(5 of 5)
The presidential crime commission offered a partial solution to overworked police forces: Split up the policeman's job three different ways. Under this plan, a "community service officer," often a youth from the ghetto, would perform minor investigative chores, rescue cats, and keep in touch with combustible young people. A police officer, one step higher, would control traffic, hold back crowds at parades, and investigate more serious crimes. A police agent, the best-trained, best-educated man on the ladder, would patrol high-crime areas, respond to delicate racial situations, and take care of tense confrontations.
Others have even more radical ideas. University of Chicago Sociologist Jerome Skolnick argues that the rigid military model for police is out of date, suggests that civilian clothes with mere badges would bring policemen closer to their fellow citizens. According to Arnold Sagalyn, formerly a top Treasury Department lawman, police should quit being lonely adversaries and help tackle urban problems—thus preventing a good many crimes that now plague police. Berkeley Psychiatrist Bernard Diamond argues that police forces should also stop recruiting primarily tough men who can "shoot it out." As he sees it, the right model is a potential community-relations expert.
Whatever the solution, the question for Americans is not what's wrong with the police, but what citizens can do to help. For all its Birchite origin, there is no real alternative to the right-wing slogan, "Support your local police." In its proper definition, support would mean paying higher taxes for higher wages to attract better policemen, and for modern equipment to match modern tasks. It would also mean a constant concern for constitutional rights—and utmost respect for the cop who guards freedom as zealously as he upholds order.
* A decision that usually must be made according to ill-defined rules. Under Illinois law, for example, a policeman is justified in using deadly force "only when he reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or another person, or when he reasonably believes that such force is necessary to make the arrest and the person to be arrested has committed or attempted to commit a forcible felony, or is attempting to escape by use of a deadly weapon, or otherwise indicates he will endanger human life or inflict great bodily harm unless arrested without delay."