Word: cop
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...largely true, as politicians never tire of remarking, that respect for law and authority-whether in the form of the cop or the university or the President-has diminished markedly in the last generation. However, a society that expects to keep challenge within reasonable bounds must retain a sense of perspective. Demands that the letter of every law be enforced to the full are risible. Myriad statutes range from Internal Revenue Service rulings to Coast Guard safety regulations for pleasure boats, and hundreds of such laws are widely flouted by the most respectable citizens. It is seldom that a responsible...
...that would tax a Supreme Court Justice, soothe angry ghetto Negroes despite his scant knowledge of psychology, enforce hundreds of petty laws without discrimination, and use only necessary force to bring violators before the courts. The job demands extraordinary skill, restraint and character-qualities not usually understood by either cop-hating leftists, who sound as if they want to exterminate all policemen, or by dissent-hating conservatives, who seem to want policemen to run the U.S. in a paroxysm of punitive "law and order...
Most Americans are not even sure 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...
...wants to be a cop? One of the most common types is the ex-high school athlete who went directly into a virile military unit like the Marines, and now 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...
...Faculty for these failures, however, is not quite fair. Sizer is aware of the lack of coordination in the reform movement but feels it's unavoidable. "You don't change universities from the top," says Sizer. "The head is -- to mix a metaphor -- a sort of catalytic traffic cop, giving the nod to some things, stopping others. It's always sloppy and irregular movement on a lot of fronts." Also, for all their shouting last spring, MAT's have been less than hungry for opportunities to work in the field and intern in the ghettos (25 out of 150 interns...