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The truth is that such disasters as the Battle of Chicago are easily avoided by granting the demonstrators' legitimate demands, such as rallying in parks, and smothering the affair in a soft blanket of civic disinterest. This takes official determination to forget the High Noon syndrome, ample communication with demonstration leaders and masses of calm cops who flood the premises, making sure that any violence is committed only by small groups of isolated, discredited protesters. When 25,000 anti-Castro Cubans wanted to picket the Republican Convention, for example, Miami Beach Police Chief Pomerance quietly diverted all but 75 to Miami Stadium and carefully cooled off his frazzled men in a special air-conditioned lounge adjoining the convention hall. The whole episode barely made the scene on television.
The biggest police problem in the U.S. today, says Los Angeles' Chief Reddin, "is to find ways to equip the policeman so that he won't give in to the baiting and the frustrations." The problem requires more than rigorous discipline and court decisions that ban lawless police practices. Like most tense people, the police could use psychiatric help in discharging hostilities before they explode. The experience of Sausalito, a small city across the bay from San Francisco, offers suggestions. Once a month the entire police department of 29 men joins Psychiatrist Edward Shev for group-therapy discussions about tension, hippies, homosexuals, Negroes, peaceniks and anything else likely to bring the police uptight. Instead of lashing out, the Sausalito cop is now apt to ask coolly: "What do you want to go and provoke me for?" Significantly, no one has lodged a complaint against Sausalito police in two years. Their hostilities under control, the men are also freer to focus on serious crimes—residential burglaries and auto thefts have been cut in half. In similar sessions with local citizens, Houston cops are trying hard to understand minority-group problems.
Much police frustration would vanish overnight if salaries rose by 50%—to what many union plumbers make. Police brains would sharpen immensely if every department in the country stopped requiring even the best-educated rookies to start out as foot patrolmen. Instead, the police ought to ease archaic seniority and allow college graduates to start as management trainees. Equally important, police duties should be drastically reduced and refined. Certainly, police should not be responsible for carting drunks to jail—one-third of all arrests. A good case could be made for putting traffic control in the hands of some other body—and for repealing scores of antique laws that make it criminal to behave in ways that offended society in the past but are now irrelevant. "The white middle class uses criminal codes as garbage cans," says University of Michigan Law Professor Yale Kamisar. "Whenever it has a problem it doesn't want to treat adequately, it draws up a criminal statute."
The Three Types