HARRIET DARLING

HOW HUMANS EVOLVED TO WALK UPRIGHT

What would you do if your family had only a limited amount of food to eat? Would you stay where you lived until more food arrived? Would you allow your family to starve to death to avoid taking a dangerous step? Probably not. Well, some early primates would have agreed.

Anthropologists have proposed several good reasons primates developed the ability to walk on two legs. These include the need to free the hands for tool use and for carrying children, food, and other belongings; sexual dimorphism in food gathering; changes in climate and habitat as they moved from jungle to savanna (changes that favored a more elevated eye-position); and the need to reduce the amount of skin exposed to the tropical sun.

Small primates (chimps, baboons, gibbons, and bonobos) are omnivorous but don’t always have meat in their diets. They usually eat the food that’s far more plentiful in their world: plant matter, which includes fruit. These primates inhabited the African countryside for millions of years, spending most of their days in trees eating, and sharing with other members of their groups, the fruits that grew there.

But there were times when insufficient food grew to support the numbers of primates living in any one area. Even swinging from tree to tree for additions to their diets, eventually these resources would falter. And most of the trees they lived in only grew fruit in one or two seasons; during other times, primates needed to obtain food supplies elsewhere. Thus, these groups would seek out other trees that had more fruit, and more aggressive individuals would kill smaller animals since these primates tended to be competitive with regard to their food supply. They would find that taking fruit from another group was an easier method of increasing their food supply than seeking out more productive trees.

Those primates whose food was stolen regularly soon found a need to devise a method of preventing this from happening in the future. A few eventually developed the ability to walk upright on the savanna now and then, in order to keep a watch for bands of more aggressive primates. As with other animals, such as the meerkat and the prairie dog, this also allowed them to keep an eye on their offspring.

Thus, primates came down from the trees where it was safe, but where food was limited, in order to travel to other trees. Many primate groups still kept watch on other groups in order to steal what they had, or to overpower them and take their food. So it became dangerous to travel across open ground, even when one was hidden by the tall grasses. In addition, other groups might hide in these grasses, and pounce on individuals attempting to reach other trees.

So some primates made an effort to rise above the grasses to see if any enemies might be nearby. Those who could do this tended to stay alive longer than their peers, and thus had more offspring. Over generations, some of these offspring inherited the parent’s ability to rise above the grasses, and their offspring inherited it from them. After a few thousand years, some primates were able to rise and stand for short periods of time. This led to a genetic preference for standing more and more upright, for longer and longer periods.

Some of these primates still only walk on two legs for short periods of time, or use their fists to assist them, but humans went further and rarely walk on four limbs, preferring two, even though our skeletons still object to this mode of transport, which often causes intolerable stress on the spine.

Finally, the end of the police book.

Section 3

In the seventies, all the new laws enacted during the sixties began taking effect. Along with these new laws came changes that brought more integration and more personal and professional responsibility into the police department. There was an explosion of minorities entering the police forces, and lawsuits against police departments for the first time, forcing them to integrate. More and better training of police officers was required, including for the first time sensitivity and race relations training, resulting in a police department that more accurately reflected the racial balance of local communities. Women, as a direct result of the feminist movement of this time, were brought onto patrol duties, and were given responsibilities almost equal to those of their male counterparts.

Title VII required that women be allowed to go into the same fields as men, and women were resolute that they would do so. Police departments had to change some of their entrance requirements, such as age and height. There were contentions by some male cops that women were too small, too slight, too unqualified to handle the violent, physically challenging work required of police officers, but every challenge placed on them resulted in some women somewhere meeting and overcoming that challenge, until eventually the laws were revised to allow women to qualify as police officers.

The eighties and nineties consolidated these earlier years, adding more comprehensive testing efforts, and there was a new awareness within the police culture itself as to how the police were doing their jobs. There were scandals such as the Rodney King brutality trial in April 1992, which led directly to a number of changes in the ways police departments dealt with mob control and other problems.

After the devastating effects of September 11, 2001, the media were once again referring to the police as heroes, rather than as semi-criminals and incompetents. Police officers gained in the respect of the society overall. Since fears of terrorism have begun pervading our society, more people than ever have expressed a willingness to give up their rights and privacy for the “homeland security.”

Recently, the problem of corruption has again come to the forefront of our consciousness (e.g., kickbacks in LA, cover-ups in San Francisco, the accusations of authoritarian police culture in Oakland). People are discouraged and angry about these events because the police are expected to set a higher standard and, like Caesar’s wife, should be above reproach.

The last portion of the book is titled A Final Word

The remainder of the book would have addressed answers to the questions posed in the Interview section of the Introduction. We hoped to analyze the interviews and go over our findings.

We intended to learn how cops see the effects of the law, technology and the media on their personal and professional lives, and within the overall American culture. We hoped to understand how they felt about their jobs, and how they thought the public felt about them as cops. We wanted to ascertain their feelings about the military aspects of policing, and whether media coverage had changed how they did their jobs.

We expected to be closer to an understanding of the ways legal changes permeate these officers’ lives, and how technology helped or hindered their performance. We also wanted to discover what they thought about the increased powers of criminals to use technology for their nefarious ends, and how the ubiquitous use of cameras influences their job operations.

Minorities and women are an important aspect in all of policing; we hoped to find out just how important.

People today don’t let their kids walk alone because of fear of molesters, there’s no privacy, drugs and guns are prevalent, violent video games and increased violence in movies and even on TV, are all driving a return to the trust and dependence on the police that was first observed back in the fifties.

