The Police: The Culture of a Social Control Agency

INTRODUCTION

A number of questions are often asked about things the police do which cannot be answered by examining any formal description of the police job.[1] Questions such as: "Why do policemen sometimes not enforce the law when it is being broken?"; "Why do policemen sometimes react to demeanor and other legally irrelevant aspects of an offender's behavior? "; "Why do people who admit their guilt sometimes come out better than people who stand on their legal rights?";

"Why do policemen often under-enforce the law in Negro neighborhoods? "; "Why do policemen harass unusual looking people? "; "Why do the police sometimes do nothing when a crime is reported to them?"; and, "Why are policemen often closemouthed and isolated from civilian social activities?!' cannot be answered if one thinks of the police as ministerial officers of the law obeying only legal requirements.

Instead of answering such questions in the usual manner, which involves an ad hoc answer to each, I would like to develop a few simple principles which throw light on all of these problems. Instead of suggesting that police officers are lazy, capricious, bigoted, stupid, ultra-conventional, and authoritarian, all of which have been mentioned as answers to the questions posed above, I would like to suggest that all of these behaviors are responses to the influences and tensions inherent in the role of a formal social control agent involved in interactive situations.

THESIS STATEMENT

The police as formal agents of legal social control exercise a large amount of extra-legal and sometimes illegal social control because they are expected to deal with many situations which are violations of custom or morality but not of law. These expectations of police action held by the public are relevant to the police because the police themselves are largely controlled by interactive institutions established with segments of the public rather than by any formally granted legal mandate. Laws require less than custom in most cases, and the police mandate is no exception. The police are confronted with violations of customs they themselves adhere to and, whether or not the violation is also one of law, their response is conditioned by their interpersonal commitments. Their dispositional decisions thus take into account moral, customary, and legal aspects of the behavior, as they interpret them, and the result is a form of social control which is only tangentially and sporadically related to law.

This thesis may be stated as a series of hypotheses about social control, police behavior, and public behavior:

1. Interactive institutions imply the existence of reciprocal typifications of behavior. In order for the institution to persist and continue to reward the participants, the people involved in the institution must act toward each other as the other expects they will. This behavior becomes the "customary" and "moral" behavior expected of the individuals involved in the institution and deviation is punished by the primary control of conscience or the secondary control of interpersonal sanctions. Formal social controls, tertiary controls, in the form of laws, are established to set minimum requirements for behavior which does not appear to be satisfactorily controlled by custom and morality. Laws tend to be minimal and universal abstracts of common customs. The police are empowered, by law, to enforce these minimal requirements but not the more comprehensive customs from which the laws were abstracted. This means that many violations of custom and morality may take place that the police have no legal warrant to correct.

2. Individuals generally control themselves to fit into the interactive institutions in which they are involved. If their behavior is not so controlled, the institution is disturbed and the others either do not know how to react, or react negatively, excluding the deviant from the institution and its rewards. Institutions can arise around any mutual activity, but the most universal and important institutions appear to center on the production and management of life needs in the areas of labor (occupation), sex (family), and territory (neighborhoods, countries). If a person is excluded from these institutions, he will have difficulty in surviving. The police occupation is largely controlled, as is any other occupation, by the interactive institutions established with the public it contacts. These institutions frequently require the police to respond to demands for social control in areas of custom for which they have no legal warrant.

3. Violations of morality, customs, and laws come to the attention of the police through complaints, their own perceptions, or, occasionally, the challenges of the violator. Some of these violations can be processed within the structure of law, others cannot.

4. Before the decision on how to process the violation can be made or completed, the police must bring the immediate situation under their control and keep it there. A number of strategies are used to control situations. The use of force and the solidarity of the police may be used to control the situation. This use of force may or may not be legitimated by legal rules, or it may be made to appear to be so legitimated.

5. Officers take personal, moral, customary, and legal considerations into account in deciding what to do about the various situations they face. Their behavior cannot be predicted unless the nature of all of these elements is known.

6. Legal solutions involve many requirements as they are the officially contemplated, recorded, reviewed, and sanctioned course of events. Legal solutions allow adversary contention to take place wherein the accused can effectively contend that he is actually innocent, that the police overstepped their prescribed methods, or that his behavior is not that proscribed by law. The difficulty or impossibility of proving a legal case, especially when the act may be a violation of custom but not law, combined with the feeling of the complainant, and sometimes the officer, that a wrong has been committed, causes the officer to search for un-counterable control techniques outside of the law which will control the behavior involved. Sometimes a partial, unreviewable invocation of the law is used as a control.

7. Where there is no legal solution, the police may attempt to evade the demands of the public for control of a violation by the use of impression management and secrecy about their operations. They may also use deceit to establish control where they have no legal warrant to do so.

8. Thus the police enact social control for social and personal ends using legal weapons when they are effective and extra-legal ones when they are not. The end result is that some of the various customs of conventional society get roughly the social control that is more or less expected, but not always through the established legal channels. Most of the social control provided by the police is thus customary and subject to the variations, vagaries, and discrepancies of a continuously changing and largely unplanned set of understandings which exist in an uneasy dialectic with formally enacted rules.

Each chapter in this work is devoted to one of these hypotheses.

Sources of Data

In order to study the police as agents of social control, I utilized several sources of data.

First, I went through the appropriate ten-week (two nights a week) training program to become a Westville Police Reserve Officer. I then worked as a police officer (again about two nights a week) for the next thirteen months, keeping careful field notes for the entire period. The problems and limitations inherent in this participant observation are discussed in the methodological appendix.

Second, I used the other studies which have been done in Westville Police Department by other sociologists as sources of observations and data inaccessible to me in my position. I used these studies as data and have largely re-interpreted their observations in my own framework of social control theory.[2] I have also used most of the other police literature cited herein in a similar manner. Very often other writers have made observations which fit into my framework, though they have been using them for other ends or have been making other arguments.

Third, I have ridden on patrol with two other police departments, one in Westville's state, one outside. Additionally, I have had many discussions with the officers of two other departments, one a small department in a high prestige community, the other the San Francisco Police Department. The officers from San Francisco were enrolled in a seminar on the theoretical study of the police process which I conducted at San Francisco State College. One of these officers, John W. Minderman, has read the entire first draft of this thesis and has commented extensively on many points. I have incorporated many of his comments as footnotes and I have followed many of his suggestions for changing a word or two without specific citation. I am greatly indebted to him for his expert and conscientious criticism and comments. His help has improved the accuracy of many points contained herein.

Fourth, I have corresponded with officers from several other police departments regarding specific problems. Where their comments are not sensitive, I have cited them by name, where they might be sensitive, I have covered their identities.

Anonymity

I have adopted several unscholarly conventions in this thesis to protect my informants. First, I have not cited any laws by their section numbers, because to do so would pinpoint Westville's state. Consequently, I have avoided making esoteric legal points and have had reference to codes which were derived from common law. Second, I have not given the dates of any of my field notes as the officers involved could be identified by the department from existing records of assignments. Third, I have disguised the identity of officers who have provided me with written or verbal comments on various possibly questionable practices. Their cooperation could cost them their jobs so the least I can do is to insure their anonymity and thank them for their help. The necessity for these conventions will become apparent as one reads the thesis.

CHAPTER I: A SOCIAL CONTROL THEORY

"Social Control" covers all of the processes which prevent and correct deviance. Almost every facet of social life has at one time or another been considered as an example of social control.

Social control originates in interactive human relationships. Both formal social control and. the social control implicit in socialization are derived from the habituations and institutionalizations which arise from repeated interaction. [3] When two people interact with one another over a period of time, they come to take for granted the behavior of the other in an ever-widening circle of situations. This behavior which is taken for granted then need not be a matter of much concern to the participants because they consider it to be the "typical" behavior of the other, an expected part of their relationship, and they can give their attention to more problematic aspects of their environments. Behavior which has reached this state of habituation is said to be "reciprocally typified" between the two people. In order for "reciprocally typified" behavior to arise, a condition must exist wherein participants are brought into regularized contact, over a period of time, dealing with essentially similar problems each time.

These conditions particularly exist in the social areas of labor, sex, and territory.[4]

When people must coordinate their behavior to produce some product, they quickly typify the behavior of the other in the situation so that they can count on the other's efforts to aid rather than hinder their own. Thus work, employment, is a major source of control over the behavior of the person engaged.

People who live together and raise children also interact repeatedly, intensively, and over a long period of time. They develop understandings about what is to be expected from each other in various situations. The family provides a great amount of control over the behavior of its members.

People who live in close proximity to one another, in the same territory, neighbors, often find that they have interests in common which require coordinated action. The longer a person lives in a given territory, other things equal, the greater the number of interactive institutions he becomes involved in, each of which constitutes a social control over his behavior.

While new institutions are being created all of the time by the processes of repeated interaction, a child does not create his own institutions, at least at first. A child is born and raised within the structure of existing institutions, and far him they are objective facts independent of his own existence. He is "socialized" into "the way things are" by his contacts with his already "enculturated" parents. [5] As he grows up he contacts other people and has experiences on his own which extend and modify the culture passed on to him by his parents. Then he creates new institutions based on his own relationships. Still, he cannot create the entire social world on his own; most of it exists independent of himself awaiting his discovery. When he enters a new situation, he will tend to find out what the customs are for that situation before creating some idiosyncratic innovation. The existence of an institution, or custom, which implies reciprocal typification of behaviors, constitutes an important social control over the individual's behavior, because, in order to gain whatever advantage the institution offers, he must behave more or less as the others involved expect he will behave.

An individual presumably is somewhat committed to institutions he himself helped to establish. He had good and sufficient reason, experienced personally, to establish the reciprocal typification of behavior in the first place, and he can think back to these reasons whenever he wonders why he is doing what he is doing. However, the institutions which he encounters as established going concerns may not appear to be so clearly justified by his own experience. If he has been well enculturated, socialized, by his parents, he will have been introduced to the appropriate social legitimation, raison d'etre, for most relevant institutions and he will behave as expected most of the time. It is not enough to depend on proper socialization, or on "self-evident" justifications, to insure compliance with important institutions, or customs, which affect many other people, because the socialization of some individuals may be defective, and the justifications of some institutions may not seem all that self-evidently important to all members of society. This being the case, customs which appear to be important for all to follow without exception may be abstracted and enacted as laws and equipped with a formal agency or organization whose purpose is to insure conformity to, or to punish deviation from, that law. Such laws can only be concerned with customs of some importance and some universality. Formal social control agencies generally do not interfere with idiosyncratic typifications unless they directly affect some widely accepted institutionalized standard of conduct. Thus the police are usually unconcerned with how people feel about or, within limits, with what they say to their employers, wives, or neighbors. Should a person decide, however, to "cut on" another person, an important institutionalized expectation is breached, and the social control agency charged with supporting this institution may be expected to take some action. Since agencies are not present, they can only act when some deviation comes to their attention, which means that conformity depends on socialization, and formal agencies are limited to punishing violations. Agencies, however, may attempt to gain their ends by aiding in the socialization of individuals so that they will not have to punish them later.

