Thinking for Ourselves Questions We Can Start With
Graham, Donald
TWO POLICEMEN TALK: Thinking for Ourselves: The Questions We Can Start With by Don Graham We know so little about the police in our big cities that any factual help we can get is welcome....
...the patrolman wasn’t going to be on the corner the next day anyway...
...A corner bookmaker would have had to be crazy to offer a patrolman a bribe under these circumstances...
...A police officer is not a soldier...
...As one lieutenant said, ‘You can be a good guy, be a great bull-shitter, keep your car clean, make a lot of arrests, but without vice you’ll never get an outstanding [evaluation rating] from me.’ ” There is no quota for vice arrests, but the Philadelphia platoon is expected to increase the number of its arrests each year...
...There may not be any general answer that will apply to all cities at all times, although Rubinstein says in his preface, “I draw inferences and offer judgments about work and behavior which extend far beyond the city limits of Philadelphia...
...Nor is there in Washington...
...City Police does not answer the question of whether a city ought to prefer being patrolled by more “corruptible” policemen, or more “inefficient” ones...
...Rubinstein was a Harvard history Ph.D...
...There are a few things he has to say about Philadelphia’s police that strike me as good observations...
...He does not put much emphasis on race in describing relations among policemen, or between policemen and citizens...
...But by indicating some of the choices all departments must make, Rubinstein gives the reader a far sharper idea of where to begin inquiry about his own city’s police...
...But the people on his beat will know him as well, and those who care to test him, to see if a few dollars will let him permit some illegal activity, will probably do so...
...Basic training instills in the private an instinctive obedience to orders and an unwillingness to act on his own initiative...
...At a time when black patrolmen were calling press conferences to denounce their sergeants and lieutenants for discriminating in scout car assignments, no one doubted that some black officers would happily blow the whistle on whites who were openly corrupt...
...There are some important things wrong with Rubinstein’s book...
...The book jacket less modestly proclaims, “Everything he describes applies to any big city in America...
...He frequently fails to specify whether he himself is involved in an incident he describes, even though the behavior of both policemen and citizens must have been affected by the presence of a my s t er io us p 1 ai n - clo thes-wearing stranger...
...And, of course, there is a lot of bribery, since gambling and liquor operators in Philadelphia see the patrolman on the beat as a threat to them and try to buy him off...
...Philadelphia’s police must make a written report on every call...
...He has virtually no choice, Rubinstein says: The honest patrolmen who is determined to advance in his platoon cannot long resist involvement in these practices...
...He carried a gun, worked a regular shift, walked beats, and was a policeman in everything but badge, pay, and power of arrest...
...Finally, when I first arrived at the precinct, no “scandal sheet” report of arrests and tickets was kept...
...Policemen...
...There was only one footman in the platoon who walked a regular beat...
...Activity” means the whole of an officer’s work, but how do you quantify what a policeman does...
...t“ ‘I’ve worked this sector so long that my wife wakes me up by calling my car number...
...As the size of detective units like the homicide and robbery squads increased, veteran policemen fled to them...
...Some physiologist or psychologist should study how it is possible for a policeman to drive down a street oblivious to what the radio is saying and then hear everything that is said when his scout car gets a call...
...Another factor impeding corruption, I thought at the time, was the large number of black policemen and the tension between them and their white counterparts...
...A policeman who walks a beat every day will know the people on it better than a man who is there only one day out of five...
...Perhaps more than anything else they learn from City Police, city officials and citizen activists should learn to ask their police chiefs just how the city evaluates its patrolmen...
...So a rookie coming from the academy did not find himself the partner of a 20-year man...
...Although Jonathan Rubinstein’s City Police* has serious defects, it is by far the best nonfiction book ever written on the subject...
...Nevertheless, most departments seem to keep some such record...
...who decided to become a police reporter for the Philadelphia BuZZetin...
...This practice goes back to the days when nearly all policemen walked a beat and the sergeant’s main concern was seeing that his men were walking where they were supposed to be...
...That means gambling, liquor, and narcotics arrests, mostly the first two, because narcotics arrests are almost, impossible for a uniformed policeman to make...
...That’s right-and the desire must be stronger in Philadelphia, where policemen must change their working hours every week, than it was in Washington, where we changed every other week...
...Everyone else changed beats almost every day...
...In Washington, for example, the D. C. police faithfully record each month how many burned-out streetlights each officer has found and how many, “defects in public space”-mostly potholeshe has recorded in a book kept in the station...
...He does not put much emphasis on how and how much policemen are paid, although next to the activity report, incentive pay offers the department its most direct means of control over policemen...
...City Police...
...The worth of a man to his platoon does not depend on his success in preventing crimes, arresting suspected felons, or even giving service without complaint or injury...
...Later, one was published, but no emphasis was placed on an officer’s performance...
...They offer him the only substantial chance to make the arrests that bring him the credit he seeks . . . . If he has nothing to trade, if he is a “straight cop” he will not make deals or extort information, the only alternative he has is to beat information from people...
...If you say he made one felony arrest in the last month, you do not know whether he marked up an armed robber after weeks of patient investigation or made a bad aggravated assault arrest that was thrown out of court the next morning...
...If his superiors don’t like his work, what can they do...
