What Should We Do About the Police?
Packer, Herbert L.
THE RELATIONSHIP between the police and the community has become an urgent problem in this nation's domestic life, as we vainly strive to control the law's legitimate monopoly on the use of...
...Why shouldn't police work become one model among others for the advancement of blacks...
...If, as James Q. Wilson argues, the police must inevitably exhibit a middle-class bias, the racist overtones of that bias can at least be reduced.3 Decriminalization I Arguments for this view are fully developed in Packer, The Limits of The Criminal Sanction (1968...
...And what are the chances of coming anywhere near it during the 1970s...
...College graduates should be sought out and encouraged to go into police work at advanced levels...
...Decriminalization is essentially the job of state legislatures, but it may in the end turn out to be the result of a constitutional coup de main...
...5 While minimum requirements require relaxation, the members of the force should be encouraged to broaden their experience by taking leaves to work as teachers and at other "civilian" occupations, without being penalized by the loss of their accrued leave and similar fringe benefits...
...Toledo has so far received only 1.5 percent of Ohio's grant...
...But that is very different from imposing initial exclusionary requirements that may often have a racist effect...
...These recruits can be fullfledged police trainees, working the beat in their own communities...
...3) the tendency for a policeman's sense of identification and loyalty to be almost exclusively to his profession...
...Nor is education the sole restrictive requirement...
...Conference of Mayors are currently pleading with Congress for a larger voice for cities in planning the federal allocation...
...c) "professionalization" and "centralization" of those police functions which require a high degree of "institutional management...
...surely take place...
...On the contrary, initial qualifications should be greatly broadened and relaxed...
...In these and many other cases, the top priority needs of the cities have not been met...
...Just as in our foreign policy, we must here reduce commitments to match capacities...
...as one might expect from the head of a paramilitary institution...
...Whether this participation comes through civilian review boards or through easing the process of civil litigation against the police doesn't really matter...
...Professionalization" and "Centralization" It is the unanimous opinion of experts that police work needs to be professionalized and the structure of local government units that control the police centralized...
...It is easy to applaud efforts to get community "input" into police work, but very difficult to reconcile these efforts with the legitimate demand for increased professionalization and technological efficiency...
...We need to blast apart this "paramilitary" structure by a number of related measures...
...The President's Crime Commission, dominated by professionals, gave heavy priority to this aspect of police work, though without even recognizing the conflict between this and the "community" aspects of police work...
...What measures can we take at least to modify the tension...
...more money for research and development of substitutes for deadly weapons like tranquilizing "bullets" and wooden ammunition for missiles...
...Centralization goes hand-in-hand with professionalization, since only through providing larger governmental units is it financially feasible to enable the police to develop what professionalization requires...
...Id., p. 42...
...Detective work, police management, and such supporting services as computerization are good examples...
...34-43, and especially the profile of Sergeant Durk, pp...
...We can rant against the destructive radicals all we want, but we still must protect ourselves on our right flank, too...
...For cops on the beat, extensive recruitment should be undertaken among the inhabitants of urban ghettos...
...Crime Act, requiring the government to pay the policeman's legal fees when he is sued for false arrest regardless of who wins the suit, is a fine example of how people like the bill's principal author, Representative McMillan (D., S.C...
...middle-class and blue-collar white ethnicism...
...I exclude from the category of morals offenses such apparently "victimless" crimes as bribery, perjury, and other offenses against the government...
...Indeed, the advent of the computer may make metropolitan or even state units technologically irrelevant, for by now even riot control has become an interstate matter...
...No doubt the trend toward professionalizing and centralizing police work up to a point needs to be accentuated...
...While legislatures have been gradually liberalizing the abortion laws, some courts have declared abortion laws to be unconstitutional...
...Since the police do a number of very different jobs, there should be a number of different avenues into police work: detective work, community-relations work, clerical work, management work—none of these logically needs an initial period of training or indoctrination as a patrolman...
...And be sure to keep a carbon of all manuscripts...
...Denver, which has over 30 percent of the population and 70 percent of the crime in Colorado, less than 20 percent of its state's allocation...
...In these "elitist" aspects, police work calls imperatively for centralization, the creation of broader and larger governmental units...
...The criminal law, and hence the police, must be relieved of the burden of enforcing morals and the consequent costs of illegal police practices, such as searches and seizures, entrapment, electronic surveillance, etc.2 Such a policy would have the effect of freeing the institutions of criminal justice to devote their major efforts to the first job that law enforcement must do: protecting us against gross and immediate harm to person and property...
