Police

Streetcorner Politicians

William K. Muir

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Année: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780226218663
• Sujet: Politics & International Relations
• Sous-sujet: Politics

"This book... examines the problem of police corruption... in such a way that the stereotype of the crude, greedy cop who is basically a grown-up delinquent, if not an out-and-out robber, yields to portraits of particular men, often of earnest good will and even more than ordinary compassion, contending with an enormously demanding and challenging job."—Robert Coles, New Yorker "Other social scientists have observed policemen on patrol, or have interviewed them systematically. Professor Muir has brought the two together, and, because of the philosophical depth he brings to his commentaries, he has lifted the sociology of the police on to a new level. He has both observed the men and talked with them at length about their personal lives, their conceptions of society and of the place of criminals within it. His ambition is to define the good policeman and to explain his development, but his achievement is to illuminate the philosophical and occupational maturation of patrol officers in 'Laconia' (a pseudonym).... His discussions of [the policemen's] moral development are threaded through with analytically suggestive formulations that bespeak a wisdom very rarely encountered in reports of sociological research."—Michael Banton, Times Literary Supplement

1

The Problem of Coercive Power

Policemen are the subjects of this case study, but I beg the reader to view them as exemplars of a much larger group of individuals. Policemen are instances of powerful persons. In observing the behavior and development of policemen, the reader witnesses at a more abstract level the effects of coercive power on the human personality. He can learn much from the police experience to enhance his understanding of political figures, with their unique agonies and special dilemmas. This book is about the problem of coercive power, and Part I, after introducing the reader to the police world and four policemen who inhabit it, describes what that problem is.

1

“What Is a Good Policeman?”

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

Lord Acton
1887

The office makes the man.

Anonymous
Political folklore

I

What is a good policeman, and what does he think and do differently from a bad one? Does police work corrupt, or does it expand a policeman’s horizons and magnify his soul? Can anything be done to avert the potential for his moral breakdown?

This book speaks to these questions. It describes the moral and intellectual perspectives of twenty-eight young men who served as police officers in a sizable American city in the early 1970s. The point of the book is to explain the interplay between a policeman’s most fundamental attitudes and the violence he recurrently faces in fulfilling his powerful office.

In a nutshell, the conclusions are these. A policeman becomes a good policeman to the extent that he develops two virtues.¹ Intellectually, he has to grasp the nature of human suffering. Morally, he has to resolve the contradiction of achieving just ends with coercive means. A patrolman who develops this tragic sense and moral equanimity tends to grow in the job, increasing in confidence, skill, sensitivity, and awareness.

Whether or not he develops these two virtues depends on the choices he makes among alternative means of defending himself against recurrent threats. Those self-defensive reactions to violence and madness influence the very core of his being. The responses he has to make to what I have called “the paradoxes of coercive power” challenge his basic assumptions about human nature and his conventional notions of right and wrong.

Achieving a tragic sense and a moral calm under the threatening circumstances of patrol work depends in part upon developing an enjoyment of talk. Eloquence enriches his repertoire of potential responses to violence and permits him to touch the citizenry’s souls—their hopes, their fears, their needs to be something worthwhile, their consciences. Equally important, a policeman’s penchant to talk provides him the chance to associate with his fellow officers. A department can create institutions within it to capitalize on his sociability. Two institutions in particular, the Training Academy and the patrolman’s squad, are crucial in this regard. In being thrust together in training and in squads, policemen have unique opportunities to talk out the intellectual and moral issues inherent in the paradoxes of dispossession, detachment, face, and irrationality—the four paradoxes of coercive power. The chief of a department can have great effect on his men’s capacity to avoid moral breakdown by seeing that effective training is developed and that good sergeants lead patrol squads.

On the other hand, in the paradoxical circumstances in which the policeman is forever working, of being powerful but not absolutely powerful, the absence of either the inclination or the opportunity to talk is likely to isolate him from both the public and his fellow officers. This isolation impedes developing a tragic outlook in combination with a moral equanimity about coercion. As a result, he tends increasingly to habits of avoidance, brutality, or favoritism. In turn, these unacceptable performances tend to compound moral and intellectual disorientation, leading to ever increasing isolation from human companionship and, eventually, to personal deterioration.

