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.