...A similar caveat blocks reduction in the paramilitary character of the police...
...It is my thesis that all criminal laws declaring that consensual conduct is criminal ought to be viewed by the courts as prima facie unconstitutional on the general ground that they are irrational...
...Consider the case of abortion...
...What would that relationship be...
...One needn't be Jeremiah to see in a certain kind of ethnicism a source of the corruption of the police, as was brilliantly portrayed in "Z," the recent movie about the Greek situation...
...HERBERT L. PACKER would substantially alleviate the feelings of discrimination that most blacks have in relation to law enforcement, if only because offenses like drunkenness, narcotics possession, and gambling are committed by blacks quite out of proportion to their numbers in the population...
...If the nonwhite ethnics and the young can come to political maturity, perhaps we "tired remnants" will be able to create a new coalition against the police as they now are...
...However "professional" a police force may be, even with decriminalization and a decrease in the paramilitary character of the police, there will still be difficulty in bridging the gap between police and, to cite an extreme example, Bedford-Stuyvesant...
...A good cop must be honest, not psychotic, of normal intelligence, and be able to get along with people...
...Why should every policeman be required to start at the bottom as a "rookie" patrolman...
...The desirable relationship between police and community in today's America requires, in my view, the following developments: (a) decriminalization...
...Elimination of the Paramilitary Character of the Police By "paramilitary" I mean the tendency of the police to resemble the institutions and structure of an army: the sense of mission, pride in identifying oneself as being part of a unit, and antidemocratic spirit...
...At the same time, they can be educated in local community colleges to recognize those aspects of middleclass values that we expect our police to share...
...We then must consider the effects of introducing large numbers of young uneducated blacks into the police force...
...and only through presidential leadership can we hope to reach a national consensus about the police...
...7 Whether the Supreme Court will so decide during this decade, or whether legislatures will repeal such laws during this next decade, is uncertain...
...I should favor someone like Ramsey Clark as the next director of the FBI, for the exemplary power of that position is tremendous...
...Yet if our society does not become completely repressive under Nixon and Agnew, I believe the chances are quite good that in the long run we will by a combination of legislative and judicial action decriminalize ourselves...
...The main impediment is congressional reluctance to spend the large sums required for training and research programs for the police rather than for hardware...
...Decentralization and Community Control While it has become fashionable to call for greater "community control" of the police, there have been, so far as I am aware, no attempts to prescribe in detail how this is to be achieved...
...Our divided nation is still committed to the current paramilitary image of our police...
...This reluctance is aggravated by Congress's disposition to give the money directly to the states, to the obvious detriment of urban areas...
...They have pointed out that will presumably militate against the needs of our cities if my prescription for decentralization is to be followed...
...The National League of Cities and the U.S...
...Blacks can be recruited right from the ghetto and given on-the-job training as policemen...
...Even Time has now joined the chorus of praisefor these efforts...
...THE RELATIONSHIP between the police and the community has become an urgent problem in this nation's domestic life, as we vainly strive to control the law's legitimate monopoly on the use of force without deepening the division between Middle America and our various minorities (blacks, youth, the intellectuals, etc...
...If, on the other hand, the paramilitary structure begins to break down, the possibilities of what I hope will cease to be referred to as "civilian" participation in police disciplinary processes will probably increase...
...Regular mail will, as a rule, be adequate and more convenient...
...The analogy to "basic training" must not be allowed to control police recruitment and training...
...Philadelphia, with more than 2 million people, less than 15 percent of the Pennsylvania grant...
...What matters is that the present paramilitary distinction between the police and the rest of us be blurred...
...I say "recognize" because it is only through the responsibility of their on-the-job training that they can be expected to arrive at a sharing of those values...
...Of course, as a man's career develops, formal education becomes a necessity...
...In the struggle of the white ethnics to maintain their dominance in ghetto police, they will have to yield to the demands of justice...
...s IT POSSIBLE to disprove the assertion ' that "there's no way to get there from here...
...These people are, so far as the police are concerned, very much in the saddle...
...2 Police illegality arises almost entirely in relation to "victimless" crimes, by which I mean primarily crimes involving consensual transactions between willing buyers and willing sellers...
...One could only wish that the intellectual Establishment,8 schooled as it is in the "talk tough" tradition of the Kennedys, and inhibited by its devotion to the "scientism" of behavioral science, showed more concern over the possibility that "order" and "growth" can be the seeds of a corruption that might blossom into a native kind of fascism...