II

The remainder of the book attempts to establish these conclusions. Chapter 2 introduces the reader to four policemen and what they thought and worried about, particularly their preoccupation with the dilemmas of coercion. Chapter 3 analyzes the concept of coercion. I examine an abstract model of a coercive relationship, something I have called the extortionate transaction. Using that model, I identify four paradoxes inherent in the effective exercise of coercive power. I have called them the paradoxes of dispossession, detachment, face, and irrationality. They are paradoxes because they contradict other “truths” by which the affairs of the civilized world are generally conducted. Chapter 4 addresses the crucial methodological question of defining the nature of the “good” policeman, the professional officer. It also insists (as does chapter 3) on the essential point that the policeman is the victim of coercion, “absorbed,” as Tocqueville remarked about politicians in general, “by the cares of self-defense.”²

Chapters 5 through 9 explore how each of the four paradoxes of coercive power manifests itself in the policeman’s daily work. For each paradox, I have distinguished four possible means of self-defense, and I have discussed the conditions and consequences of a policeman’s choice among them.

Then, in chapters 10 and 11, we come to the dynamics by which these paradoxical events affect a policeman’s intellectual and moral development. These two chapters involve a minute examination of how a policeman’s experience causes the growth of character. Chapter 12 goes on to deal with three factors, language, leadership, and learning (i.e., the education given to an officer on the job by his sergeant and squad members), and how they can be manipulated to affect the direction of character development. Chapter 12, thus, is about the way human effort can artificially alter the “natural” consequences of the policeman’s lot.

Chapters 13 and 14 look at two sets of implications of the study: What does an understanding of these twenty-eight young policemen suggest about improving American police organizations? And what does the study teach us about coercive power as a universal phenomenon?

The rest of this chapter sketches the context in which the events of this book took place and discusses the selection of the sample of twenty-eight young officers.

III

The peculiar characteristic of police departments in the United States is that they are local and very different one from the other. An observer of a single police department must constantly check against a tendency to overgeneralize.³ A literate person surfeited with police stories emanating from New York and Chicago may find it hard to comprehend that some local police departments operate without significant graft and illegitimate political influence. But there are many graft-free and professional police departments in this country. Likewise, a middle-class citizen, used to the operations of suburban police departments, may completely overlook the vital counseling role which city policemen play in lower-class urban areas. But dealing with intimate family problems is often the most significant part of the work of a metropolitan police department. Similarly, the law-abiding reader who encounters an ill-trained (and unpaid) police reservist⁴ on duty at county fairs and ball games may doubt that American police get any training at all, much less good training. But the training given to regular policemen in the better police departments in the country is sometimes intellectually sophisticated and effective.

Departments differ most importantly in seven respects: the homogeneity of the citizenry they serve, the extent of illegitimate political influence to which they are subject, the pervasiveness of graft within them, their size and the organizational efforts to cope with size, their history, the investment in professional training, and the philosophy and skill of their chief. Each of these seven factors may have a crucial effect on the character of a police department.⁵

Take the Laconia Police Department, for example, the one in which this study was undertaken. In at least one of these seven respects, it fulfilled the popular stereotype of an American police department. Laconia, the city it served, had half a million people—some rich, some poor; some established families, some recent immigrants; some black, some white; some sanguine, some without hope. Its substantial minority-group population—black, Latino, Asian, and Amerindian—was geographically concentrated in one-half of the city. Laconia was rectangular in shape, fifteen miles long west to east, and five miles wide south to north. Practically none of Laconia’s 200,000 nonwhite citizens lived in the hilly southern half of the city. Rather, they lived in the “flatlands,” the lower, older half of the city that bordered the river. By no means were all the people who lived in this northern, or level, half, poor and minority. For instance, there was Lafayette Park, in the exact center of the flatlands, with its stylish commercial and swank residential developments. But a substantial fraction of the neighborhoods consisted of bleak public housing projects, where no citizen was a homeowner and where the typical family was broken, on welfare, and almost invariably under serious medical or emotional stress. In contrast, the new subdivisions spotting the hillsides to the south were filled with white, middle-class families, who enjoyed suburbanlike luxuries (and deprivations)—vistas, open spaces, and privacy, but no sidewalks, mass transit, or nearby stores. Not atypically, Laconia was a city of contrasts and varieties of cultures.

