Paying for Protection

...Only about one-third of all police radio calls involve criminal matters that may, under the law, result in an arrest...

...In addition, "enforcing the law" is not the same thing as "enforcing order," and the two functions may at times contradict each other...

...On this last point, it should be noted that urban concentration works to magnify the actual increase in crime...

...I am reluctant to believe this, but hard put to think of any other explanation...

...Maybe potential reviewers were intimidated by the fact that the book has a few statistical tables and was published by a university press...

...A cop who settles a loud, acrimonious, drunken, and perhaps mildly violent family quarrel by arresting husband and wife is enforcing the law, but no one will thank him for being so legalistic...

...To begin with, we define this assignment broadly, to meet our convenience...

...As Wilson writes: "To the patrolman, the law is one resource among many that he may use to deal with disorder, but it is not the only one or even the most important...

...If that proves not to be feasible, we shall have to do something about recruiting men of a far higher caliber into police work...

...As Wilson emphasizes, the police organization is one of those rare institutions in which, as you go down the hierarchy, the number and range of discretionary decisions increase...

...None of our social scientists, two or three decades ago, ever thought to mention it as a possible major problem for the future...

...The fault is entirely our own for creating what the sociologists call a role-conflict...

...True, crime statistics are often inflated, either intentionally or not...

...in Manhattan it could mean two muggings a year on one block of high-rise apartment houses, where everyone promptly knows about it, talks about it, gets excited about it...

...Wilson's study focuses on the patrolman—the "cop" on foot or (more likely) in a squad car—and how he goes about trying to enforce law and order...

...And by "doing something" I mean paying money, not merely issuing pious exhortations, since in our world money creates moral authority...

...beyond that, the law is a constraint that tells him what he must not do but that is peculiarly unhelpful in telling him what he should do...

...Against this background, I thought James Q. Wilson's Varieties of Police Behavior: The Management of Law and Order in Eight Communities would evoke prompt and widespread attention...

...Reviewed by IRVING KRISTOL Senior editor, Basic Books History is full of surprises, most of them unpleasant...

...We ask the police to cope with organized mobs, disorganized rioting, and civil rebellion—and we are furious when (as in Chicago) they do not acquit themselves particularly well...

...Anyone who wants to have an informed opinion about the policeman's relation to law and order ought to read it...

...It is merely a matter of historical accident that they have fallen upon the shoulders of the police...

...But it is also true, even after we have discounted this inflation, that freedom from felonious assault is an ever scarcer and more expensive human right, and freedom from the fear of such action so scarce as to be non-existent...

...that's in a day's work...

...a cop, most of the time, is inventing them...

...It seems clear to me, for instance, that the very notion of "the policeman" is hopelessly ambiguous, given the multiple functions attached to the job, and we should seriously contemplate establishing a variety of law-and-order officials to correspond with the varieties of police situations...

...The rest involve emergency services that could as well (or better) be supplied by some other organization—possibly even a private enterprise...

...They are also apprehensive because they can never be certain that they are "handling the situation" in what will turn out to the "right" way...

...All in all, this is a highly vexing state of affairs, and it is understandable that the issue of "law and order" should agitate us, sometimes extremely...

...Consequently, the patrolman's work is in the nature of services to the citizenry—recovering stolen property, reporting traffic accidents, providing emergency medical aid, getting cats out of trees, and so on...

...Such "handling" is risky, of course...

...The British "bobby" was for long a respected and important member of the community, not because the British are so passionately law-abiding (that is a myth), but because his salary was approximately 50 per cent higher than a skilled worker's...

...My only cavil is that Wilson, perhaps in deference to the academic pieties of "political science," is wary of speculating about possible reforms and innovations...

...He does worry about being shot by an enraged citizen?and that happens all the time...

...That it is so, however, is beyond dispute...

...One of the least pleasant in our own lifetime has been the extent to which we all have to take daily evasive action against criminal assault...

...Thus, he approaches incidents that threaten order not in terms of enforcing the law but in terms of 'handling the situation.'" (Italics in original...

...Nevertheless, as I write this, almost three months after the book's publication, I have yet to see a single review of it—not in Time, not in Newsweek, not in the New York Times, anywhere...

...On the contrary, we confidently expected that full employment and an increasing national income would make crime a marginal social disturbance...

...If the police were good at this sort of thing, they would make fine soldiers but poor patrolmen...

...An adequate education is also much scarcer and more expensive than it used to be—though, here again, we don't know precisely why...

...Policemen are an apprehensive lot, not so much because of the physical dangers they encounter?on a purely statistical basis, mining and construction work are more dangerous—as because of the random, unexpected way an ordinary street incident can explode into a matter of life or death...

...But this sociological remnant has turned into a major growth industry...

...A cop doesn't worry about being shot at by a criminal he is pursuing...

...In today's terms and in this country, that would mean an average policeman's salary of about $15,000...

...Though the police are everywhere organized along military lines, the structure of command is wildly at odds with the military model...

...And it becomes clear in the course of the book that we have given this man an impossible assignment, which he can never fulfill to our satisfaction...

...A soldier, most of the time, is following orders...

...It was assumed to be, in Marxist jargon, a "remnant of the past...

...The two jobs should not be committed to one person, and probably not to the same organization...

...without a doubt, the finest book on the American police ever written, and Professor Wilson is one of our best-known scholars of urban affairs...

...This does not prevent us from expecting soldierly conduct from policemen in quasi-military situations...

...That is a lot of money and would require a substantial increase in taxes—which leads me back to my very first point: However you look at it, and however you go about acquiring it, law and order and personal safety become increasingly expensive as we make more and more progress to whatever it is we are progressing to...

...This is not exactly what we had in mind when we set out to build "the affluent society," "the welfare state," etc., etc...

...It is...

...If one person in a thousand is mugged annually, that barely causes a ripple in a rural or thinly settled suburban area...

...We really don't know why this is so, though each of us speculates after his fashion...

...Personal safety is not unique in being less prevalent today...

...Lack of space prohibits a detailed summary or discussion of this rich book, full to the brim with increasing details and shrewd insight...