Changing the Police
COUPER, DAVID C.
Changing the Police DAVID C COUPER The American police are an enigma. Citizens see them as a collage of stereotypes from mystery novels, television movies, and our own superegos. If you are...
...We are in the midst of prolonged hearings concerning charges of "poor morale" in the department, allegedly stemming from new policies I initiated, plus attacks on my personal character...
...Jonathan Rubinstein is a newsman who spent more than a year working with the police, experiencing the role of an urban police officer in Philadelphia...
...serpico, by Peter Maas...
...Maas does not really say that Serpico was set up or shot by his fellow police officers—he just suggests it Those of us in the police service empathize with the feelings Serpico had after testifying against his fellow—but corrupt—police officers...
...I can certainly identify with Ahern when he was being considered for the position of Public Safety Director in Cleveland...
...He wants to combat street crime, strike hard at organized crime, rid his city of narcotics, and attack white-collar crime on a broad basis...
...Stein and Day...
...The police service needs to be put in proper perspective...
...Maas's book should be widely read...
...The Super Cops, by L. H. Wittemore, is the stoiy of New York cops Dave Greenberg and Bob Hantz and their sensational exploits against drug traffickers...
...7.95...
...The police chief under fire for implementing change, instead of for graft, corruption, or a spiraling crime rate, is a relatively new phenomenon...
...Recently little has been done to improve the American police...
...This reviewer comes to these five books from a background of police work aimed at improving and professionalizing the modern police force...
...359 pp...
...This is what Hollywood exploits to market the police product to the widest possible audience...
...My first year or so in Madison has been active and rewarding and, I believe, is tending toward a high standard of professional and democratic policing...
...Maas tells the Serpico story against a frightening background of widespread .corruption in the New York Police Department—corruption that former Commissioner Patrick Murphy paid particular attention to during his administration but with questionable success...
...Those who don't take risks make it, those who do, don't...
...455 pp...
...This is a classic case of the kind of harassment traditionalists can generate in an effort to prevent organizational change, even change welcomed by the community...
...One day we shall all benefit from a responsive and responsible police service that can serve people in many social ways beyond the traditional assignment of fighting crime...
...other proceedings are still pending.—The Editors ) Other police administrators have met similar internal resistance to change...
...It is not sensational work...
...city police, by Jonathan Rubinstein...
...7.95...
...Those that make it remember those who did not, and why...
...The Viking Press...
...The community is currently going through an ordeal that may provide a major case study in social change within a police organization...
...Unfortunately, the sensational nature of the exploits of Serpico, Greenberg, and Hantz often detracts from the real role of the police service...
...Thomas Y. Crowell...
...234 pp...
...Instead, it is often boring, sometimes unrewarding, and often frustrating to a committed police officer...
...Corruption, inefficiency, and ignorance have plagued American police forces since their inception...
...Such former chiefs of police and commissioners include: Patrick Murphy, once head of the New York Police Department and now with the Police Foundation in Washington, D.C...
...Some make it, and some do not...
...The book is mainly descriptive, with little analysis...
...He let me know in no uncertain terms that he was a man to be reckoned with and was instrumental in my appointment...
...the super cops, by L. H. White-more...
...they fell not in gun battles but on the firing line of implementing change...
...Who have been the "casualties" of police change in this country...
...Petersburg, Florida, public safety department...
...I would not categorize my opponents as young versus old or college-educated versus high school-educated...
...Former Police Chief James Ahern of New Haven, Connecticut (Police in Trouble: Our Frightening Crisis in Law Enforcement) knows the pain, frustration, and occasional futility of attempting to change the American police...
...Instead, confrontation, in my judgment, is between those who are more flexible, have perspective, and are humanistic and those who lack these qualities...
...If you are puzzled about the police—viewed in conflicting contexts ranging from brutality, graft, and murder to selfless service, heroism, and courage—pity today's police officer who sees and feels society redefining and changing his role and harboring rising expectations regarding how he performs that new role...
...Charles Gaine, Oakland Police Department, now with the St...
...Farrar, Straus and Giroux...
...vice squad, by Robert H. Williams...
...As chief in a small community with young, liberal political leadership I found we could discuss such changes as blazers instead of military style uniforms, a bachelor's degree requirement, aggressive community relations, and career development for police officers...
...There are, of course, other kinds of organizational and personal corruption in addition to money payoffs from "protected" gambling, prostitution, and drug-dealing operations...
...The innovators, the prophets, the new breeders of organizational evolution...
...City Police is a provocative and experimental sociological work in laymen's language...
...Hawthorn Books...
...Corruption can be found in brutality (excessive force), denial of constitutional rights, or political and criminal influence peddling within a police organization...
...But my leadership and administration have been challenged by an internal band of discontented police officers who professionally, and ideologically, do not accept our current orientation of peacekeeping, community relations, policy development, and affirmative action...
...However, the real nature of police work is portrayed by City Police and Police in Trouble...
...The process is selective, a reverse social Darwinism: a process of assuring mediocrity and organizational "satisfaction...
...They are against the system because they believe it is inefficient, ineffective, and laden with lazy or incompetent police officers...
...Little enough...
...Robert Igle-burger, Dayton (Ohio) Police Department, now serving as visiting police administrator at the University of Wisconsin Law School...
...Like Frank Serpico, these two cops are against the police bureaucracy...
...In almost no department in the country does advancement depend on respect for the law," he writes...