Contingent upon these three processes, reciprocal typification, socialization, and the establishment of formal social control agencies, there are three kinds, or levels, of social control. These have been identified by Georg Simmel as morality, custom, and law. [6]

Three Levels of Social Control

Primary

Primary social control, or morality, is provided by the individual himself. As a child grows up, he abstracts from the specific admonitions and punishments he receives in his interactive institutions the idea that certain forms of behavior are prohibited, not just by one person or another, but by everybody. He soon comes to feel that this is a general prohibition, which applies to himself as well as to all others. He identifies with the generality of others, that is, with a society.[7] Since this process is bound up with the learning of language, his own identity, and "reality", as it is understood in the only world available to him, it is a very important guide to behavior. Long after he has grown to understand the relativity of cultures, there will still be certain ways of acting which are "right" and comfortable (these form his "ego ideal"), and other ways which are "wrong" and uncomfortable (these form his "conscience"). Since the guides to behavior learned as a child are insufficient to guide an adult through his life, a general mechanism for learning and internalizing new rules is part of an individual's primary socialization. One consequence of this is that rules which come from people and institutions (e. g., tertiary social control agencies) that the child has learned are legitimate rule makers in themselves are respected and made part of the adult's own primary social control.

Secondary

Secondary social control, or custom, comes from the interactive relations in which a person engages. The people with whom he must interact are the most important for the regulation of his behavior in the ordinary course of affairs. Thus the people he meets in the course of earning a living, raising a family, and living in a certain area are the people with whom he must get along. If his behavior is disturbing or unpredictable to these people, that is, if it constitutes a problem for them, they will usually respond by attempting to get him to follow the patterns they have come to expect are "typical" of him or of properly demeaned people "like" him, which fit into their institutionalized relationships without disturbing the routine and unattended nature of the relationships.

Take, for example, the social control implicit in work. First, the worker is required to be at a certain location at a certain time every day of the work week. This means he cannot do anything else at that time, it means that he can only go a certain distance away at night and have any hope of returning for the next day, it means he must get some sleep most nights before going to work, it means that he must not drink heavily just before going to work, it means that having a regular living place will be more convenient than constantly moving around, and it means that he has the money and the stability to be married. Further, it means that he must devote his energy while at work to those activities required of him. Generally, he cannot drink, fight, gamble, sleep, make love, or in other ways disattend his work without some consequence, such as being dismissed, which would cause his family to go hungry and his house to be taken away from him. Further, should he engage in illegal activities in his off-work hours which result in his imprisonment, even for a short time, or in notoriety, or in a "record," he may lose his job and find it quite difficult to get another.[8] Having a job also exerts control over the dress and demeanor of its occupant, controls which often extend into non-work areas of his life and life style in general. Similar social controls inhere in marital and neighborhood institutions. All of these institutions usually reinforce one another with regard to the important forms of behavior so that deviance which affects one also affects the others, causing most people to conform enthusiastically. As will be mentioned later in more detail, it is possible that people will come loose from these institutionalized behavior patterns, for example, by being unemployed, unmarried, and homeless. In such a position, a commitment to conformity is difficult to maintain as there are few rewards for conforming and few punishments of any consequence for not conforming. [9]

Tertiary

Tertiary social control, or law, is enforced by formal social control agencies such as the police, the courts, social workers, churches, psychiatrists, and mental hospitals with the ratios varying from society to society. Their control takes two forms, actual control over the behavior or disposition of a concrete deviating individual, and the symbolic control of their mere existence. The agency stands as an objectification of the importance of the enforced institutions. In a simple society these two aspects are not highly separated, but in a complex society the concrete manifestation of the institution in enacted roles is seen only by a very few people, usually those being processed and the processors, so the symbolic content stands separate and subject to manipulation and "image" making. For example, the police attempt to appear to be omnipresent in order to deter crime, but actual criminals know that the police are anything but omnipresent because they have had contact with the enacted roles on a personal basis.

The following table should make the relations between the levels of social control and the source, agent, and sanctions involved at each level more clear. The root source of social control lies in the interactive institutions built up around co-ordinated activity. What is necessary in this area comes to be taken by the individual to be what is right and moral. What is moral and customary within a social system may then be enacted into formal laws. In most areas of human conduct, the primary, secondary, and tertiary prescriptions are in accord; that is to say, morality, custom, and law agree on what is proper. Occasionally disparities arise when what is customary is not thought by some to be moral or when something illegal is customary and not considered immoral. These disparities lead to difficulties for the agents who enforce the rules, because, in the ordinary course of events, the agents at the different levels work together, and a conflict of rules produces a potential conflict of agents.

SOCIAL CONTROL SUMMARY TABLE

LEVEL	SOURCE	AGENT	SANC TIONS
PRIMARY	Socialization of ego by ego and alter so that ego fits in with the interactive institutions in which ego is involved. Ego ideal, and conscience.	Intra-active self which examines prospective and retrospective consequences of decisions and acts.	Neg. Guilt, shame, doubt, uncertainty. Pos . Feeling good, pride, satis- faction, at peace with self and world.
SECONDARY	Interactive institutions which come from Reciprocal typifications and expectations around common activities and other Coordinated behavior.	Alters involved with ego, or for whom ego's behavior is important.	Neg . Ostracism, hatred, exclusion from activities, emotional withdrawal. Pos . Acceptance, survival, friendship, love, employment, and emotional support.
TERTIARY	Group processes which lead to the enactment of laws and other written, abstract. regulations.	Legally authorized agents. Police, mental hospitals, social workers, administrators.	Neg . Fines, imprisonment, death, “treatment," and other handicaps on survival. Pos . "Awards," citations of merit, community well-being.

At both the primary and secondary levels of social control, there are a rich variety of positive and negative sanctions which can be, and are, employed to insure the conformity of the actor to the important institutions in which he is involved, and his own internalized understandings of proper conduct. If the actor conforms to these informal rules, he "gets along" well with others and with himself. If he does not conform, he has more difficulty in leading a placid and productive life because the others will not continue to associate with him, making it difficult to survive, or he will be tortured by self-doubts and guilt over his activities which will show up in a variety of mal-adaptive psychological and somatic responses. When people move about between various systems of customs, they increase the probability that their socialized sense of morality will not be exactly congruent with the customs they are coerced to obey, and they thus become relatively uncommitted to those particular customs. Similarly, when people holding to a set of institutions find themselves in conflict with laws which prohibit these institutions, all of the positive and negative sanctions of the primary and secondary social control systems may be brought to play to counter the imposition of law. In the United States Prohibition was one of the more dramatic examples of such conflict, but lower class customs of casual marriage and violence are continuing, if unspectacular, demonstrations that a society which is built up from diverse interactive institutions may not produce laws which support equally all of the various customs of divergent groups in the society.

When laws are enacted, the basic and minimal elements of the institutions which are important to the lawmakers and their reference publics are abstractly stated as the rules for all to follow. Penalties for not following these laws are annexed and some formal agent of "society" is employed to see that these minimal standards are kept. Since laws rarely require a specific performance (rather, a specific abstention) from individuals, and the assumption is that if primary and secondary social controls are working as they should, there will be no violation of law, there are generally only negative sanctions to insure compliance. Law thus, de facto, relies on primary and secondary controls in most cases to insure conformity. For a number of reasons, which seem to reduce to divergent institutionalizations and consequent divergent socialization, secondary and primary controls may not support tertiary controls and large segments of the public may be relatively unmotivated to obey particular laws. While the negative sanctions associated with the laws may cause such people to look around for a police officer before doing what they want to do, the sanctions do not create any reason for actively doing something which such people are not personally and customarily inclined to do.

The agent charged with tertiary social control thus faces the dilemma of attempting to inhibit certain forms of behavior and encourage others without any legitimate means for doing so. Should the behavior occur, he can invoke the law and thus sanction the actor, but, when customs differ from law, this is rarely an effective producer of motivation to conform. Its only effect may be to produce another person who hates the police. Since the agent of tertiary control is himself an actor, and since he is at that instant in an interactive situation with the violator, or potential violator, he may, and often does, forget about his possible legal sanctions and attempt to use the secondary sanctions which are available in the situation to insure conformity to his tertiary rules. He may praise, curse, sympathize with, threaten, support, denigrate, or ostracize the offender (To be truly effective the police officer must be involved in an interactive institutional relationship with the offender, not just a casual contact.), or he may point out to the offender that these are consequences to be expected from his peers if he persists in his violation. (e. g. , "What would your parents think about your doing this? ") He may also attempt to engage the primary level of social control by telling the violator what he should do, that is, what the moral thing is to do (e. g., "A big strong man like you shouldn't hit a woman.")

Situations arise repeatedly where police officers must fall back to secondary and primary social control because the "rewards" which they produce are diffused throughout the community and unappreciated by specific individuals. For example, a citizen has no way of knowing that he might have been the next victim of a particular burglar or rapist that the police caught, and thus he does not feel involved in a transaction with the police except very remotely. The fact that the police caught a burglar who was going to victimize him is unknown to him and thus exerts little influence on his willingness to obey traffic laws.[10] In interactive situations, the positive and negative sanctions are much more visibly related and thus motivation and prohibition are more closely joined. (e. g., One appreciates the benefits of living with a wife and thus takes many of her prohibitions seriously.)

Each level of social control has a somewhat different, though related and derivative, source. Each level has an appropriate agent of control, and each level has positive and negative sanctions to insure conformity to the rules of that level. The levels generally support one another, but conflicts in all permutations are possible since the basis for all control is interactive institutions, and these institutions arise out of experience and existential needs rather than in obedience to some master plan.

Level of Social Control, Severity of Sanctions, and Interaction Frequency.

The sanctions, rewards, and punishments which exist at each 1evel of control are of graduated degrees of severity. The primary level has the least severe punishments, in a physical sense, and the tertiary level has the most severe punishments. In spite of this, primary and secondary social control tend to be much more effective than does tertiary control. The reason is not hard to find. The closer and more frequent the contact between an individual and his sanctioner the less severe the sanctions which are needed, because closeness and frequency lead to certainty of sanctions. As Jeremy Bentham put it:

"Now, on the one hand, a lot of punishment is a lot of pain; on the other hand, the profit of an offense is a lot of pleasure, or what is equivalent to it. But the profit of the offense is commonly more certain than the punishment, or, what comes to the same thing, appears so at least to the offender. It is at any rate commonly more immediate. It follows, therefore, that, in order to maintain its superiority over the profit of the offense, the punishment must have its value made up in some other way, in proportion to that whereby it falls short in the two points of certainty and proximity. Now there is no other way in which it can receive any addition to its value, but by receiving an addition in point of magnitude. Wherever then the value of punishment falls short, either in point of certainty, or of proximity, of that of the profit of the offense, it must receive a proportional addition in point of magnitude."[11]

Taking these principles out of Bentham's context and applying them to the three levels of social control, it is clear that they operate here as well.

