Word: arresters
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...problem lies not with the government's instruments of power, but with its credibility. The police could arrest McCoy and Shanker, but it would make no difference, for they are as helpless as the Mayor and the Superintendent of Schools. On September 11, McCoy agreed to readmit the disputed personnel, only to have the community block their entrance the next day. The intermediate political institutions, necessary to confine conflict, have broken down because their constituencies are both aware and uncompromising, and the city, now forced to deal directly with the people of Ocean...
...neighborhood. If Joe Friday were pounding the pavement, he'd have to spend more time learning the personalities and trouble-making potential of the people on his street than poring for hours over the book. The law only provides the patrolman with names of charges to use if an arrest is made; it can't tell him when he should make an arrest...
...THREE STYLES of police behavior developed in the book, the "watchman style" has the most familiar ring. As Wilson notes, most 19th century American policemen did behave like watchmen, ignoring small offenses and maintaining order through their personal authority (often backed with fists) rather than by their arrest power. The watchman-style patrolman judges offenses by the prevailing standards of the immediate community. He might ignore a small theft in a ghetto neighborhood, but investigate the same theft in a prosperous white area. Only in more serious offenses would he crack down, perhaps breaking a few more heads...
...considering that the chief pressures his men to maintain order by the book, even where that book is irrelevant. What might be considered a disorder in a prosperous area might be only a quiet evening on ghetto streets. But the legalistic-style police go where the "offenses" are and arrest the "offenders." That means more Negroes in jail and more complaints of harassment...
...describe how and why the police of a given community act. As Wilson admits, the styles are not empirically defined, and are more the result of the judicious impressions of his workers in the field. Indeed, the book falters most noticeably when Wilson attempts to use selected tables of arrest statistics to bolster his argument on the styles. The statistics do tend to confirm that the styles exist, but they also lead him into tiresome digressions to explain anomalies in certain of the tables...