...250 pp...
...The president of the police association in Madison made one of the first contacts with me immediately after the announcement of my appointment as chief...
...Those who are sensitive to others, humanistic, dynamic, and perhaps controversial, just don't make it...
...A recent report of the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals found it still had to propose much of what had been recommended six years earlier...
...As an activist leader of the "college cops" on the Minneapolis force pressing for change, I experienced the enormous resistance of the conservative officers who oppose altering traditional police practices...
...The public must support their "future cops" and what they stand for...
...In Vice Squad, newsman Williams describes corruption in some large cities, including New York, Chicago, and Miami, and he details an incredible number of contemporary case histories of police corruption...
...Those of us who consider ourselves "cops of the future" feel many pressures to conform, to go along with the ways the police have always done things...
...Later, as detectives, they developed an impressive repertoire of crook-catching tricks against New York drug dealers...
...The wayside is littered with the bodies of fallen police chiefs...
...But what has been done to improve the cop on the beat or, for that matter, the cop who supervises the cop on the beat...
...I regard this as a proper background for a symbolic "birth" of a genuinely professional police service based on a "service model" and a humanistic approach to community problems...
...Ahern underwent tremendous pressure, as I did, in reforming the existing promotional system and trying to select managers and not technicians for supervisory positions...
...But we do not...
...But it truly portrays the problems of urban policing in our country: the "nitty-gritty" problems of the use of force, searching and seizing, graft, and the personal "code" of police behavior...
...Promotions cause the biggest problems in any organization, especially the police...
...Police leaders are needed: adpolice in trouble: our frightening crisis in law enforcement, by James F. Ahern...
...Most police chiefs are products of the existing law enforcement system, a system that has not been one of honor...
...It is not difficult to be a police chief if a person views administration and police management in terms of a custodianship...
...My problem, like Ahern's, began when political influence peddling was resisted...
...He writes: "A conscientious, ambitious, honest, and intelligent police chief wants to fight back at crime...
...6.95...
...Most police chiefs today are organizational watchmen who ceremoniously "keep" their organizations...
...Surely police administrators do not lack the body of knowledge needed for reasonable experimentation and implementation...
...Conservatives make it, liberals don't...
...In Serpico, he tells the story of Frank Serpico, the New York cop who blew the whistle on police corruption to the New York Knapp Commission which was investigating it...
...The tenacity required of police officers to stand up for what is right and honest is one of the more pressing issues in the police service today...
...Ahern notes that "respect for the law" is one basic and important tenet that has virtually been overlooked by the police...
...The pinnacle of every cop's career is being a chief of police...
...If someone would like to "get acquainted" with the police in earthy terms, then I strongly recommend City Police along with Ahern's Police in Trouble...
...Home of the University of Wisconsin, Madison has a history of violent clashes between law officers and student demonstrators...
...Those of us in a police bureaucracy can appreciate the frustration of trying to "get the job done" through the grossly inefficient system of police, prosecutors, and courts...
...It is also an urgent and timely issue at all government levels...
...James Ahern, New Haven Police Department, now a consultant with the insurance industry, and Frank Dyson, Dallas, Texas, now in real estate...
...In 1967, the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice recommended sweeping changes for the American police: college degrees for entrance and promotion, paraprofes-sional community service officers to aid police officers, improved in-service and pre-service training, police policy development, better community relations, and so forth...
...The pervasiveness of the problems at all levels of the New York Police Department prevented and will continue to prevent immediate solution...
...Policemen are better equipped with hardware, from personal equipment and squad cars to computers and radio systems...
...It is not what television portrays on its many "cop" shows...
...ministrators who will put themselves and their careers on the cutting edge of change after having struggled to get to the top...
...7.95...
...Ahern makes numerous recommendations for "rebuilding" our police departments, and puts together a concise description of our nation's police problem and things we can do as police officers and citizens to revitalize the police service...
...The literature goes on and on...
...The greatest threat to law enforcement in the country is "illegitimate political interference, often intimately connected with corrupt and criminal interference...
...314 pp...
...After testifying to the Commission, Serpico was shot in the face by a drug dealer...
...His attitude is likely to be tacit acceptance of his position...
...On his first day at the job, however, he is likely to find that he can't get a letter typed, an order given, or a request made . . . Almost without exception, a new chief of police is a product of the department he will head, and his twenty years or so in it are likely to have made him cynical...
...Vice Squad by Robert H. Williams and Serpico by Peter Maas deal primarily with police corruption—specifically, corruption dealing with payoffs from vice and narcotics operations...
...Before Ahern even met Mayor Carl Stokes, he was approached by a subordinate member of the police department and told he would have to deal with him first...
...The decade or so that preceded this post included several years of patrol in Minneapolis and one of its suburbs, a master's degree in sociology, and a tour of duty as police chief in a small Minnesota community...
...I do not have the heart to draw your attention to the Wickersham Report on police improvement issued in 1931...
...In late May, after an investigative trial that lasted nine months, Police Chief Couper was exonerated by a special panel of three judges...
...Peter Maas, who wrote The Valachi Papers, is no novice about police corruption...
...They do this because it is safe, is relatively easy, and insures job security...
...At present I am chief of police in Madison, Wisconsin, a medium size midwestern city that is on the "cutting edge" of change...
...But really pity the police chief who attempts to translate these social expectations and demands into working programs of police change...
Vol. 38 • July 1974 • No. 7