If a person violates his own precepts, he knows it immediately. A small amount of certain guilt is ordinarily sufficient to keep him conforming.

If a person breaches the expectations of an interactive relationship, it is highly likely that he will be discovered and sanctioned by the other, but it is not certain. This small amount of uncertainty requires that the punishment be somewhat more severe, an attack on self-esteem rather than guilt, ostracism rather than depression, assault rather than nausea.

If a person violates a law, he has a fairly small chance of being caught, and the punishment will take a long time, so Bentham's logic requires that the punishments be more severe, as they in fact are. Additionally, it is often presumed that if a person breached an important institution knowingly, he was in some way free from the social controls of custom and morality, and thus must be controlled by law alone. Police officers dealing with juveniles, in fact, take the presumed existence of social control at primary and secondary levels into account in deciding whether or not to exercise the formal control of arrest. If the juvenile appears to feel guilty about his behavior, he may be considered "salvageable" and be reprimanded while if he is nonchalant and obdurate, he may be considered a "punk" and be arrested.[12] What the officer is actually assessing is the juvenile's apparent morality or primary control. The apparent ability of his family to provide secondary social control is assessed by determining whether other members are in jail, or whether a parent is missing.[13] Here the officer is trying to assess the quality of the control of family customs over the boy's behavior, using indicators readily at hand.

Any sanction may be countered by the individual and its impact somewhat blunted. The guilt of the primary level may be tempered by rationalizations or repressions. The ostracism of the interactive group may be countered by disaffiliation or withdrawal, or by adopting a charakterpanzerung (armor-plating of character) attitude toward all others.[14] The nature of the relationships, involving as they do close contact and possibly extensive reciprocal typifications, makes the attack of a spouse, employer, or neighbor a particularly effective one for disconfirming the subjective reality of the deviator, and one particularly hard to reject.[15] The sanctions of formal social control agencies are hedged about with procedures which have the effect of making sure that everyone else accepts the validity of the sanction,[16] even if the offender himself neutralizes its impact on his own self-image.[17] It is possible to fight formal sanctions in ways impossible with informal sanctions, to appeal convictions time and time again. Each of these possibilities makes the certainty and the proximity of the sanction less and thus reduces its power to control behavior, and thus its effectiveness in the mind of the police officer.

The state reserves to itself the legitimate use of force and violence. If secondary social control agents could use force and violence to coerce obedience to their own institutions, it is possible that society would have to be organized along feudal lines, creating small, warring societies within a larger society. The reservation of legitimate force to the society as a whole allows the formal agents of social control to limit the coercion at the secondary level to non-lethal forms.[18] This means that the effective control of certain kinds of dangerous behavior is also reserved, practically speaking, to tertiary social control agents, whether or not secondary groups are affected by the violence. Thus the legitimate use of force provides a societal control over the possibility of deviant institutionalizations achieving the status of rebellion or states-within-states.

When Social Control Breaks Down

Each level of social control has the possibility of becoming ineffectual or of breaking down completely. The personal controls which a person customarily responds to may be abridged by alcohol, drugs, passion, ambition, or insanity. The interactive controls may be non-existent, as for homeless men, or may be abridged by alcohol, time, and location. Formal controls may be absent, ineffectual, or in disorder at a given time and place.

The most frequent way in which primary social controls are abridged, so far as the police are concerned, is through drunkenness. Drunks of various kinds make up the largest portion of the workload of most municipal police departments. In order for a drunk to come to the attention of the police department, he must be in public, without a sober companion, or overtly obnoxious toward a citizen or officer.[19] This happens more frequently to those with no place to stay than to those involved in institutionalized relationships with work, family, and neighbors. A person can get as drunk as he wishes, and so long as he stays out of the public view and, hopefully, within the control of some small social system, there is no danger at all of being arrested by the police.[20]

The secondary social controls of work, for those who have them, are weakened at night and on the weekends. For example, seventy percent of the patients seen in the psychiatric ward of a municipal hospital are night admissions.[21] The weekend is traditionally a time for staying up late, doing things, and drinking. This is a result, in part, of the fact that there is no work to get up for the next day and in part of the custom of paying some workers at the end of the week. In many middle class families the social control of the family takes up where the social control of work leaves off, but many lower class families appear to be so chronically conflict ridden that they provide no control (in this sense), and the neighbors are accustomed to family fights so they have made conflict part of their typification and are thus not effective in controlling the behavior. As a result of this breakdown in interactive control, the police often have to be called to deal with family fights on the weekends.

Thanksgiving is another time of loose social controls and many family fights, possibly because it brings families together to drink but without any program, such as gift exchanging, to divert the hostilities. Family trouble appears to involve, almost universally, people who are subjected to no other interactive control at the time, and whose personal controls have been abridged by drink. Family trouble itself is institutionalized in some families. Typically, every Friday night the husband comes home drunk after spending most of his paycheck. His wife complains, possibly throws something at him, with tears of frustration on her face. He hits her. She calls the police, who come. After some discussion, the husband leaves the house for the night. The agents of formal social control have acted at the informal interactive level for a family which could not control itself.[22]

For people who have somehow managed to become cut loose from interactive controls, the police act as social janitors, sweeping up the derelicts who have no one else to look after them. The danger of such uncontrolled persons being loose has long been recognized and formally taken account of by the law. A man without work, wife, or home is a man available for mischief, a man with nothing to lose, a man, in short, whose very existence is a danger to the peace of the community. Vagrancy laws cut right through to the heart of the matter. They make this status illegal. The developing awareness of civil rights has struck down most vagrancy statutes, or is in the process of doing so, requiring instead that a person commit a crime rather than constituting one by being free of social controls.

Arthur Stinchcombe has suggested that the importance of vagrancy statutes is that they define a person without access to private spaces as a person without legitimate connection to the social structure. It seems to me that the important aspect of attachment to a social structure for a social control agent is not whether the person is attached but whether he is controlled.[23] The requirement of an occupation, frequently found in vagrancy statutes, is an indication of control, not access to private spaces.

Social control of behavior is also weakened when the individual can isolate himself from those with whom he has reciprocal typifications. A homeless man is the prototype, but anyone can free him self of interactive social controls by driving a car. Unless a person is a professional driver, in which case the control of his employment covers his driving (and professional drivers have remarkably few accidents because of this), when he gets into a car he is free.[24] Unless the driver actually has his family or neighbors with him, there is no one to tell him what to do. He becomes a moral vagabond. He drives for a short distance and no one he sees knows who he is. The only social controls operating are his own primary controls and the random and sporadic control provided by police traffic officers. In a situation such as this, where for all practical purposes the primary control of the driver is the only control, and he can eliminate even that, an officer may attempt to assess from a driver's attitude whether or not he has functioning primary controls before applying a formal sanction (Chapter V).

Sub-Cultural Institutionalization of Deviance

To this point, I have mostly been dealing with the various levels of social control as if they all were working toward the same end. For most people, most of the time, this is probably true. Their primary controls lead them to do what is expected, and their secondary controls are congruent. The tertiary controls are not even an issue because their behavior is already controlled. In a complex society, however, people faced with different life situations may come to reciprocally typify behavior which is illegal.

"An upper-class child may learn the "facts of life" at an age when a lower-class child has mastered the rudiments of abortion technique. Or, an upper-class child may experience his first stirrings of patriotic emotion about the time that his lower-class contemporary first experiences hatred of the police and everything they stand for." [25]

When the morality and customs of a group are not congruent with law, a great many of the mechanisms for controlling behavior are chaotic. As Sykes and Matza have pointed out, delinquents are aware of the illegality of their acts but they have developed specific justifications which neutralize the criticisms of the tertiary social control system.[26] They intersubjectively objectify these justifications which are then available to consciousness should they be faced with the necessity of explaining their behavior to representatives of some formal social control agency.

It is also possible that a person should feel no guilt or shame about behavior which is disapproved of by those who interact with him. Such a lack of affect often signals for the intervention of formal social control agents, perhaps from a mental hospital.

Though it is quite rare, it is possible that a group would set up its own tertiary social controls and act as a society within a society. It has been suggested that the Mafia has done this.[27] Some large businesses approximate tertiary control over their employees, though generally without violence.

The institutionalization of deviant reciprocal typifications depends upon having a society complex enough so that such deviations are not immediately obvious to all those who are involved in conventional institutions.

“…the size and anonymity of the city decrease the chance of small social systems to control the behavior of their members in public. In a small village, activity in public places easily comes to the attention of the family, the priest, the employer, and the peers of the offender. Further, in large cities there are much stronger norms about "deliberately not noticing" the behavior of other people. This means that in cities, much more behavior is only inquired into by the police."[28]

This means, in the framework developed here, that the reciprocal typifications and institutionalizations of behavior which have been the genesis of all social control are rapidly becoming less important for conformity while internal primary control and formal tertiary control are becoming relatively more important.

The Police Mandate: A Mixture of Laws and Customs

The mandate of the police is made up of a number of accretions and avulsions to and from the basic requirements of keeping the peace and stopping crime. It is an historical product which varies from country to country, from state to state, and from city to city.

The police mandate as it is enacted consists of those things which the police routinely do which are not successfully challenged. It is through these routine performances that the police as an institution actualizes itself in society. It is these concrete manifestations of de facto legitimacy to which people and other institutions adapt themselves, not to some abstract statement of the proper role of the police in society.[29]

Since the mandate of the police is so complex and often contains somewhat contradictory requirements, it is very difficult to say whether and in what regard they are doing a "good" job. Michael Banton wrote:

"In the case of certain organizations it is fairly easy to agree on criteria of organizational efficiency. Armies are efficient insofar as they can defend national interests by military action; the fishing industry is organized to catch large quantities of fish at economic cost; motor manufacturers are efficient if they produce reliable and inexpensive vehicles, and so on. But the police have to meet many criteria and it is difficult to compare the value of success in one direction at the expense of shortcomings in another. For example, a police force which solved more crimes but which treated suspects with undue severity would be in one sense more efficient, but its activities would excite public protest. The police are given a variety of objectives but they are simultaneously subjected to a host of restrictions concerning the ways in which they may attain them, and the interplay between the ends and means is much more complex than in most organizations. The efficiency of the police may therefore be less important than their responsiveness to the community they are required to serve." [30]

The mandate of the police is extended into new areas in some states every time the legislature meets and enacts new laws. The underlying requirement for the creation of a formal police mandate to control certain behavior seems to be that it has become a matter of public concern,[31] and that primary and secondary social controls are seen as being incapable of suppressing the behavior.

In order to carry out the demands of their mandate, the police have certain powers which are granted to them legally, and they assume other powers on which the law is effectively silent.