But in other respects Laconia and its police department differed sharply from the stereotype. For one thing, there was an almost total absence of illegitimate political influence applied to the department. Elected politicians in Laconia accepted the widely understood taboo against seeking favors and interfering in the administration of the department. No Laconia policeman that I met ever suggested that someone other than his uniformed superiors would affect his promotion or his duties. The elective political system of Laconia during the time of this study was conservative and business-oriented. (For a variety of reasons, the political efforts of the nonwhite population had not yet become effective. No black, for example, had even been elected to the city council.) The city manager dominated the policies of city government; elected officials deferred to him on practically every significant matter. As for political parties, they were simply nonexistent in the reform politics of the municipality, and labor was surprisingly inept in making its influence felt. The bar dominated the appointment of judgeships, and the basis of selection was more likely to be professional accomplishment and connections to the state political system than political participation within the city. The police chief, the city manager, and the civil service director agreed on the need for a professional police department; each insisted on “merit” as the sole basis for employment and promotion; each insisted that no citizen should get covert special favors. In the vacuum of city politics, they had the influence to enforce their good intentions.

Nor was there, generally speaking, any corruption within the department. In the 1950s, the department had suffered serious scandal, in which several policemen had gone to prison for shakedowns and bribery. Long since then, graft had been rooted out. Even a free cup of coffee transgressed departmental regulations, and the chief had made several harsh examples of policemen who violated the rules against accepting gratuities. Moreover, the relatively high salaries of Laconia policemen made graft unnecessary.

The result was that there were no embarrassing skeletons hidden away in the recesses of the department and no necessity to keep things secret from outsiders. Citizens and researchers, friendly and hostile, had ready access to every aspect of the department. To an extent limited solely by a concern for safety, the chief made the department’s operations open for all to see. The chief’s open policy had been in effect so long that patrolmen were fully accustomed to recurrent “outside” observation.

The police department was sizable—it had to be, to cover the seventy-five square miles within the city limits. In all, there were 800 uniformed personnel. Despite the relatively large size of the department, however, all administrative activities were centralized in a single building, known as “Downtown.” There were no precinct stations in Laconia. The nearly 400 men who constituted the Patrol Division of the department arrived every work day at Downtown, drove out to their beats in marked cars, thereafter responded to citizens’ calls dispatched by radio from Downtown, and at the conclusion of the watch returned Downtown.

Patrol officers were organized into three watches, or shifts. Each watch worked eight and a half hours a day, with a new watch coming on at 7 AM (day watch), 3 PM (third watch), and 11 PM (dog watch). Every six weeks the watches rotated, so that in an eighteen-week period each officer in Patrol normally worked an equal number of weeks in the morning, evening, and night. All the men on a given watch, no matter what part of the city they patrolled, dressed in the same locker room, met in the same lineup hall, and worked out in the same gym.

Each watch was under the command of a captain. To cope with the geographical extent of the city and the frequent overload on the radio system, the department subdivided Laconia into an east area and a west area, each with its own radio channel and each supervised by a lieutenant. In turn these two areas were further subdivided into two or three districts, each of which was patrolled by a squad of eleven men led by a sergeant. Individual squad members, working alone or in pairs, were assigned to particular beats within their district.⁶

The other 400 men in the department were assigned to specialized details like the Investigative Division (consisting exclusively of men who had “made” sergeant), Training, the Juvenile and Vice Units, and Internal Affairs (which conducted investigations of allegations of police misconduct). These parts of the department, which never met the public at large the way Patrol did, were also concentrated within Downtown.

The present condition of the department was affected by its history. Events twenty and thirty years old were remembered by Laconia citizens, who passed on remembrances of the past to newcomers—in bars, on streetcorners, at family gatherings. In the past of Laconia, a riverfront and industrial city, the department was mixed up in the violence of the Great Strike (in the Depression), the Military Curfew (in the middle of World War II), and the Riot (in the middle of the “other war,” in Vietnam). It was in the light of these dramatic and tumultuous events that the public at large developed its notions of the toughness, the relentlessness, and the physical massiveness of the Laconia policeman. No one in Laconia, or nearby, of any seniority, ever attributed meekness to the Laconia Police Department.

Even as late as the mid-1960s, the department was making history infected with violence. A vigilante band of black youths, called the Overseers, had organized in the early part of that decade. As a part of their self-appointed duties, they tried to modify the behavior of police within black areas—through surveillance, threats, and firearms. Deadly shoot-outs erupted half a dozen times, and there were victims on both sides. History preserved the hatreds bred by this open warfare, and it shaped dogmas, understandings, and stereotypes which did not give way quickly to changes in reality.

Moreover, history was handed down within the...