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Despite the glaring lack of uniform standards across the country, most police recruits fit Dr. Rhead's prescription, as far as it goes. In Eastern and Midwestern cities, the typical recruit is a Roman Catholic of blue-collar background and Irish, Polish or perhaps Italian ancestry. Often, says Chicago Psychologist Arnold Abrams, he has been "exposed to an autocratic environment." Most recruits are eldest sons; most tend to be nervous around authority. In Detroit, says former Police
Commissioner Ray Girardin, they usually come from the bottom 25% of their high school class. U.C.L.A. Psychiatrist Charles Wahl adds that most policemen he has worked with had "harsh and punitive fathers."
Fortunately, more and more police departments now use psychiatrists or psychologists to screen applicants. The results are sometimes startling. In Chicago, between 1961 and 1963, an "excessive number" of applicants rejected for patrolman suffered from paranoia. "There is something about police power that attracts to its ranks a particular kind of person," explains Dr. Abrams, a member of the examining team. "It gives them an umbrella to legitimatize their pathology. They can act out their problems and be rewarded for it."
The same kind of analysis can, of course, be applied to the motives of judges, surgeons, soldiers and presidential candidates, to say nothing of journalists. In fact, police work also attracts large numbers of men who sincerely want to serve the public, delight in chores as disparate as solving murders and delivering babies, and have all the moral courage requisite to making that awesome police decision—to kill or not to kill.* In California, one study showed that 50% of one police force (Sausalito) had the same psychological profile as doctors and ministers. If most cops were not highly motivated, how could they stand the thankless job of doing society's dirty work?
Society s Spoiled Darlings
Politically, policemen are usually conservative. The policeman, says Berkeley Criminologist Gordon Misner, "pictures himself as the crime fighter standing alone against the Mongol hordes, without the support of the public, the politicians or the courts. You don't often find a liberal in policing. And if you do, by the time he's been in a while-longer, he's going to be voting for Governor Wallace."