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Not only has society put the policeman on the front line in the ghetto, but it has saddled him with a multitude of problems that are social, medical or, as in traffic control, economic rather than criminal. Sometimes they are not even that, but only the moral expressions of an earlier generation. "The criminal code tends to make a crime of everything that people are against," says the President's crime commission. "The result is that it becomes society's trash bin. The police have to rummage around in this material, and are expected to prevent everything that is unlawful." More important, observes Sociologist Skolnick, some of the vice laws actually encourage criminality by creating a black market of illegal demands—prostitutes, narcotics, the numbers game—that can exist only with the connivance of corrupt cops.
All Your Time. Apart from nourishing corruption, vice laws tie many men down fighting infractions that most Americans are guilty of themselves or condone. Some 200 men assigned to the L.A. vice squad spend much of their time keeping tabs on minor gamblers, striptease clubs, prostitutes and sexual perverts. "Why, with all the homosexuals, bisexuals, transvestites, and trans-sexuals," declares San Francisco's Cahill, "it takes all your time figuring them out. It's shocking how little time we have left for major crime." The most bothersome and time-consuming task of all is handling public drunks, who, though hardly a serious menace to society, account for one-third of all arrests in the U.S.*
The Difference. Obviously, almost anything that will improve the police will cost money: better law enforcement cannot be purchased on the cheap. Not only are salaries too low, but too little is spent on equipment, buildings and, most of all, research. Most chiefs scoff at the much publicized gadgetry, such as "instant banana peel," a chemical that makes streets too slippery for rioters to stay on their feet. But police professionals are, somewhat belatedly, impressed by computers and faster communications techniques. Reddin, for example, wants three things from the technicians: a Dick Tracy-type wrist radio to connect the patrolman to the station house; a fast scanner to pick out suspects' fingerprints, and a dashboard computer console to tie patrol cars to giant memory banks in Sacramento and L.A. Computers could then tell, within three seconds, whether a suspect had a record.
Yet in the end, it is the individual cop who is the overseer of peaceful normalcy. Often under the most difficult circumstances, he is the thin blue line between law and disorder, civilization and anarchy. He is the man whom Tom Reddin and others like him are trying to lead—and change. Few experts promise quick results. As Tom Reddin puts it: "We're reversing a whole lifetime of a different kind of police work." Understandably, the policeman—even the "streetcorner sociologist"—is not so much concerned with social trends as with the job an older society gave him to do.