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63 J. Crim. L. Criminology & Police Sci. 106 (1972)
Police Personality: Fact or Fiction, The

handle is hein.journals/jclc63 and id is 116 raw text is: TnB JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL LAw, CRnI 12NoLoGy AND POLICE SCIENCE Vol. 63, No. 1 Copyright a 1972 by Northwestern University School of Law Printed in U.S.A. THE POLICE PERSONALITY: FACT OR FICTION?* ROBERT W. BALCH Robert W. Balch is Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Montana, Missoula. Much of the work on his present paper was prepared while he was a graduate student at the University of Oregon. In the last few years a great deal has been written about the police mentality. If we can believe everything we read in magazines, journals, and sociology books, the typical policeman is cynical, suspicious, conservative, and thoroughly bigoted. This is not a flattering picture to be sure, but it recurs again and again in the popular and scientific literature on the police'. Perhaps there is something about the police system itself that generates a suspicious, conservative world-view. Or perhaps certain personality types are inad- vertently recruited' for police work. Either ex- planation is plausible, and both may be correct. Unfortunately only a few writers have bothered with the most basic question of all: Is there really a modal police personality? At one time most white Americans thought blacks were superstitibus tap dancers who preferred watermelon to work. Could it be that we have stereotyped policemen in the same way? The following pages will examine the controversy over the police mentality and suggest a sociological alternative to current specu- lation about the nature of police personalities. THE POLICE PERSONALITY As IT APPEARS IN THE LITERATURE Although authors vary in emphasis, there is remarkable agreement on the characteristics be- lieved to make up the police mentality. The cluster of traits that consistently emerges includes suspicion, conventionality, cynicism, prejudice, and distrust of the unusual. The traits are poorly defined and the names vary, but the syndrome is always the same. Policemen are supposed to be very suspicious characters. A good policeman is always on the lookout for the unusual: persons visibly rattled in the presence of policemen, people wearing coats on hot days, cars with mismatched hubcaps, and * I would like to thank Fredrick B. Lindstrom, Marvin J. Cummins, and Richard D. Vandiver for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. so on.' A good policeman presumably suspects evil wherever he goes. As Buckner put it, Once the commonplace is suspect, no aspect of inter- action is safe, on or off duty. 2 According to Colin Maclnness, suspicion is simply a manifestation of deep-seated political and emotional conservatism. The true copper's dominant characteristic, if the truth be known, is neither those daring nor vicious qualities that are sometimes attributed to him by friend or enemy, but an ingrained conservatism, an almost desperate love of the conventional. It is untidiness, disorder, the unusual, that a copper disapproves of most of all: far more, even than of crime which is merely a professional matter. Hence his profound dislike of people loitering in streets, dressing extravagantly, speaking with exotic ac- cents, being strange, weak, eccentric, or simply any rare minority--of their doing, in fact, any- thing that cannot be safely predicted.3 Furthermore, policemen supposedly have no faith in their fellow man. Most are firmly con- vinced that only the police stand between a tenuous social order and utter chaos. The people I see in the streets and in trouble are the same people who just a little while before that were in their nice homes and not involved in trouble. You can't fool me. I see people in the raw, the way they really are. Underneath their fine, civilized manners and clothes they're animals.4 If people in general are no good, then coons and spics are worse. All they like to do is drink, make love, and collect their welfare checks: 1Adams, Fidd Interrogation, Po.ICE 28 (Mar.- Apr. 1963). 2 H. T. Buckner, The Police: The Culture of a Social Control Agency, 1967, at 190 (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley). 3 Quoted in J. SKOLNICK, JUSTICE WITHOUT TRIAL: LAW ENTORCEMENT IN DEmocRATIc SocIrTY 48 (1967). 'A. BLACK, THE PEOPLE AND THE POLIcE 6-7 (1968).

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