...At the least, there are a few hopeful signs...
...White ethnicism is being simultaneously assailed by the blacks, the middle-class young, and the tired remnants of the liberal coalition forged by F.D.R...
...This provision tends to increase the paramilitary character of the police...
...This tendency is an evil in police work because it accentuates the "we/ they" feeling, even though the police, unlike an army, are an immediate part of the community...
...Perhaps metropolitan units should be substituted for our present crazy-quilt pattern of city, township, and county units...
...In short, police work probably typifies the kind of service occupation that ought to lead to black assimilation into the middle class...
...Professionalization" means of course more money for salaries...
...more money for research and training programs...
...To the extent that their detection involves such police illegality as wiretapping and bugging, it is presently unconstitutional to condone that illegality...
...In the reform of the police, I see writ small the kind of renewal that our society needs...
...The first real opportunity to make a breakthrough in the paramilitary structure of our police will come when the durable J. Edgar Hoover retires or dies...
...What does it really take to be a good "cop on the beat...
...Decriminalization The criminal law, and hence to a large extent the work of the police, should be purged of those crimes, like narcotics and marijuana possession, gambling, abortion, homosexuality, drunkenness, obscenity, etc., that are beyond the capacity of the criminal law.' These offenses create legal lawlessness and give law enforcement a bad name...
...HERBERT L. PACKER The work of the "cop on the beat" certainly does call for some easing of the tension between the police and the community...
...Presidential leadership alone can perform the delicate task of simultaneously centralizing and decentralizing the police that is necessary if the police are to be responsive to the needs of a democratic, pluralistic society...
...Their wish to serve the community can be encouraged by employing their talents as teachers for the ghetto recruits, both as police instructors in community colleges and as on-the-job companions...
...3 See Wilson, Varieties of Police Behavior (1968), p. 297...
...The police can be prepared by decriminalization to cease, or at best diminish, their present vendetta against blacks and the young—to mention only two of the most deplorable aspects of police work today...
...Let me offer a few remarks on each of these...
...4 The principle of "lateral entry" needs to be extended far beyond the modest notion of transfer between police forces encouraged by the President's Crime Commission...
...The four elements that I have been elaborating are, with the exception of professionalization and centralization, interrelated...
...While Ford's $30 million is a mere drop in the bucket and while the Ford Foundation is not the Congress, this is a very hopeful development...
...If the predominantly youthful and enthusiastic audience in whose company I saw "Z" really took in the lesson it had to teach, the paramilitarism of the police might well be on the way out...
...I dissent strongly from the canon of "professionalization" which insists that entry into the police should require higher formal education than it now does...
...The centrifugal pressure of things-as-they-are may suffice to curb the movement toward a national police force that most of us would deplore as a major threat to civil liberties...
...d) decentralization and community control, particularly within urban areas, of the "cop-on-the-beat" aspects of police work...
...Thus, the police can move outside the police structure, and so gradually the distinction between the police and the rest of us may be lessened...
...The first question I find a good deal easier to deal with than the second...
...Single-minded patriotism plus power plus fear plus indifference about methods equals something that could approach fascism...
...only through presidential leadership can we divert the necessary funding into improving the police...
...their avenues of advancement through additional schooling also require development...
...there are plenty of possible pegs, including the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishments," the NinthAmendment's developing role as the safeguard of"privacy," the religion clauses of the First Amendment, etc...
...Police discipline, as the police become less paramilitary, will have to include at least a minimum of "outside" participation...
...To Our Contributors In sending manuscripts, letters, and other material, please do not use special delivery unless requested...
...WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT THE POLICE...
...Middle America, if I understand that term, rests largely on the entrenched force of lower 7 By "irrational" I mean the absence of a reasonable means/end relationship, what the Supreme Court used to call the absence of Substantive Due Process...
...Ghetto inhabitants are like the rest of the population in their wish that law enforcement concentrate on protecting lives and property, for they are the principal victims of such crimes as murder, aggravated assault, robbery, and burglary...
...We don't need a younger J. Edgar...
...Correspondingly, avenues need to be opened outside the police system for further training and retooling...
...If most of the "cops on the beat" in the ghettos were black ignoramuses and bullies, that would not be as bad as having white ignoramuses and bullies patrolling the ghettos...
...see Time, July 13, 1970, pp...
...42-43...
