What are we doing to some of the Best among us?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, police work, detectives, sociology

In rare cases, I will overlook ugliness and vulgarity. The fact is, street people are frequently ugly and vulgar, particularly criminals; detectives work mainly with street criminals; to learn something of their lives, I must look (peek) unflinching into the world they inhabit. Street Stories: The World of Police Detectives by Robert Jackall makes police detectives the subject of sociological scrutiny. "The Professor" spent several years in their world: in the "houses" of several New York City precincts, alongside them in their work, studying the files and archives, and probably making a bit of a nuisance of himself, as sociologists must do.

The bottom line for me (as it seems to be for Jackall): the bosses and their political machinations are frequently a bigger danger to society than the "criminals". Sure, some cops go bad, some whole departments go bad. At times, policital machines have suborned entire police systems. But most police and most police detectives are dedicated though jaded, honest but cynical, and incorruptible in the midst of vast corruption and venality.

As I read of their work, I found myself asking, "How can we do this to them? What are we turning these good men and women into?" Consider this list, from Chapter 5, "Squad Work", of the events in a typical four-day duty tour by a Transit policeman during the early 1990s:

• One armed robbery by a single suspect seeking cash
• Two or three robberies by groups of suspects taking sneakers, earrings, and other accessories
• Three token booth robberies

And in a typical four-day tour "aboveground" by a Midtown North squad detective during the same years:

• Two assaults on homosexual "johns"
• A handful of tourists conned by flim-flam artists
• Extortion for "protection" in a local bar by huge men with gravelly voices
• A corpse in a flophouse
• A knife slashing outside a trendy nightclub

Further uptown in Manhattan, a detective in the 34th precinct might encounter, in a four-day duty tour:

• Two aggravated gun assaults
• One armed extortion
• A knife-wielding derelict
• A bookie, "shaken down" of his receipts
• Someone jumping from the Geo. Washington Bridge, who may have driven over from Kentucky to do so
• One drug-related killing

For each of these three examples, multiply by the sixty tours in a year...is it any wonder police detectives are tired, jaded, cynical about human nature? How many of us witness a single armed robbery in a lifetime? See a corpse anywhere but the open casket at a funeral? Meet up with any of the darker denizens of the streets, of any size or voice quality? When my parents were in their early seventies, they were followed home from a restaurant and confronted by a young man with a gun as they opened the garage and got their mail. Mom threw the mail at him and they both screamed and shouted at him. They are lucky he panicked and fled... The only such event in two long lives.

The later chapters of the book open another window on the political and "legal" wrangling and ambiguities that detectives confront once they have "solved" a crime (and 50% is a very good record). I didn't get a good idea how many cases are solved on the street only to be lost in the office or courtroom, but it seems to be substantial. I don't have any trace of an idea what to do about it, either. People say "The justice system is broken." Well, sort of, except there really isn't enough of a system to break. If we could apply systems thinking to justice and criminality...worth a thought (by people capable of thinking; getting elected removes all though from the brain).

Author Jackall, "the Professor" to the detectives he followed, has done us all a service, if we will heed it.