The legal powers granted to the police in themselves are not great, but, by routinization, organization to use these powers and an unfailingly liberal construction of the rights granted by these powers, the police convert them into important weapons.

They have the right to make an arrest for misdemeanors which occur in their presence when they have "reasonable cause" to believe that the offense has actually taken place. A citizen making the same arrest must be certain that the offense has taken place or he may open himself to suit for false arrest. The police have the right to arrest a person for a felony when they have reasonable cause to believe he committed one, whether or not, in fact, a felony has taken place. A citizen may arrest when he has reasonable cause to believe that felony has been committed by the offender, but a felony must actually have taken place or he again opens himself to suit.[32]

Additionally, laws give the police the right to persist in their attempts to arrest in the face of resistance and often make resisting an officer an offense in itself. In both of these cases, the citizen has almost. the same rights, but the police officer has somewhat more latitude. The conception of the police officer as being little different from the average citizen is a consequence of the American legal system's derivation from English common law. In some other countries the citizen has no right to arrest, and the police have a variety of special powers which set them apart from the citizenry.

The employment of these limited powers by the police is facilitated by their organization and equipment. Should a citizen arrest another, he is unlikely to be armed, he is unlikely to have a radio to call for help, and he is unlikely to have a safe way of transporting or keeping his prisoner until he can find a magistrate. Since it is a routine for the police, they have worked out a number of techniques for taking care of these contingencies. Consequently, they are in a much better position, practically speaking, to arrest people than the average citizen. In addition to these practical considerations, the police are the legitimate force-users and if a citizen knows, or should know, that he is being arrested by a police officer, it is illegal for him to resist. The police officer's view of reality is granted precedence by this law, and the arresting citizen has no counterpart.

The police assume the right to use discretion in enforcing the laws they have to enforce. They may decide for some reason to enforce one law and not another, or to enforce a law in one area but not in another. They may decide not to enforce minor laws if it would get in the way of enforcing major laws. They may decide not to enforce a law in a particular situation in order to give them bargaining powers. In some states this discretion is prohibited but practiced; in Westville's state, the law is generally silent on the practice. The use of discretion by the police is one of the major discrepancies between their formally legitimated behavior and the behavior actually employed.

There are other areas where the police may do things for which they have no formal legitimation but which they have "always" done. For example, there is apparently no law in Westville' state authorizing police officers to seize non-contraband articles for use as evidence in court, but they routinely do it.[33]

Since the police are agents of social control, and since they are responsive to the community institutions they interact with, they often are in the position of confronting behavior which is not illegal but which some part of the community wishes to get rid of, or which the officer, a member of the dominant community himself, finds offensive. All of the various deviations from the officially sanctioned view of reality are not illegal, sometimes because there does not appear to be any way to make them so, other times because the behavior is too new to have generated enough moral indignation to have had laws passed. Some law can usually be found to process disagreeable people, even if it is not a law against what makes them disagreeable (Chapter VI). The police are aware that the primary and secondary social controls of these deviants do not conform with their ideas of proper controls, and they may invoke the legal process, at least partially, to sanction this behavior. Police patrols may be increased in an area, people may be arrested for minor acts which would normally be overlooked, and officer may go out of their way to find ways to harass these deviants. For example, one partner I worked with told me of something he had done shortly before I joined him. He saw a group of Hell's Angels riding through Westville and started to follow them. They drove absolutely legally for forty- seven blocks, which took him far off his beat, and then one dropped a cigarette to the road, a violation of an obscure section of the Health and Safety Code. The officer then stopped and cited the Angel for this violation. He was a little defensive about it, however, because, as he pointed out, there is no where to put a cigarette out on a motorcycle.[34] In situations such as this, the police may be operating within their social mandate (that is, controlling offensive behavior) but outside of their legal mandate, or, at least, they may be using their legal mandate in service of their social mandate.

Finally, the police occasionally catch, arrest, and start through the legal system some serious violators. In these instances the reaction of the police to the crime is the beginning of formal tertiary social control as it is usually thought of. Although such activity provides the major formal justification of the police, it actually constitutes a small, but symbolically important, portion of their activities.

The Police as Agents of Social Control

The police support other social control efforts and agencies by many of their actions. They may support a secondary control agent by informing a violator, authoritatively, that should he not obey the controls of his family, he will be arrested. For example, in one case a 13-year-old boy was encountered when the officers responded to a disturbance call, which had been originally reported as a fight. It turned out that the "fight" was just a scuffle between brothers, but, in the course of investigating the complaint, the officer became aware of the fact that the boy had not been to school for five days, and his mother did not know how to cope with it. The officer sternly lectured the boy on his duty of obedience to his parents, then told his mother that she could contact the juvenile bureau if he refused to go to school on Monday morning, and a report of the present contact would be there to give them the background of the case. The officer had to exert quite a bit of effort to convince this thirteen-year-old that there were serious potential consequences of refusing to obey his parents. When the officer said he could be taken to juvenile hall, the boy said, "So what?" The officer said, "If you wise-off there, they put you in a little room and close the door until you decide to behave." After doing everything he could to reinforce the secondary control of the parents, the officer left.[35]

In some situations the police support one secondary social control system over another which seems to have gone awry. In responding to a family disturbance call, where it turned out a husband had been beating his wife, it became apparent that a possible solution was to help the wife leave with some of his relatives who offered to take care of her. Her husband was drunk, argumentative, openly hostile to us and to this proposal, but, by escorting her out and not arresting him, we shored up and assisted the secondary control system over the present emergency. Had we arrested him on her complaint, the reciprocal typifications of their marriage would have been damaged, perhaps in such a way that would have made the system incapable of dealing with its own trouble in the future by making it dependent on the intervention of the police, a tertiary agent.[36]

In other situations the police act as conveyors between some secondary control system and some non-legal tertiary control system. Thus the police assist in emergency mental illness apprehensions and in various medical emergencies. On one occasion my partner and I served an intemperance warrant on a husband that had been sworn out by his wife.[37] When we served the warrant, he was quite sober, but the civil nature of the proceeding was underscored by his being removed in an ambulance rather than in a police patrol wagon. (In San Francisco an officer in plain clothes, driving an unmarked station wagon serves all the mental illness petitions.)[38] Thus when the secondary control system required the help of a tertiary agent, the hospital, the police were called in to manage the transition of control.

In still other situations the police attempt to make relevant the typifications and thus the controls of another institution in which the offender participates in order to control his behavior in a situation where the present controls have proven insufficient.

"For example, when a Detroit officer reported to a family dispute in which a man had struck his wife, the officer told the man that he was acquainted with the man's employer and cautioned him that any further trouble might result in his losing his job. When the husband promised not to resort to physical violence again, the officer departed."[39]

The various institutions in which a person is involved generally are somewhat relevant to his behavior in other situations, but when they are remote, a person may not think of them in the heat of an argument. Thus when an officer can make them relevant, when he knows enough about the person to make the appropriate suggestion, he can often reinstitute control without acting as a formal control agent and invoking formal sanctions. "Professionalization" of police work often causes the officers to be isolated from the informal systems and forces them to rely on the formal controls at their disposal.

Symbolic support for primary and secondary controls is sometimes implicitly recognized by police writers in less formal terms;

"The most important work done by the police in preserving quiet and good order, however, results simply from the police being in existence. People are reluctant to 'tamper with the law' or to take advantage of their neighbors when they know that justice will be done. It is for this reason that police departments today strive to establish the reputation of invincibility, and to instill in the potential violator's mind a conviction that he 'cannot get away with it.'

This kind of public education by the police contributes more to law observance and general maintenance of the peace than anything else."[40]

Not only is the potential violator deterred, but so also are the people with whom he interacts. If a person, such as a wife, has formed a set of reciprocal typifications with a potential violator, the presence of the police may convince her to attempt to dissuade her husband from illegal action because the presence of a higher level of social control poses a threat to her institutionalized adaptations should her husband be arrested. Thus a wife may argue against her husband stealing a car, not because she feels that it is particularly wrong but because she feels that the police will possibly catch him, put him in jail, and she will be without support. Though seldom consciously argued, the same effect is produced in other secondary control relationships. The enforcement of the institution requirements by the social control agency stands as a reminder of official "reality." This puts a damper on deviant reciprocal typifications which otherwise could undermine the institution by flagrant disregard of it.

The secondary level of social control, custom, is the major source of primary social control, or morality, and it continues to reinforce it very effectively. All of the potential reactions of a person's friends, work mates, neighbors, and family may come to mind when thinking of the consequences of violating some law. In addition, a person's socialized sense of propriety and "rightness" is upheld and reinforced by the rewards and possible sanctions of those people with whom he has established reciprocal typifications.

Each level of social control has its own area of proper control and higher levels traditionally have no warrant to interfere unless a lower level proves incapable of dealing with its own problems. The individual ordinarily gets to keep control over his own mind unless he demonstrates that he cannot, in which case his family, secondary level, attempts to cope. Only when they fail is the tertiary level--psychiatrist, police, or mental hospital--called in. (Of course, people without families or friends may go direct to the psychiatrist or hospital.) The family ordinarily gets to keep control of its own problems and arguments until a breach of the peace serious enough to be reported to the police occurs or until the members individually or collectively decide to seek the help of a social worker, psychiatrist, or marriage counselor. Much of the reluctance of the police to actually interfere in family fights and neighborhood disputes, even when minor laws have been broken, comes from the feeling that such matters are better settled by the participants to their own satisfaction without the strain which would be caused by legal intervention.[41]

Because of his crucial location at the intersection of the secondary and tertiary social control systems, the officer often has to decide, like Maxwell's Demon, who is cool enough to be taken care of by the reinstitution of his own social controls, and who is hot enough to be a candidate for legal processing. Sometimes the choice is obvious, when the crimes are great enough or minor enough, other times the choice may be dictated by the availability of secondary social control agents. If they are available, the offender is turned over to them, if not, he goes to jail or the mental hospital.[42] These decisions to invoke or not to invoke the legal process are made daily, and if the decision is not to invoke, it is rarely recorded.

Conclusions

Social control originates in reciprocal typifications of behavior which become institutionalized. The control is in the existence of the institution. Typifications usually arise in the areas of labor, sex, and territoriality. To gain the benefits of the institution, the person conforms to the expectations of its members.

A child learns these institutions as "facts" in his socialization, but since all may not learn properly, or may not appreciate the necessity of the institution, and since many institutions may lead to different controls in a complex society, formal agents of social control become necessary.

Primary social control comes from the individual and his socialization. Secondary social control comes from the interactive relations a person is involved in and is basic to both primary and tertiary control. Tertiary social control comes from agencies which support important institutions. The various levels usually support one another in the absence of disturbing circumstances. Some problems are considered specific to each.