...Let us assume for a moment what may be unlikely: that the police could be brought into an ideal relationship with the community...
...more money for de 'San Francisco Chronicle, July 16, 1970, p. 4 veloping specialized services...
...2) the fact that discipline is maintained solely from within...
...b) elimination of the paramilitary character of the police force...
...WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT THE POLICE...
...Assuming that the institutional structure of the police remains committed to specialization, professionalization, and centralization, as I believe it must, what modifications are possible...
...While these crimes do not have any immediate victim, we are all their victims...
...It isn't just their self-image but their image in the community at large that represents a danger to democratic institutions...
...See also Morris and Hawkins, The Honest Politician's Guide to Crime Control, Chapter 1and Chapter 8 (1970...
...Of course, "middle-class values" are themselves undergoing a process of change, and the injection via the police of large numbers of blacks into the middle class would hasten that change...
...1° This same congressional reluctance e Richard Nixon, at least, dismissed that other great symbol of the past, General Hershey...
...As a part of the community that enjoys a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, the police must not be allowed to develop a "fascist streak" that enables them to exploit the notion of a "war on crime...
...Count it, if 8 For example, the Public interest group...
...They obviously can't be limited in their careers to patrolling their own neighborhoods...
...HERBERT L. PACKER you will, as one of John F. Kennedy's prime mistakes (along with Vietnam, the space program, the SST, and the ABM) that he missed the tremendous opportunity offered him in 1961 to take the one symbolic step that could have changed forever the image of the American polices Professionalization and centralization, unlike decriminalization and elimination of the paramilitary character of the police, are with minor exceptions completely in our present mainstream...
...The Ford Foundation has announced the creation of a grant-making agency to promote police reform (New York Times, July 22, 1970, p. 1...
...I am not interested on what peg the Courthangs the doctrine...
...can impede progress...
...The response of the Chief of Police to this suggestion was rather cool, 4 See the story of the New York Police Department's effort to encourage recruitment of collegegraduates, New York Times, February 13, 1970, p. 1; see also the accompanying "Man in theNews" piece on David Burton Durk, id., p. 42...
...The principal "paramilitary" aspects of the police include: (1) their closed-endedness, which inhibits contacts with the rest of the community...
...Chinese in San Francisco are protesting the height requirement of the local police, which tends to keep Chinese off the police force...
...If such sanctions as compensation for "innocent" victims of these devices could be developed, there would be much to say for modifying our present exclusionary rules in the investigation of certain narrowly stated crimes, since exclusion of evidence is the only sanction for police illegality presently available...
...It would, at the same time, be a great help in training these ghetto recruits if we could step up the recruitment of middle-class, collegeeducated policemen...
...I find this kind of alliance less implausible than I do the "integration" of lower-middle-class white ethnic police with young ghetto people...
...Nonetheless, we do need centralization and institutionalization of the elite aspects of police work...
...A minimal sharing of middle-class values will 6 See Note 4, supra...
...If we can recruit enough "elite" men from the colleges, as we now seem to be trying to do in some cities,6 and if decriminalization and reduction of the paramilitary aspects of police work succeed, we should be on our way to easing the present tension, which results in large part from the lower-middle-class "white ethnic" orientation of the police...
...Now it may be that the paramilitary character of the police will turn out to be the most vulnerable point in the armor of the white ethnics...
...Our present fragmented structure of local government impedes police efforts to control crime...
...Respect for the value of human life and of property—these are the essential middle-class values that the police must share...
...Some, I assume, will display an aptitude for police specialization that will enable them to qualify for professionalization...
...That is, if our allies don't knock us off in the process...
...But even if large numbers of black police were to remain uneducated, why would the situation be any worse than it is now...
...Money is the key to solving police personnel problems, whether they be centralization ("elite" specialists) or decentralization (recruitment and training for "the cop on the beat") . We can't rely on the present leadership of the police to change their nature or even their image...
...Until administrative arrangements are worked out either to give money directly to the cities or to impose federal requirements on' how the money is to be spent, we will continue to experience misallocations of existing resources that we spend on the police...
...Professionalization is necessary for those aspects of police work that require specialization...
...10 The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which allocates federal funds, has been attacked by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark for its policy of making block grants to the states...
...The Time article contains the first plugthat I have ever seen in the mass media for decriminalization...
...For example, police recruitment and train ing ought to be greatly diversified...
...The "racist" provisions of the recently passed D.C...
Vol. 18 • April 1971 • No. 2
