.006

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                                                                                July 19, 1968

THE NATION

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 solder 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, his front line the
American ghetto, Harlem, Watts, Roxbury, Hough, Hunters Point,
the South Side, Dixie Hills, Bedford-Stuyvesant: these 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, tying 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 by a well-trained
soldier but a "street-corner 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 assaults is even more widespread and last 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 neighborhood after
dark.

     In Boston, office girls refuse to work alone after 6. In
Kansas City, hospital have trouble finding night nurses. Prudent
Chicagoans try not to ride the el after dark, and attendance at
White Sox games is down, note 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 Vietnam 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 only 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 6-cent special-issue stamp showed a
kindly cop escorting a small boy, with three words in banner
red: LAW AND ORDER. [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.]

     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's
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 underdeveloped
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, 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 teenage 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 ado -- 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 post-war
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 lesson,s 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 front-lien 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 form 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 2 1/2 tons of grass last year,
enough to orbit a good-size army. Because of its balmy climate,
it has, notes the chief, a "twelve-month 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 feeling all but a few
regulars for active law-enforcement duty. An elite team of 22,
known as the "Top Group," has been organized for special
assignments, such as nabbing organized car-theft rings or
stick-up 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 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 in 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
lbs.), 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, aged 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 police space, equipment and uniforms.

     To damp down rumors that often lead to riots -- a report
that 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 a beautiful relationship," argues the chief. "The
policeman gets to know the people. They identify him, and the
chances of one of them throwing a rock at him are less." 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 economics 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 Bills'" 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 community 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 U (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." [Apparently from
"Mr. Charlie," the equivalent of honky or whitey.] 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 anti-draft 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 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 Sided. The result is a kind of inbreeding 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 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 karate expert -- and he has to be able to
make 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 form 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 too 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," declared 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. [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.]

     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 "street-corner
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 filed 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.