Each level has different rewards and punishments for the actor. Primary; guilt or good feelings. Secondary; praise, employment, or discharge and divorce. Tertiary; guidance (possibly) or prison, commitment, death. The rewards of tertiary control agencies are given to society as a whole rather than to individual actors (or, at least, the actors seldom know when they have benefited).

The control exercised at the primary and secondary levels is more efficient than that exercised at the tertiary level because, though the sanctions are less severe, they are more certain. Formal agents often use informal controls to accomplish their ends.

There are techniques to blunt control attempts by rationalization, withdrawal, or neutralization.

Tertiary agents as representatives of society as a whole keep the legitimate use of force, in part to keep secondary agents from establishing a feudal social order.

Social control breaks down when people are drunk, or unattached permanently or situationally to the controls of work, family, and neighborhood. The police sometimes have to substitute for secondary and primary control in family fights. Automobiles reduce secondary control and rely on primary and tertiary, making motorists into situational vagrants open to police control. The police sometimes act in lieu of conventional secondary controls for vagrants, sanctioning and occasionally protecting them.

It is possible that sub-cultures can have deviant typifications which they enforce with their own secondary and primary controls. The typifications come from their interactive experiences and may not be congruent with the typifications of the rule-making institutions in the territory. The existence of deviant secondary social controls depends on having a complex society, which also reduces the importance of all secondary controls.

The police mandate is unclear. There are the legally specified functions and the myriad of other functions which have accreted to or avulsed from these basic ones, in response to the demands of the community.

Others in the environment react to the mandate manifested in action, not to the formal mandate (though it may be important as an ideal).

The police are granted some legal powers to fulfill this mandate. They extend these powers by organization and discretion.

The police sometimes harass social deviants, either because the community desires it or because they themselves are offended. When these deviants are not breaking laws, the police stretch to find laws which they can apply, using them as weapons.

Finally, the police catch serious law-breakers and send them through the formal agencies of social control, the courts and prisons.

The police support secondary social control institutions, or support one over another, or convey deviants from secondary institutions unable to handle them to tertiary agencies, or attempt to make the secondary controls relevant to the offender.

The police are at the intersection of secondary and tertiary social control processes and often decide which way an offender will go.

CHAPTER II: THE RELATION OF THE SOCIAL CONTROL OF INTERACTIVE INSTITUTIONS TO THE SOCIAL CONTROL OF TERTIARY AGENTS

Most behavior is controlled by the participation of the actors in various interactive institutions which revolve around their work, their home life, and their neighborhoods. The social control which is provided by the police, a tertiary control agent, is generally congruent with the controls of custom, but occasionally discrepancies arise.

In the first section of this Chapter, the dilemma of the police regarding the kind of social control they should provide is explored. Their choice is whether to attempt to control a situation using interactive sanctions and/or following the customs of the participants, or using the formal legal sanctions which are at their disposal. In many cases, perhaps most, non-legal elements of the situation, including the expectations of the participants, enter in as important determinants of the sort of control to be provided.

In the second section, the ramifications of the provision of secondary control by tertiary control agents are explored, taking as examples the police dealings with alcoholics, the mentally ill and family problems.

In the third section, some of the interactive institutions which are important for controlling police behavior are explored. These institutions provide secondary social controls over a tertiary social control agent. These interactive institutions, established with other institutions in the community, largely determine the nature and direction of police action in many areas because they establish the behavior required of both parties involved in the transaction. These institutionalized exchanges, by making the police responsive to the community, often require the police to provide social control in areas of custom for which they have no legal warrant, and thus no special powers.

Secondary or Tertiary Control? A Dilemma of Tertiary Agents in Interactive Situations

"The ordinary citizen is not well informed about the true nature and extent of police powers."[43]

"When 'police violence,' for example, is under discussion, there is noticeable a clear-cut class attitude. The Top People tend to the view that if a man cuts up rough with the police and gets hurt, he has asked for and deserved what he got. (... ) The middle-class citizen tends to disbelieve all such stories, and is thus able fairly comfortably to dismiss them but is deeply shocked when one of them is proved true. The proles accept them as self-evidently true, (... ) and are genuinely surprised at any expression of doubt. The same is true of corruption and perjury, and other less clearly occupational lapses like burglary and fraud."[44]

There are two conceptions of proper police behavior which correspond to the level of social control which they exercise, These are the "legal" conception, and the "interactive" conception. The conceptions consist of sets of expectations about the behavior of police officers in various situations; specifically, whether the officer should invoke secondary or tertiary social controls. To an extent, the "legal" conception is held by the middle class in our society while the "interactive" conception is held by the lower class, which results from their existential positions relative to police activity. William F. Whyte observed this pattern in "Cornerville:"

"There are prevalent in society two general conceptions of the duty of the police officer. Middle class people feel that he should enforce the law without fear or favor. Cornerville people and many of the officers themselves believe that the policeman should have the confidence of the people in his area so that he can settle many difficulties in a personal manner without making arrests. These two conceptions are in a large measure contradictory. The policeman who takes a strictly legalistic view of his duties cuts himself off from personal relations necessary to enable him to serve as a mediator of disputes in his area. The policeman who develops close ties with local people is unable to act against them with the vigor prescribed by law."[45]

William Westley found in his study that a police officer assigned to a beat in a slum area:

^"...found that upon doing a favor for somebody he had to allow them to reciprocate the favor: to buy him something, a hat, a pair of shoes, a meal; and that when he refused to accept the return favor the people looked upon it as an attempt to hold something over them. In the slum jungle, law is particularly prominent and reciprocal incrimination is regarded as a prerequisite to friendship."[46]

In general, people who have had contact with the law, or people who live in social areas where such contact is common, believe the interactive conception of police behavior, and people who have not had such contact, except perhaps for traffic tickets, believe, more or less, in the legal conception. There are people, of course, who have never had an experience with the police themselves who have many of the negative expectations associated with the interactive conception because of their political commitment to causes which involve lower class people. Social workers, civil rights activists, VISTA volunteers, and other community organizers, though generally of middle-class extraction, have had enough vicarious experience so that they hold to the interactive conception. They tend to hear of the negative aspects of interaction with the police more often than the positive ones for a variety of reasons.[47] Even so, middle class activists in lower class settings provide a demonstration of the existential basis of the two conceptions.

The police officer is also aware of these two sets of expectations and he guides his action, in part, to take account of them. When he is in the street, he is not very visible to the command level of the police department so he can respond to interactive expectations. The command officers appear to know that he does this, in general, and they only get disturbed when it becomes too overt. A police captain interviewed before World War II by William F. Whyte said about the numbers racket:

"As long as it is kept quiet, the cop can't complain. We might say, "For God's sake, don't write them under my nose. Go in the back street." The police have to see that it doesn't become too open. Of course, if an officer accepts money to let them do business, that's a very serious thing.^{" [48]}

The policeman is not very visible to people in the street (in the sense of knowing what he is doing) unless he is actually interacting with them, so he can occasionally follow the legal conception completely without "ruining" his street reputation. Thus the officer segregates the contradictory role expectations by maintaining low visibility and manages to adapt. As will be brought out later, the balance which is struck and the tension which it causes varies with the closeness of the officer to the public. Any course which he follows has its perils:

"A patrolman can therefore compromise his legitimacy while maintaining order in one of two ways; either by visibly betraying his obligation to enforce some rules of law or by fulfilling these obligations in ways that conflict with the moral standards of the local population. If he is too legalistic, he runs the risk of being perceived as arrogant and unjust; but if he tailors his standards to the practices of the neighborhood rather than to its ideals, he is looked down on for abdicating his responsibilities altogether."[49]

Police Officers' Assumptions Regarding Neighborhoods

Neighborhoods are associated with different types of crime and have different reactions to criminal activity. In his patrolling, the officer is advised to look for certain types of criminal activity which are often associated with specific areas.

On occasion, police departments go so far as to make building-by-building studies of the areas they deal with, scoring each block on the basis of its police hazards, and assigning patrol areas on this basis.[50]

In addition, the officer can expect different customs regarding citizen's definitions of what ought to be considered a legal offense, and different levels of concern about the activity:

"A street fight in the upper-class residential section of a large city will result in numerous calls to the police. The same kind of activity in other areas may go unreported unless discovered by the police on patrol. The shot of a pistol, the scream of a woman, the tampering with a car, or the carrying of appliances through the streets in the dark hours of the morning--all indications of a possible crime--may bring residents pouring out into the streets in some areas, while not even arousing curiosity in others. These varied reactions, by the way, have important implications for the police administrator. He must make a difficult choice: to allow the indifference to dictate adoption of a lower level of enforcement in those areas in which such indifference exists, or to hold to a uniform city-wide policy of enforcement despite the lack of citizen cooperation in some areas."[51]

After the police administrator makes his "difficult choice" the officer in the field will make his easy choice. He will usually patrol looking for "good" crimes and overlooking almost all others unless a citizen actually complains. Even when a citizen complains, the officer is likely to share the neighborhood's lack of concern, and, as a consequence, take little action. When an officer new to a Negro "ghetto" beat in Westville gets excited over a battery, the cynicism and sarcasm of the older officers is immediate. One partner commented to me in this situation (while a new officer was calling over the radio for additional units to cover an area to look for a suspect) “Would you believe a man actually hit his wife, in Westville?"[52] In other words, the officers have conformed to the interactive institutions with which they are in direct contact so often that they have become habituated to responding in that way in that situation. Another officer made it clear that he was simply taking a reactive position to law enforcement:

"If they want to sign a complaint and prosecute, I'll go all the way with them and help them all I can. But if they are just going to diddle around (i. e., not prosecute) like usually, I could care less. Why bother? "[53]

A consequence of attention to objective indicators of criminality and to this negative assessment of the commitment to legal norms of the people in certain neighborhoods leads the officer to assume that certain types of people, and certain areas of the city (along with their inhabitants), are inherently suspicious.