...Washington’s police department in 1969-70 was dominated by rookies...
...tour and wake up when their scout car number is called on the radio...
...But for all its defects there is no discounting the importance of this book...
...Some policemen even claim to be able to sleep in the car on the midnight to eight a.m...
...Because of hundreds of such good observations of petty things and important ones, the reader can finish City Police feeling that he knows what life is like for the cop on the street...
...Yet the idea that the police have judo or karate training persists almost everywhere and probably saves policemen quite a few fights...
...What does a Philadelphia policeman do in his eight hours of work, and why...
...No one knows or cares what happens to these cases in court...
...And wonder of wonders, the police not only agreed, they let Rubinstein ‘do exactly what he wanted for the next year...
...The department Rubinstein describes was run by older men...
...Writers keep referring to the police as a quasi-military organization, yet the differences between the soldier and the policeman are nearly total...
...it does not give us all the answers, it at least defines the questions we should be asking...
...There are, of course, limits to how far Rubinstein’s observations of the Philadelphia police-or, for that matter, my own experience as a District of Columbia policeman-can be expanded into generalizations...
...But they also make the policemen less efficient in making arrests and preventing crime...
...He rode, or walked, with someone almost as new as himself...
...Now, all of these factors-the prevalence of rookies, racial tension, lack of pressure from higher-ups, and above all the steady rotation of beats -help lower the level of corruption...
...He will know the local teenagers and the local burglars and hold-up men, too...
...It puts every American big-city resident in a position to ask the right questions, and that is a position we have never been in before...
...A man may be offered a transfer to a choice unit if he makes a spectacular arrest, but catching bank robbers is not the way to develop a sergeant’s friendship...
...If the people of Philadelphia knew what their policemen do with their time, would they tolerate the thousands of man-hours that must be spent annually in writing and processing the reports on false calls...
...They must make vice arrests, he writes...
...On the midnight to eight a.m...
...One car would not cross into another’s territory-certainly would take no police action thereunless the sector car was on a call...
...It was also a department in which a man’s beat or sector was treated as his private property...
...If Donald Graham is a former District of Columbia policeman...
...They are made because the sergeant wants them and, presumably, because the commissioners want an increasing number of vice arrests to show that their department is clean from corruption and to reduce their men’s incentive to take graft...
...The size of the force had been almost doubled as successive Presidents decided to “do something’’ about crime in the capital...
...In Washington, the report is called the “scandal sheet...
...shift, “it is not easy even for the conscientious to remain alert throughout the night...
...As Rubinstein correctly points out, these arrests are not made because they are easy, and not because citizens want them made...
...The question is particularly important because Rubinstein found the Philadelphia police employing a lot of pretty seamy tactics...
...Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $10...
...I asked a patrolman friend who had just received the highest possible rating for promotion to sergeant how many gambling or liquor cases he had made in three and a half years as a patrolman...
...The danger to the bookmaker came from the vice squad detectives...
...But the book provides so much provocative information that it is an extraordinarily useful starting point for understanding police work in other cities...
...But is his knowledge applicable only to the streets of Philadelphia, or do his hometown police behave the same way...
...He couldn’t remember any...
...Amazingly, most big city departments keep a third of their patrolmen on the street in the early morning hours when crime and traffic are at their lowest...
...If he does a good job, how will he be rewarded...
...I don’t remember ever arresting anyone for liquor or gambling violations...
...TWO POLICEMEN TALK: Thinking for Ourselves: The Questions We Can Start With by Don Graham We know so little about the police in our big cities that any factual help we can get is welcome...
...After a few months on the paper, he worked up the audacity to ask Frank Rizzo’s department to let him see it from the inside...
...Orders will never come in time...
...impatient in leaping to conclusions not justified by his evidence...
...During these months Rubinstein came to realize, as any policeman does, that the least understood thing about police work is the nature of the job itself...
...see their work as a series of moments of action which cannot be understood unless directly experienced,” he writes...
...That requires something very different...
...In Philadelphia, it’s called “activity,” and the report it goes on is the “activity report...
...Jonathan Rubinstein...
...Such cases are hard to make legally, so the policeman perjures himself...
...In Washington no one counts how many vice arrests patrolmen make, and as a consequence, they make almost none...
...He went through the police academy, he rode with officers in several parts of the city...
...Numbers, not quality, are what’s important...
...There is no special judo training or suggestion that a policeman should develop sophisticated combat skills...
...What priorities does the department give to the various jobs it assigns him...
...This may have been true of Philadelphia, but it does not resemble police work as it was practiced in one precinct in Washington three years ago...
...I can’t summarize City Police, because it is a description of police work that the author observed in over two years in Philadelphia...
...And he is sometimes too...
...What a department asks for on the activity report in large part determines what it gets, and what the Philadelphia police want is “vice activity...
...As rookies came to a precinct, they were broken in by the veterans, taught to police the old way...
...The police academy teaches its rookies to use their own judgment...
...Patrolmen who refuse to sleep often speak contemptuously of their colleagues who do, but every policeman understands the desire to do it...
...It started as a joke, you know, but it worked, and she does it all the time now...
...But people refuse to see him in any other way...
Vol. 5 • December 1973 • No. 10
