Word: policemanly
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...policeman is forbidden to act as judge and jury-for that way lies the police state. Yet he also has enormous discretion to keep the peace by enforcing some laws and overlooking others. How does he exercise that discretion? Largely on the basis of common sense and common mores, plus his own private attitudes. Unfortunately, he now faces an era of drastically changing mores that challenges his most cherished creeds and conceptions...
...what they want the police to police. "We ask our officers to be a combination of Bat Masterson, Sherlock Holmes, Sigmund Freud, King Solomon, Hercules and Diogenes," says Rocky Pomerance, Miami Beach police chief. Indeed, the U.S. often seems lucky to have any cops at all. Plato envisaged the policeman's lofty forebear as the "guardian" of law and order and placed him near the very top of his ideal society, endowing him with special wisdom, strength and patience. The U.S. has put its guardians near the bottom. In most places, the pay for an experienced policeman is less...
...seeks security in a job that requires no college degree. Often he aims to live far from the inner city-a lower-middle-class aspiration that produces white commuter cops who nervously regard black-ghetto patrols as raids behind enemy lines. According to Chicago Psychiatrist Clifton Rhead, a policeman needs distinct traits-a tendency to be suspicious, act fast, take risks, be aggressive and obey authority...
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...
...fact that 56% of Americans approved (according to Gallup) makes such occurrences no more palatable. By responding as they did, Chicago police gave the true anarchists among the demonstrators a victory they never dared imagine. If a demonstrator can provoke a riot by hurling four-letter words at a policeman, the U.S. is in for more disorder than it even now fears...