"According to both gang members and patrolmen, residence in a neighborhood is the-most general indicator used by the police to select a sample of potential law violators. Many local patrolmen tend to consider all residents of "bad" neighborhoods rather weakly committed to whatever moral order they make it their business to enforce, and this transforms most of the people who use the streets in these neighborhoods into good candidates for suspicion."[54]

In many instances, the assumptions on which a police officer operates are based on an accurate assessment of pertinent aspects of the interactive reality available to him. This being the case, his assumptions are pragmatic and may not fit well with formal legal conceptions. On occasion, they may seem to be prejudicial, and in the strict sense are, but it is important to realize that he must make these pre-judgments to identify likely subjects for suspicion. One writer on police procedures suggests:

"Whenever you find that one (tavern or pool hall operator) was arrested for some illegal activity, you can be fairly sure that he is still involved in something illegal. Although a man's past record should never be used to persecute him, it would be silly to forget it in the naive belief that every person sent to jail or prison will be miraculously made honest by their experience. ... Use a man's past record as a basis for suspicion until his actions prove to you that your suspicions are groundless. To assume a man to be honest until you discover otherwise will brand you a 'chump'."[55]

Thus the patrolman in these cases operates on an interactive presumption of guilt, the opposite of the legal presumption of innocence.[56]

Some neighborhoods may actually be organized along criminal lines, or criminal activity may be so important that the citizen who lives in the neighborhood is fearful of even reporting offenses of which he is the victim.[57] Naturally an officer working in such a neighborhood will have different expectations and will act differently toward the people than he would in a less criminal neighborhood. One of my partners commented, as we were recovering a stolen car in the middle of a housing project, that we were, "In the heart of enemy territory." I looked around and saw sixty or seventy impassive, hostile faces looking at us and was inclined to agree.[58]

It is often assumed by sociologists and other commentators on the legal scene that the higher the social class of a defendant, the better chance he has of getting off without harsh punishment. This observation is probably true for major crimes and the legal process seen as a whole, but for minor crimes and the situations of arrest, bail, and court appearance, the people who have experienced them most often know the most about them and consequently come out best. Particularly in recurring situations, the law may have been explained many times by many officers to the same person. Juveniles who have been processed know the ropes. They tend to be affectedly polite, cooperative, and silent, knowing that anything they admit can be used against them. They know that "special officers" or merchant policemen have only a citizen's powers of arrest, and treat them with contempt. They know that the Westville police usually do not transport prisoners in patrol cars, but use a wagon, and so will harass patrol officers mercilessly until a patrol wagon shows up, whereupon they scatter in all directions.[59] One of the officers interviewed by William Westley also commented on this situation:

"I was amazed at the knowledge these people (in a slum area) have of the law. For example, if they take a beating, they know that they have to swear out a warrant before the policeman will arrest the other man. Nobody in Park Manor knows that."[60]

It has often been my experience in responding to a call about a family fight for the first words spoken to be, "He hit me and I want to arrest him." This indicates that the complainant knows that for a misdemeanor not committed in the officer's presence a citizen who witnessed the offense must make the arrest. I have no way of knowing how wide-spread knowledge of this point of law is in the middle class, but I think that it is rare. An important consequence of this knowledge of the law is that the officer cannot bluff knowledgeable people so easily.

Police Officers' Assumptions Regarding Individuals

The legal conception of the police officer is hardest to fulfill when the officer gets to know routine offenders as individuals, that is, when he has established some interactive institutional relationship with the person. Knowing what he does about the individual's situation, the officer may make more sophisticated judgments about the disposition to be accorded in the individual case, judgments which take law into account only if it is useful and relevant. Egon Bittner observed the following with a mentally ill person:

". . . a young woman in agitated distress was taken to the hospital in part because her fiancé arrived on the scene and proposed to take over. Prior to his arrival the officers were about ready to leave the patient in the care of her mother and a neighbor who appeared to have a soothing influence on her. The entry of the fiancé seemed quite innocuous to the observer, but the officers gathered from his remarks that the arrangements he had in mind were not only not feasible but even destructive. The evaluation was possible because the officers knew many factual details about the places, persons, and arrangements the man envisioned."[61]

Personal knowledge of offenders may also make their various denials and misrepresentations transparent:

"At some point during adolescence, however, a gang boy becomes recognizable to patrolmen by name. And when this happens, there is no longer any real escape from constant surveillance by the police. Most of the techniques used to dodge the situation of suspicion are rendered useless. Even if precautions are taken, the boys usually find that they are still trapped. Their place in the situation of suspicion becomes permanent."[62]

The importance of interactive institutions in decisions about the use of tertiary controls may be seen from these following, incidents.

My partner and I responded to a call regarding a family fight. When we arrived, the story was a usual one: the husband had awakened and found that his wife was trying to stab him with a pocket knife. The usual disposition in such a case would be to talk the incident out and when everyone seemed cooled off, to leave. In this particular case, however, I knew that just sixteen days before the man's wife had slashed open the back of his head while he was sitting at the dinner table, because I had participated in her arrest for "assault with a deadly weapon." Such being the case, we convinced the husband that he should leave the house for the night, or he might be killed, and my partner made the knife "disappear."[63]

On another occasion, a partner commented when we got an assignment, "Mrs. Green is drunk again." When we arrived at the address Mrs. Green was indeed drunk, and I remembered that I had been there the week before with a different partner.

On a third occasion, a return call to a family fight resulted in the husband leaving. There was some mention of a missing gun, and my partner later commented that the solution to that particular family's problems might not be far away. He said that if one shot the other then we could take the body to the morgue, the killer to jail, and the kids to the welfare department and the problem would be solved. The frustrations of returning again and again to a situation where nothing useful or permanent can be done may lead the officer to hope for some resolution, and not to worry too much about what it might be.

On a fourth occasion, as we drove past a house, my partner stated that a four-generation police-problem family lived there. The great grandmother, grandmother, mother, and ten-year-old daughter had all been arrested numerous times, generally for prostitution. The family had been a problem for the Westville Police Department for more than thirty years, according to the stories my partner had heard. He had only been on the department for a few years and had only had an opportunity to arrest three of the four generations.[64]

Problem families have also been observed in other cities.[65] The social control likely to be exercised by his family plays a large part in the legal disposition of a juvenile, if it is known to the officer.

"There is even some evidence to suggest that assessments about the type and quality of parental control are even more important factors in dispositions than any of the offense-related criteria. One of the main concerns of a juvenile officer is the likelihood of future offense, and this determination is often made on the basis of "the kinds of parents" a boy happens to possess. Thus the moral character of parents also passes under review; and if a house appears messy, a parent is missing, or a mother is on welfare, the probability of arrest increases. Similarly, a boy with a father and two older brothers in jail is considered a different sort of person from a boy whose immediate family is not known to the police."[66]

Some Origins of Cultural Expectations of the Public Regarding Police Action

The "legal" conception of police behavior held by the middle class depends for its continuance on a certain separation from the realities of lower class life and street life in general. The middle class person may contact a police officer now and then and find the contact a pleasant experience because both he and the officer define the situation in non-criminal terms and the officer makes a conscious attempt to adapt his language and actions to the social status of the person he is dealing with. When a middle class person, who expects that other people will be dealt with by the police as he has been, sees the police fighting a drunk into the patrol wagon, he assumes that the drunk "started it.” He is unlikely to see much of this street life, though, because the paths of middle class and lower class people seldom cross either in space or time, and even should they physically cross, their meanings and expectations differ so markedly that they can hardly be said to be in the same place. A street is something for a middle class person to drive down, someplace to meet friends and carry on business for the lower- class person. The middle class person does not see the lower class world as he drives by, and the middle class person's car is part of the background for the lower class person. A contact with the police takes on its subjective meanings from the context in which it is carried out.

To over simplify a situation which is actually quite complex, there are dealings with the police surrounded by "good" and "bad" conditions. There is a persistent ecology of conditions which goes a long way toward defining the nature of a police-citizen contact. Contacts which take place between the police and persons who "belong" in an area, during the day, which are citizen initiated, tend to be helpful and polite, especially if the area is middle class and residential. This is because nothing in the situation alerts the officer to the necessity of tertiary controls being applied. Contacts which the officer initiates, at night, with people who do not "belong" in an area, are likely to be punitive, especially if the area is lower class and industrial. Because the officer assumes that people in such situations are without reliable secondary controls. All of these elements do not need to be present to define the contact, and in some instances a person who belongs in an area will be more doubtful than a visitor, but, on the average, it is possible to predict that the behavior patterns of middle class people will tend to have them interacting with the police under "good" conditions and the behavior patterns of lower class people will predominantly cast them into "bad" conditions. Thus, quite independent of the characteristics of the individual, the experiences of people in different social classes will tend to reinforce the "legal" conception for the middle class and the "interactive" conception for the lower class.

Should anyone wish to experiment to test the truth of these assertions, they could try, first, asking directions to a restroom from a police officer in a park on Sunday afternoon, and, second, walking slowly around in a lower class or industrial district with a suitcase at two a. m. The contacts will probably be quite different, but somewhat typical of the routine middle class and lower class police contacts.

Conditions Supporting and Undermining the "Legal" Conception of Police Behavior

The "legal" conception (or tertiary social control agent exclusively) of police behavior requires that the officer function as an impartial, honest, uninvolved, dispassionate legal officer in all situations, in spite of any provocation. It serves a useful function as an ideal, even though it is never reached.

The more separated the officer is from the public, the more easily he can approximate the behavior required by the "legal" conception. State police forces which are not in contact with individuals except for law enforcement purposes are much easier to keep corruption-free than are municipal departments.[67] When an officer walks a beat, he is in constant human contact with the people of his beat and he begins to respond to them as people with whom he has understandings rather than as legal problems. The patrol car officer is in less contact and consequently knows fewer people, and so treats more people as legal problems. When police operations are centralized and district stations are eliminated, officers may be assigned to different beats and different shifts around the city as the need arises, further cutting off contacts with the public.

The officer who is in contact with the public may be seen as functioning as an agent both at the secondary level of social control and at the tertiary level, while the isolated officer functions largely on the tertiary level using negative legal sanctions instead of positive and negative, interactive ones. The "legal" officer is a rationally efficient bureaucrat carrying out his mandate without fear or favor. The "legal" image is a good one, for public relations conceived as an advertising man would think of it. It is "professional" appearing, and difficult to criticize except for its coldness. The officer who follows the "legal" conception most of the time may be an efficient police officer, or he may not. He is certainly going to limit his access to information from the underworld, and tips from friendly merchants, because he will have little contact with them.

Support for the "legal" conception may be mobilized by a public opinion process started by a police scandal based on illegal "interactive" practices. A cry for reform may cause a police department to adopt rigid controls and "professional" procedures. Public opinion is not a constant, however, and unless there is a "blow up" the people in the community have no effective way of transmitting their day-to-day feelings about the police to anyone who has the power to do anything about it. The police adopt and maintain "legal" behavior in anticipation of the occasional serious mobilization of public opinion. When there are powerful community groups ready to make an issue of any police failure to live up to the legal conception, there is, of course, pressure within the department for the officers to behave accordingly.

Incidents which affect opinion leaders are more likely to result in effective pressure on the police, for good or ill, than incidents affecting the powerless. Westley gave an example:

"The public, and, for the purposes of our case, we will represent it as the middle class club woman, in city X, long condemned the laxity in the enforcement of vice and gambling laws in city X, yet did nothing extraordinary to indicate their dissatisfaction in this area. However, when the police failed to immediately apprehend the murderer of one of their group, they raised a public outcry, organized and financed a powerful committee to investigate the police and politics in their city."[68]

Support for the "legal" conception also comes from progressive police administrators who wish to adopt business-like techniques to improve the reputation, quality, efficiency, honesty, and prestige of police work. On occasion, their desires put them in conflict with the officer in the street who is being required to do something very difficult; be in contact with the public but react only in an official manner.

