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Convenient Whipping Boy. Feeling somewhat besieged, policemen not only work together but spend their off-duty time together, and police families often have little social life outside the police-family orbit. "Other people generally don't like police," explains Christos Kasaras, a patrolman on Manhattan's West Side. The result is a kind of inbreed ing that tends to make police the victims of their own stereotypes.
Yet very often, as New York's Howard Leary observes, the policeman has reason to feel rankled: he is indeed what Leary calls "the convenient whipping boy" for many of society's ills. All things considered, it is almost a miracle that American cops, who receive little respect from anybody for perhaps the toughest job in the U.S., are as good as they are. "It is too easy to forget," says University of Chicago Sociologist Jerome Skolnick, "that police are only people," with the same frustrations and prejudices that others of similar backgrounds might have. "No matter what people call you," says Patrolman Kasaras, "you're supposed to contain yourself." The young policeman, adds Reddin, "deals with filth, the dregs of humanity, on a minute-to-minute basis. It's not hard for him to reach a point where he says that people are no damn good, so to hell with people." Yet as Miami Beach's Chief Rocky Pomerance only half-jokingly observes, "a policeman these days has to be part priest, part psychiatrist, part social worker, part karate expert—and he has to be able to make a decision in a few seconds that will stand up before complex legal scrutiny clear up to the U.S. Supreme Court."
Outmoded administrative systems that force every recruit to start off in the lowest rank discourage the educated and the enterprising from becoming policemen. Every would-be police chief has to serve a menial apprenticeship; no one from outside, regardless of his qualifications, can come in at the middle. Some, like Reddin, favor lateral entry, commonplace in every other organization, but none have succeeded in changing the ossified structure of the police establishment. Pay is equally out of date; the median for patrolmen in big cities: $6,088.
One consequence is a dismayingly low percentage of college men in police work. Only a very few forces, including Los Angeles', require any higher education at all. Another is that more and more policemen have to moonlight to make ends meet—and in most cities are required to carry their guns off duty—as guards or cabbies. This can itself provoke violence. Arguing in a New York traffic tie-up last week, one off-duty cop shot another and was, in turn, shot by a third. Result: one dead, one seriously wounded.