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Duties vary just as widely. Boston police must not only conduct an annual door-to-door census, a chore that consumes ten weeks, but also have to issue permits for dogs, guns, private detectives, itinerant musicians, pawnbrokers, junk dealers, new-and used-car dealers, and hackney cabs. In Los Angeles, policemen going on duty must pause for a reading of schoolchildren's essays on the glories of the L.A.P.D. Red tape envelops every police department, but few can compete with New York's for sheer bulk. A New York cop who arrests a teen-age drug addict must fill out well over 100 forms—enough to make any but the most conscientious think twice before stopping a suspect. And the cop on the beat still uses the same weapons he did 100 years ago—the billy club and the gun—and often wields them with Dickensian abandon.
All too often he also has the attitudes of 100 years ago. While the best police heads have made strides in instilling professionalism in their forces, others, as in Boston, Pittsburgh and Memphis, have not taken even the first step. Few have recognized that in the turbid inner cities more than efficiency is needed, that the cop must indeed be a man of many parts. Among the few: New York's Howard Leary, Washington's Patrick Murphy, Atlanta's Herbert Jenkins, St. Louis' Curtis Brostron. And, of course, Tom Reddin.
The Glass House. Most Americans heard of Reddin only after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, when, for a period of 42 nearly sleepless hours, he directed the investigation of the murder and also expertly fielded newsmen's questions on nationwide TV. Most Californians knew of him long before, almost from the very day in February 1967 that he moved into the chief's office in L.A.'s new eight-story headquarters building, known to the force as the "Glass House."
The late William Parker, Reddin's predecessor, was the epitome of the police professional, a crusty authoritarian who had little truck with sociological theories. Taking over a scandal-tainted force in 1950, Parker made it as honest as any in the nation, boosting standards, competence and morale, and giving the L.A. police a paramilitary esprit. He did not, however, understand the new problems caused by the postwar influx of Mexican-Americans and Negroes. For several years before his death in 1966, the once progressive department stagnated as the ailing chief's ideas congealed into dogma and he labored to surround the department, in Reddin's words, with a "blue curtain of secrecy."
Black people, L.A. State Senator Mervyn Dymally told the McCone commission investigating the Watts riot, "generally expected the worst from the police—and generally received it." Even after Watts had been pacified in 1965, Parker could not help exulting: "We're on the top, and they're on the bottom."