The Officer Reacts to the Assumed Power or Status of the Offender

The "legally" oriented police officer treats everyone alike. No matter what the social position, race, or sex of the offender, the important consideration is the illegal act which they have committed. The head of the largest business in town and the shoe shiner on the corner are, and should be, equal before the law and its representative, the police officer. Both should be arrested if they break the law, and both treated with the same consideration and respect for their human dignity. Persons who have achieved the status of "criminal" can, of course, be treated with the appropriate precautions, but otherwise as any other person. This set of expectations is an ideal, but an ideal hard to reach in police service.

One factor which makes the "legal" conception easier to sustain is for the officer to be unaware of the social status of his suspect. In order for the officer to act on the basis of an ascribed status, the fact that the person has such status must be known to him. This may come about if the officer is isolated from the public. It may arise as a consequence of the size of the city. It may arise if the officer is a stranger to the community he works in. In a small town, in a situation where the officer has contact with the public, in a community which is his home town, the officer will be aware of many, many people in the community, their positions, and their names even if he has not ever met them. In a town with one school, one bank, one hospital, and one large manufacturing plant, every teacher, banker, doctor, and manufacturer will be known to the police officer. He may not have met them, but when they identify themselves to him, their position and function in the community becomes instantly known. In such a community, an arrest may have disastrous consequences for the individual arrested, and this, too, is known to the police officer. He may decide not to arrest on this basis.[69] In a larger city, far fewer of the occupants of these positions are known to the officer, and he may feel nothing about the consequences of the arrest for their career. In a city with a hundred banks, dozens of schools and hospitals, and perhaps a thousand manufacturers large and small, such as Westville, there are many people who would get special consideration from a small town police officer who get routine and "legal" treatment. It takes far more status to get a "break" from the police in a large town than it does in a small one.

One way in which a legal or interactive orientation is manifested is in the demeanor of the officer. Michael Banton wrote:

"... many of the policemen whom the author has observed on patrol, . . . , in practice adopt an impersonal manner with socially superior offenders and a familiar one with socially inferior offenders.''[70]

In my own experience, I have noted that the officers I have ridden with almost invariably, there have been one or two exceptions, will address a Negro complainant or offender by his or her first name and will use "Mr." or "Mrs." if the person is white. It is difficult to tell if this is a specifically racial reaction because Westville has almost no poor whites for comparison.[71]

Another way in which an interactive institutional orientation is sometimes developed was observed when I was riding with an out-of-state police department. As we passed a downtown club where a debutante ball was in progress, I asked whether they were going to do anything about the fact that in a short while a great many drunk, under-age couples would be driving away from that party. One officer responded:

"Not me. I stopped a big shot once. Never again. The next morning he had me up before the chief accused of shaking him down for a hundred dollars. He sued, and I almost lost my job."[72]

When I have mentioned this incident to Westville officers, they have been incredulous, and unanimous in asserting that "it couldn't happen here." In general, middle class drunk drivers have a lower probability of being arrested than do lower class drunk drivers because the areas in which they drive are less likely to be frequented by police patrol units. Police cars are assigned on the basis of the need for their services, and this need is greater in lower-class areas so there are more units which can observe a lower-class person on his way home, and possibly arrest him if there is no other pressing business. Similarly, honest citizens in high crime areas are likely to be mistakenly stopped and treated as if they were criminals because the police officer ascribes criminal status to the entire area.[73] Street gatherings in such areas are dispersed where they would not be in a middle class area because the officer feels, often correctly, that this will prevent fights and disturbances.[74]

Although the police officer may have some difficulty in perceiving the socio-economic status of the person with whom he is dealing, he has no difficulty in perceiving the race. Race is an important basis for interactive orientation in police work. Although Westville officers that I know never refer to Negroes publicly by any slang terms (it has been specifically prohibited by a departmental order),[75] in the privacy of the patrol car, Negroes are "animals," "cannibals," "orangutans," "spear chunkers", or "spear chuckers" to some officers. To a great many more officers, the Negro, complainant or offender, is an object of derision. It is quite common for officers to adopt an exaggerated southern dialect mocking the Negroes' typical complaints, when the subject comes up.[76] Additionally, some officers use a slang expression, "T. N. A." which means ^"Typical Negro Action," to dismiss almost any behavior they disapprove of. It can refer to a group of teen-agers dancing to a transistor radio on a street corner, to teen-agers verbally harassing the police as they drive by, or to the complaint of a woman who has just been hit by her boyfriend or husband.[77] The use of this term, "T. N. A.," signifies that the officer is bored by the act and considers it the product of a degraded person of whom better is not to be expected. Important as these negative attitudes are, the relation of the police officer to Negro crime and violence is more affected by several structural factors than by the individual officer's attitudes.

Historically, the problem of crime and violence in the Negro community has been of relatively less importance to the police than crime and violence in the white community. In many instances, the police let customary dispute settling procedures, i. e, secondary social control, carry the burden without imposing formal legal sanctions. Albert Reiss and David Bordua wrote:

"Among the private arrangements that the police may allow to stand is the use of violence among subordinate or peripheral groups in the society. The most outstanding instance until recently has been the willingness of the American police to respect intraracial violence among Negroes, thus implicitly defining the Negro population in a sense as a group "without' the law."[78]

Or, as a southern Detective Captain said at the time of the First World War:

"In this town there are three classes of homicide. If a nigger kills a white man, that's murder. If a white man kills a nigger, that's justifiable homicide. If a nigger kills a nigger, that's one less nigger."[79]

The idea of professional police work, the ideal of proper, "legal" social control, requires that the protection of the law be extended into the Negro community and that the law be enforced on the basis of the violations rather than the interactive institutions of the participants. To the extent that this takes place, the apparent crime rate, the statistics of "Crimes Known to the Police," will increase in the Negro areas of the city as official action replaces private violence. At present, Negroes who live in predominantly Negro areas are victims of under-enforcement of the law far more than of over-enforcement.

Almost all sociological writers on police work have mentioned the under-enforcement of law in Negro communities.[80] Even though the professional orientation is making a great deal of headway, two incidents in which I was involved show the pattern of legal under-enforcement still exists.

In the first incident, my partner and I responded to a call regarding a family fight. There was a great deal of confusion. In addition to the complainant, a twenty-year-old Negro girl, there were about a dozen other women and children in the small apartment, all talking at the same time. The girl had been hit in the face and body by her "common-law" husband, a twenty-year-old Negro. He had beaten her, knocked her down, and "stomped" her in the face. She had a large lump on the forehead where he had kicked her. They had two children, both small and crying. The officer taking the report tried to convince the complainant to sign the complaint and to agree to prosecute, and had her reluctant consent to do so, until one of the other women present convinced her not to. She then refused to sign, and we released her husband from custody. So long as the offense was interpreted as a misdemeanor, this was the only legal course of action open. It would also have been possible to have interpreted the offense as "assault with a deadly weapon," a felony, because of the use of the shoes in "stomping," and to have arrested the offender on the officer's own complaint. This might well have happened if the people involved had been white. As it was, it was written off as a "west Westville battery," and no action was taken.[81]

In the second incident, another partner and I were assigned to investigate a missing person report. When we arrived, it was midnight on a Friday night. The complainant, a thirty-four-year-old Negro woman, said that her nine-year-old boy had run away from the house about 6 p.m. that evening and had not come home yet. A missing child of that age at that hour is officially interpreted as a matter of urgent concern unless the surrounding circumstances indicate otherwise. In this case, because he had left with other boys his age (whom the mother did not know), the officer advised her not to file a formal report of a missing person, because the boy would probably show up in the morning and the result of filing a report would be that there would be police officers all over the area looking for him for hours. She reluctantly agreed not to file a report and we left. As we left, my partner commented on the smell of urine in the house, and on people who didn't know who their children's friends were. Had the complainant been white, and living in a good neighborhood, a missing person broadcast would probably have been made under the same circumstances.[82]

People build their expectations of the police from their experiences with the police, the things they read, and the experiences they hear about from their friends and neighbors. Negroes in Westville have come to expect little from the police because of incidents such as the above. As the thrust toward the "legal" conception of police behavior continues, two results can be expected. First, some Negro complainants will get better legal service which they may or may not turn out to appreciate. (Should the husband have been arrested in the first incident mentioned above, the wife might have suffered in the long run, when he got out of jail.) Second, there will be increasing cries of "police persecution" and complaints about the "white man's law" being imposed on the black community, because many people not currently arrested will be going to jail, some for long terms. These people will prefer the "interaction" conception officer, who let things ride. The net effect may be a reluctance to call the police about interpersonal matters and an apparent reduction in the need for police services. Imposition of uniform legal standards appears to be inevitable in the long run because an increasing respect for legality in police work will gradually invade even the worst areas of the cities, even though at present neighborhoods tend to get the kind of law enforcement they desire and show they are willing to accept.

The Officer is Presented with Extra-legal Requests

A great many people who hold to the "interactive" conception of police behavior expect the police officer to be generally helpful in his relationships to them. Many poor people use the police as the first port of call in times of trouble. The police are used where the middle class would call a family doctor, a marriage counselor, or a minister.[83] In many cases, the police officer arrives at the scene of some sort of disturbance and finds that there is no legal action to be taken, or that any legal action which could be taken will make the situation worse, and he is left in the position of being a relatively knowledgeable outsider who can suggest various courses of action to the people there. While a strictly legalistic interpretation of his duties would suggest that he ought to refrain from offering advice, in the human situation he faces, he can often be of some help, and can render a service to the public. Sometimes this is a referral to other agencies, sometimes specific advice. Depending on the officer and the situation, the advice may be given in a helpful or disgusted manner. I have seen officers suggest consulting a doctor, a psychiatrist, or the juvenile bureau of the police department. I have seen officers suggest that one person leave the house in order to avoid more trouble, and I have seen officers suggest that couples get a divorce, stop drinking, and be more tolerant of each other. The advice does not appear to be of very high quality, often, but it may be better than any other the people involved could get at the moment, and they may know the police officer better than they know any professional counselor.

The Officer's Emotional Involvement

According to the "legal" conception, the police officer should carry out his duties in a rational and emotionless manner, with dignity and impartiality. Police officials sometimes feel, according to Banton, that patrolmen are "insufficiently dignified both on the street and in their dealings with citizens."[84] And that the public will not believe the officer important if he does not appear so. As one police writer put it:

"The public looks upon these (uniformed) officers of the law as reflecting the law in all its aspects. Thus, if a policeman is uncouth in the way he applies the law, the citizen will think that not the policeman alone but the law, as well, should be changed. Moreover, the conduct of a policeman in uniform is extremely important with reference to the reputation of the entire force."[85]

On the other hand, the officers themselves know that a friendly approach is likely to allow them to define the situation in such a way that they will not have to fight with a suspect.[86] On occasion, an officer may fake affectivity by, for example, swearing at an offender so that he can be "punished" without the necessity of arresting him which, of course, is an interactive sanction.[87]

Regardless of the "legal" conception, it is to be expected that on occasion even the most dispassionate officer will become personally outraged at some turn of events, and when he does so, he may use his legal police powers in service of his own emotions. Officers may not even have to misuse their powers, they may simply choose to use them where in their own discretion they would usually not do so. Thus persons who curse at police officers can expect that, at the least, their infraction will be viewed and reported in the most serious light possible.

