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Policemen and Policework form an important area of public service that openly and dramatically involves many aspects of our daily lives. In recent years, the police are being called upon, more and more, by the community to perform many complex services. No longer is the citizenry content to have the police perform the simplistic functions of the watchmen or the guardian of the peace.
Yet the community tends to react to the police as if they were a distinct and separate body almost alien to the community. This response tends to confuse the majority of young men who become policemen. They consider their function as helping the public, and therefore they become upset, and confused when they find themselves as part of a group that is feared, disliked, hated or even assaulted in the performance of these services. Some individuals feel that these hostile attitudes are only seen in the ghetto. However these negative feelings about policemen are openly expressed by individuals from all economic groups. The experience of meeting with indifference to outright hostility of the public towards the policeman eventually results in feelings of isolation and alienation of the police from the general community that they serve. This isolation and alienation reinforces the tendency of the police to close ranks and they then develop all the feelings and some of the responses that minority groups have when they are or feel isolated from the majority. However, there is one notable difference. The police are a minority group with physical power — a gun and a club, and they have been empowered by the community to use this delegated power in preserving law and order for a community they feel has isolated them.
The isolation of the police from the community is further widened by a trait that all police departments share in common: viz. a policy of official silence concerning their behavior. The police traditionally believe that public scrutiny of police behavior is biased and fault finding and