Police-community relations programs are intended to be long-range, full-scale efforts to acquaint the police and the community with each other's problems and to stimulate action aimed at solving problems; they have been criticized, however, as being concerned mainly with raising the professional image of the police in the minds of the public (President's Commission, 1967a: 100). In some ways, they seem to have functioned to slow down change and to maintain present police policies and practices.

The President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (1967b: 178) has indicated that some of these policies and practices cannot be justified. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968: 158) comments that some activities of even the most “professional” police departments may heighten tension and enhance the potential for civil disorder.

In recent years, police conduct has rapidly emerged as a major social and political issue. Although both the nature and the outcome of this controversy have important consequences for law and society, its most immediate effects have been evident in changing public attitudes toward police activities. Policemen have become the targets of growing and frequently irreconcilable popular demands both for the maintenance of “law and order” and for the elimination of “police brutality.” Law enforcement agencies, therefore, have seemed to encounter a mounting crisis of public confidence in police practices.

Although the effects of mounting public concern about crime and police protection probably have been most evident among whites (President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, 1967: 144–149; Ennis, 1967; Feagin, 1970), a desire for increased police protection has also emerged among black Americans. In fact, black attitudes toward police practices have appeared to reflect a perplexing enigma. While many black citizens have complained about harsh or brutal police behavior, they also have expressed intense criticism of a lack of police protection.

One serious obstacle to the achievement of social change in America has been the intransigence of large bureaucracies toward changes in goals, procedures, and styles. Although programs ad infinitum to remedy evils such as poverty, segregation, crime, and pollution are proposed and even written into law, the day-to-day operation of our political institutions often fails to reflect these innovations. Thus we are unable to evaluate the merits of alternative solutions to such ills because they are never given the test of full-fledged implementation.

In this paper I am going to suggest various measures to modify the behavior of one important political institution which has been staunchly resistant to change—the police. Our under standing of police operations is still quite limited (due partially to the secretive nature of most departments), but as David Easton (1969) has argued, social scientists have an obligation to use whatever intellectual tools are at their disposal to obtain “quick, short-run answers” to questions of pressing social concern. To this end, what follows is an attempt to apply some principles of learning theory (developed largely in highly-structured psychology laboratories on infra-human subjects) to the chaotic environment of the cop on the beat.

A generation ago, one professor at Harvard Law School used to greet his students at the beginning of the semester with an offer to debate them on any subject so long as he was allowed to “state the question.” Any review of the crime, law enforcement, and criminal justice literature produced during the last ten years indicates that there is still as much disagreement over how the “relevant” questions should be stated as there is over the answers to these questions. Despite a strong public demand to “stop crime,” there is little consensus within the research community as to the questions (if any) which, if answered, would assist in the prevention of crime or the improvement of police, court, and correctional processes. Much of the literature “states the question” in terms of the narrowly defined “efficiency” of law enforcement and criminal justice agencies; a second group asks questions concerning the functions assigned to the criminal justice system; and a third set of critics are concerned with the implications of decisions made by the police, judges, and correctional officials for a democratic system of government. While I cannot attempt to review the literature which has been generated under these three models, I will describe each briefly and suggest some of the problems that have risen in research on law enforcement and criminal justice.

Virtually unstudied and largely unobserved, the police employee organization has evolved over the last fifty years into a strong economic and political institution. The rapid growth of militant police unionism as a new political and economic force in the society has raised serious problems for the police agency administrator in the exercise of his professional responsibilities in the area of law enforcement and his executive responsibilities in the area of personnel management. It has also raised serious public policy questions as to whether the protected right to organize and to bargain collectively which is being extended to all other public employees ought to be extended to the police without limitations. Underlying all these questions is the basic issue of whether official sanction should be extended to another entrant in the competition for control of local police operations.

The question of who supports the law is commonly approached within a framework of social stratification analysis. Pressure to pass certain laws and willingness to assist the agents of law enforcement are often related to social status and political power. Marx and Engels (1947) were among the first to see the law and support for the law in terms of the interests of various groups in the stratification system, arguing that the law is a tool employed by the bourgeoisie to oppress and exploit the proletariat. In another historical study, Ranulf (1964) concluded that the “distinterested tendency to inflict punishment” is concentrated in the petty bourgeoisie or lower-middle class, suggesting that it is in that level of the social hierarchy where one will find the greatest support for the law, or at least the punitive aspects of the law. Not too different from this is the conclusion reached by Marshall (1968) which is that middle-class values have long been critical in determining what types of social behavior will be labeled criminal.

One of the more interesting questions that political scientists are likely to overlook in their analyses of public policy, the delivery of services, etc., is the continually changing mix of public and private provision of such policies and services. Present concern with the criminal justice system, in general, and the police in particular, is no exception. Political scientists are interested in questions of police organization, public accountability of police activity, implications of greater involvement in local police activity by state and federal agencies, professionalization of local police officers, etc. But we have tended to concentrate on the political-governmental provision of police services and to ignore both the traditional and the contemporary role of private police as a very important part of the total panoply of police activities in American society.