A Cop's-Eye View

...The 'professional' policeman of tomorrow with his college degree will be the same kind of man" as today's allegedly insensitive cop...

...Our confusion over law enforcement can only be alleviated by understanding that police problems are part of a larger social malaise...

...In sum, says Rubinstein, "he is honorably following the knowledge of his trade, which is rooted in the realities of city life...

...The basic lesson of this impressive study is that society and its law-enforcement officers are in the same boat...

...Rubinstein observes that "even when confronted with evidence of interesting actions going on above eye level, [an officer] is not encouraged to develop the habit of looking up...

...Rubinstein also discloses that any information a patrolman does obtain is not passed on, since the police are not a "team...

...But what makes City Police especially interesting is its analysis of the policeman's Weltanschauung, his view of the world as he patrols the city streets...

...Although this may be true, it does seem to the casual observer that many patrolmen are lackadaisical, intent on avoiding trouble, and "resting" when they are not "cooping" (sleeping on the job...

...The typical cop keeps everyone on the street under surveillance at all times, seeking to discover certain tell-tale signs of criminal activity...

...Still, Rubinstein does provide fascinating examples of "environmental perception," and he raises as well important questions concerning both the demands society makes on police officers and the effect of those demands on police work...

...The patrolman "is mystified by the failure of any measure to curb crime in the streets," and so is the public...

...Indeed, they now rival Women's Liberation as the most fashionable "pop" topic of the '70s-with arguments about the nature of law enforcement, the role of the police in our cities and the extent of corruption producing almost as much heat as disputes over sexism in America and who will wash the dishes...

...In a casual but chilling aside, Rubinstein notes that "if [police] legitimacy is increasingly questioned, they will use force simply to preserve themselves...

...Studying the police has an undoubted entertainment value...

...Our primary concern, however, must be not with the easy target of the "thin blue line," but with the social and political arrangements that it serves...

...On the other hand, "the patrolman uses his knowledge of the area he works to arouse or calm his suspicions of what he sees...

...The protection of vice activities, for instance, derives from elected officials giving their law-enforcement agencies the impossible task of rooting out immorality...

...Must we tolerate official misconduct in the name of some greater good...

...Operating on the basis of these established-albeit subtle-clues, the policeman emphatically "rejects the notion that he stops people without reason...

...Other scholars, like William Westley and James Q. Wilson, have studied police-community relations and the various "styles" of police conduct...

...If this occurs, our police organizations will have become something very different...

...He asserts that while much less brutality occurs than is commonly supposed, there is widespread corruption resulting from the public's bizarre and unrealistic expectations...

...Reviewed by Isidore Silver Professor of Law, John Jay College The current concern about "law and order" has resulted in the police becoming a subject of intense public debate...

...the electorate voted those reformers out of office at the first opportunity...

...Rubinstein, a Harvard PhD who served for one year on the Philadelphia force, attempts to describe the actual job of the cop...

...He is suspicious "of any car he cannot see into easily," and he watches people whose shirttails are out because this is a "ruse commonly used to conceal a weapon...

...The policeman who "understands how little power he really has" reflects our general feeling of ineffectuality...

...In the past, "when reform governments made a lot of arrests and pressed hard for convictions...

...contemporary arguments about "effectiveness" are merely rehashes of centuries-old controversies...

...Anything 'out of place' interests him greatly...

...The relationships among colleagues in a squad are anything but harmonious and trusting," and only rarely does a department make any effort "to get the men who know more than anybody about what is going on in the streets to share their knowledge with each other...

...Of course, a fundamental problem-observed by virtually all social scientists-Is that we don't really want to clean up our police forces...

...Can we afford to investigate police corruption vigorously when we are told that attempts at reform will inevitably affect morale...

...Thus, we learn that a policeman's role and his experiences strictly limit what data he is willing to receive and act on general information has little value to him since he cannot do anything with it...

...Should we "professionalize" the work of the cop on the beat, and spend vast sums of money to increase the "thin blue line...

...Jonathan Rubinstein's excellent book provides no answers to such questions, for what it demonstrates is that none are possible: Police performance has historically been ambiguous and often fruitless...

...It is for this reason, argues Rubinstein, that ambitious "professionalization" schemes won't work...

...Despite an abundance of technological innovations ?two-way radios, patrol cars, walkie-talkies?the police are "what they have always been, solitary workers patrolling their territory...

...Adapting the techniques and insights of Erving Goffman, the foremost sociologist of human interaction, Rubinstein explains how an officer perceives his environment, what he chooses to see and react to, and how he sorts out his sensory information...

...One cannot help wondering if our law-enforcement officers are as vigilant as City Police would have us believe, or whether the author has simply succumbed to the sociologist's tendency to discover "laws" of behavior that have no empirical truth...