People who have had experience with police officers know that they get affectively involved in their work. One writer on "policemanship" suggests:

"Respect is the key. If you treat police officers with respect you will have less trouble in your relations with the police than if you do not. If you cause or permit a police officer to feel that you do not respect him or his department, you may be beaten up, arrested roughly or shot."[88]

This is too strong a view, but it is one that is held by many people the police deal with.

The Officer's Own Interactive-Institutional Relationships Affect His Action

The "legal" conception police officer enforces the law without regard for the relation the suspect has to him or the police department. If the Mayor's car is parked illegally, it gets a ticket, if the policy is to only accept cash for bail, the check of the most influential man in town will be refused.[89]

Generally, the one group of people who most benefit from their interactive relation to the police officer consists of other police officers. Police officers do not usually write tickets for other officers. One officer referred to this practice as the "Policemen's Protective Association," others as "professional courtesy." Some police officers take advantage of their marked patrol cars to drive at high speed in the city, some routinely run red lights even on non-emergency calls; as one officer put it: "Who is going to arrest me?"[90] Off duty, police officers make a point of identifying themselves if they are stopped, and they usually get special consideration.[91] Sometimes officers leave their Arrest form books or Field Interrogation books on the dashboard of their private cars so that other officers will notice and not write them parking tickets. Other officers leave their official calling cards on the dashboard for the same reason.[92] None of these techniques is fool-proof, however, because some officers do not play the game and others do not notice. Officers consider it almost a "right" of the job. Banton mentioned that the southern officers that he interviewed were usually able to avoid tickets.[93]

So long as police officers can use discretion in any case at all, it must be expected that persons who are in a particular interactive relationship with the officers will benefit from this discretion. It was explicitly stated in training that one should not arrest one's own grandmother for drunk driving, and implicitly this protection is extended to all those who are law-enforcement "relatives" as well, because secondary sanctions can be brought to bear on officers who "misuse" their powers by fellow officers.

Self Interest May Lead to Corruption

The "legal" conception police officer serves the city he works for and the public interest in general. He does not use his office for private gain. The rules of practically every police department prohibit the accepting of gratuities, engaging in politics, drinking on duty, and arresting in his own disputes.[94] In many cases, the officers themselves are highly critical of other officers who engage in this sort of activity because they feel, correctly, that it does more to degrade the image of the police than any other activity. In Chicago, ". . . most policemen reacted to the new system with relief," when O. W. Wilson stopped bribes.[95] In Westville at the beginning of the Christmas season, a memorandum was distributed to all members of the department reminding them of the regulation which prohibits accepting gifts and gratuities. The possibility of big or important graft does not appear to exist in Westville, or in many police departments in Western states.

Some of those who hold the "interaction" conception of police behavior feel that the police officer is, or should be, open to bribes. In relatively honest police departments, bribes of money are out of the question for most officers. There is simply no congruence between the amount of money which is likely to be offered and the amount it would have to be for the officer to risk his relatively high-paying and secure job.[96] If an officer's superiors are "on-the-take" the officer can be as well, but if they are not, then the interactive institutions will not support him and the officer must evaluate each bribe offer in terms of whether it is worth his job, and the possibility of ever getting another one.

The police officer is probably more honest than the average worker who comes from a similar background. Yet, a great deal of concern is manifested over police criminality. This concern arises because of the definition of the officer's role as society's agent, and because the officer's job is to suppress criminality. A police officer is thus held to much higher standards than is the average working man. If an employee steals, the "class" of employees, being extensive and indefinite, does not come into disrepute. If an officer steals, all police officers are degraded. When one officer steals, it is a chink in the moral armor of all, which is seized upon by people who themselves have been demonstrated to be morally flawed by the police and are seeking to "condemn the condemners."[97] A police officer must be "above reproach" for this reason.

Importance of the "Interactive" and "Legal" Conceptions

Bloodless roles are difficult to live up to in any event, and a role such as the legally oriented police role qualifies as an exceptionally difficult one. One of the major sources of difficulty is that in his contacts with the public, the officer will not only be personally inclined to act according to the "interactive" conception because it is easier, but he will also come to understand that the segment of the public with which he has the most contact expects it, and will make their expectations known.

The most important variable in the existential relevance of the two conceptions is the amount of contact that the officer has with the public. In Westville, the few walking beats which still exist are reserved for those officers who have demonstrated to their sergeant that they have the maturity and judgment to handle the problems implicit in intensive public contact without creating bad public relations or a scandal for the police department. The "walking man" must create from the two conceptions a combination which will allow him to operate effectively in close contact with the public, a very difficult job.[98]

The choice for the officer between the two models may involve the decision to engage the interactive social controls existent in the situation by adopting the interactive approach, or having to engage the legal process instead by sticking to the "legal" conception. The officer using the "legal" approach has no particular trading material (i.e., interactive rewards) to get people to do what he wants, he has only legal threats and the fear he can produce of legal consequences.

Secondary Control by Tertiary Control Agents: Interactive Institutions and Legal Intervention

Behavior exists and arises out of the apparent necessities of the situation as they are apperceived by the participants. It is only later that people construct categories and systems of categories to describe the behavior which has taken place. These systems of categories may be well or looselyrelated to the feelings and customs of people actually engaged in the behavior; there are almost certain to be discrepancies. Many forms of behavior which are distressing to victims or participants have been made illegal, many have not. When an act has been made illegal, it opens the possibility that tertiary agents from outside of the immediate situation may become interested in it, and may take over the regulation of the behavior from people within the situation. When it has not been made illegal, but the interactive institution's control has broken down, people outside of the institution may act as umpires, but, generally, may not take over the regulation of the system. Since behavior itself is "meaningless," deriving its apparent meaning from the interpretations placed on it, people often are confused regarding the "proper" course of action to follow unless they are quite knowledgeable about the precise distinctions between the various possible formal systems of categorization. Since they are confused, and no other solution is immediately apparent, the police are often called to deal with behavior which is not illegal, though it may be "wrong" or immoral, which is distressing to the people in a situation. Obviously people who are in a position to call the correct agency, or to take other appropriate action, do not call the police to take care of routine trouble, unless it is legal trouble.

In a simple society where there is no great division of labor, and where most people are known to one another, at least by reputation, the "experts" in each specialty are known to all. Should a man have trouble with his wife, someone, the shaman, the chief, or some elderly woman, is recognized as the person to consult about the trouble. In a complex society, there has been increasing specialization in every field and there is no longer a single, recognized person to go to for each broad category of troubles. Should a man have trouble with his wife, he might go to see a medical doctor, a psychiatrist, a psychiatric social worker, a clergyman, a family service clinic, a bartender, a psychologist, a welfare worker, a lawyer, a police officer, or someone whose advice he feels would be good. Each sort of advice might be best for a specific situation, but what sort of advice is best for the concrete situation that he is involved in may not be known to him. The distribution of knowledge about such matters is not equal throughout society. Better educated people have a better idea of the range and variety of specialists who deal with personal problems than do the less well educated. Even should a well educated person not know the specialist he wants, he may know that he needs a specialist and he may know of someone whose specialty is referring people to other specialists. Even this knowledge may be unavailable to a poor or uneducated person. He may have a problem which he recognizes as a problem but not have anyone to call, or ask about it. In this situation, the poor person calls the police.

Unlike other tertiary social control agencies, the police will come when someone calls twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The police are the only city office open, the only legal office, often the only emergency medical service known to the person in difficulty, they are the only "family service clinic" with twenty-four hour home delivery of advice, and they are often the only people who will do anything at all about some situations, such as venereal disease among prostitutes. None of these areas are the primary responsibility of the police, and the police are not equipped or trained to deal in a very satisfactory way with many of the problems which arise. It is not always clear, however, when a legal, or tertiary control, problem may be involved, so the police must respond to calls, and once there they try to give what advice or help they can.

Interpersonal problems come to a head when people are interacting with one another. During the work day when the various specialists are holding office hours, the people who are their potential clients are also at work and separated from their wives and husbands. On the weekends when people are not controlled by the interactive institutions of their jobs, they spend more time in each other's company, they often drink and suppress whatever personal controls they might have in other situations, and when problems arise, the police are the only agency which can take care of them.

The police pick up many tasks because they are the only agency available. Emergency notifications for people who do not have telephones are sometimes taken care of by the police, as are found property, sickness, loose animals, and disputes between landlords and tenants. The police actually spend a large portion of their time dealing with such problems, and a relatively small portion dealing with crime, or crime prevention. In fact, if one were to deduce the mandate of the police from their time allocation, one might conclude that they were a miscellaneous social service and control agency which maintained a sideline in crime work. The fact that the police are not such an agency, however, keeps them from developing a sustained concern with the social problems which come to their attention.

Professional social work involves a planned intervention over a period of time and often a knowledgeable referral to other agencies. Since it is not officially their responsibility to take care of the various problems they do take care of, the police try to avoid the sustained interest which would be required to do the job well.

"Whenever certain known persons come to the attention of officers, it is said that they are "acting up again." The avoidance of sustained concern and attention is part of the official posture of the police and an expression of the fact that the illness as such is of little interest and that it acquires relevance only through its unpredictable exacerbations."[99]

The intervention which the police practice often comes at a period in the development of the problem where "talking it over" is largely out of the question, because the problem has developed to the point that violence is highly likely, if it has not already occurred. When problems reach this point, there are few community agencies which are equipped to deal with them besides the police. The fact that police officers are armed and equipped for violence is necessary in many family disturbance calls. In the United States in the five-year period 1960-1965, fifty-four police officers were killed answering disturbance calls. This made disturbance calls one of the largest categories of police deaths for that period.[100] Even were some other social agency to attempt to take over the miscellaneous social control functions of the police, it would probably be necessary to arm them and equip them with police-type powers because of the potential danger of the situation.

Although most of the social service functions the police perform seem to be accidental accretions to their mandate resulting from their armed availability, there have been police officers and police departments which have suggested that some forms of social work were proper parts of the police function.

"In a remarkable report on "Policemen as Social Workers," rendered in 1919, Chief Vollmer (of Berkeley, California) urged all cops to take an active interest, and even assume leadership wherever possible in general movements to improve their communities. It was an essential part of crime prevention and control, he said, for policemen to help get better housing in slum areas, better schools, more health clinics for children, improved welfare services for indigents, more adequate aid for the physically and mentally handicapped.&qu