It’s our belief that these times we’re living in are, in fact, the “good old days.” We are a product of all that’s come before us. Our future is built on the foundation of what we are now and who we have been. We can take a snapshot of where we are, and who we are now, but we must know that, unlike Dorian Grey’s picture, the portrait of the society will stay the same and society itself will change. We are not a static society; we have an evolution in law, we have an evolution in technology, and, as this book was to show, the police culture evolves as a reflection of the growth and development of the culture as a whole.

Although we might catastrophize and worry when there are two bad quarters in a business report and things appear to be going wrong, we must always remember that just because today is stormy doesn’t mean that God is sending another flood. Our book was to be an effort to bring history into the public consciousness as it relates to the police.

Continuing the Police book

Section 2

Police departments in the early part of the century were inefficient, ineffective, and generally based on the political “buddy system.” Cops had very little training and practically no education, and laws were enforced arbitrarily. The common citizen expected little from the police department; the police were definitely not your friend, but were sometimes your enemy. The general perception was of an uneducated thug who had power over your life, and therefore must be feared and respected. People in the early part of the century generally avoided seeking out the police for help.

It wasn’t until after World War I that the police image began to change. Soldiers returning from the war with military training often influenced police departments to implement such methods into their working lives, and a new, more effective paramilitary police organization was born. During the Great Depression, police departments became even more focused on maintaining the status quo, and not so much on crime fighting. There were so many people out of work, so many hobos, so many small, petty crimes, and people with money tended to turn their faces away from such problems to avoid seeing them. So the police saw their jobs as more to keep everything looking normal, letting the public avoid seeing all the crime that was going on. The thirties saw a rise in bank robberies and train-robbing, and at that point, the police had to begin developing systems to combat such crimes.

World War II took many young men off to war, but the country’s crime rate went down and more women moved into the police department. These women were social workers then, rather than hard-nosed cops, and those police who stayed at home were older and needed to become more efficient. Afterwards, when the soldiers returned, again with military training as well as experiences with other countries and other police departments, police cultures changed yet again. Women were forced out of the police, or were relegated to more support roles, after having had a taste of real responsibility and power. And as a result of the GI Bill, there were more people receiving college educations, thereby raising the standards of police departments everywhere and, in general, improving the public’s perception of the police. The job of police officer became more of a profession, increasingly respected and valued in the community.

During the sixties, the growth of civil unrest and riots was broadcast on national television, along with the police responses to them (e.g., southern integration efforts, the Chicago Democratic Convention, the Sharon Tate/Charles Manson Murders), and showed the police as irresponsible, brutal and vicious, clarifying for the nation the violence inherent in the police system. New laws arose with the effort to respect suspects’ rights as well as victims’ rights. Often, these rights led to the public’s belief that suspects were given more rights than victims. New laws, such as the Miranda law and others, putting more and more restrictions on the police, were enacted, once again changing the face of police activity.

The next section of the book was to be the interviews referred to in the last blog. However, we found that neither of us had the time, nor the opportunity, to do these interviews so I’m skipping that section and going on to Historical Policing. This section will be broken up into several blogs since it’s very long.

HISTORICAL POLICING

Section 1

We hope to clarify how technology, as it relates to policing, has changed over the past century, and how it has affected police forces up to modern times. We will also talk a little about where the technology is going, and how that will impact police forces of the future.

As for the media, we’ll examine newspapers, magazine articles and books that discuss problems of the police in the past, all the way down through the century, and how the police have been affected by the media itself.

Before the Great Depression, the media (which at that time consisted of the radio, newspapers, a few local magazines, books and pre-talkie movies) focused on some news and pure entertainment. During the first thirty years, movies tended to be like little novels, telling exotic stories and preaching. There was little congruence between what was broadcast over the radio or in books, and actual cops and police activities. Newspapers and magazines were focused on good news and fashions, or high society. Little was known then of crime and criminals until the Stock Market Crash. We’ll look at some of the media reflections of the day, and at newspaper articles and books written about police activities.

In the thirties, forties and fifties, movies about gangsters created stereotypes of police and criminals that definitely affected not only the view of the public as to the jobs of the police, but the views of the cops themselves. We’ll evaluate the movies and look at newspaper articles of the same period, and books written by retired cops.

Then in the sixties and up to the present, TV brought the civil rights battles, the riots every summer, the anti-war activities, right into people’s own living rooms. Stories on TV about how the police did their jobs, who they were and what they were doing, made them much more obvious to the public. Since cop shows are now one of the most popular TV entertainment venues, they permeate the ideas of the public, they develop and help to create the attitudes of the public, and of the cops, toward the job of the police.

Another aspect of the media has always been as a watchdog. Newspapers and TV are constantly watching everything the police do, and reporting everything – mostly focusing on the bad. Many departmental problems that occur are first brought to the attention of the police hierarchy through the media. The ability of today’s media to present events, often as they happen, influences the manner in which the police must do their job. There are numerous newspaper stories and TV broadcasts covering such activities, and these will be examined and analyzed.

The problems of corruption in the police, lack of training, inefficiency, racial profiling, brutality, along with so much more, have all been covered in the media throughout the century. Articles, books such as “The Jungle,” yellow journalism and shock journalism, have all helped to focus people’s attention on the police, sometimes having a detrimental effect and often leading directly to changes in policy and procedures. Upton Sinclair’s book “The Jungle,” for example, provided a look into the meat-packers industry and labor problems in 1906, and the issue of strike-breaking by the police eventually sent shock waves through the country and led to demands for reform.

Laws have been changing a great deal over the century, and those that affect the police and the court system have moved along with the changes in society in general. We’ll deal with “Crimes of the Century,” such as the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and “Trials of the Century,” such as the O. J. Simpson trial, and how these ended up affecting police procedures, whether for good or bad.