o come here and be Dirty Harry or Don Johnson. We need to shift from a spirit of adventure to a spirit of service" (Kaminer, 1994, p. 114).
Or as former New York Police Commissioner William Bratton indicated,
there is resistance from the 'old guard,' who fear losing authority and control as police departments are decentralized, and there is resistance from recruits, "who come in expecting to chase people and do shoot-ups. Eighty-five percent of police work is not that. The average police officer in America is never going to draw his gun in his entire career" (Kaminer, 1994, p. 114).
Still another part of the problem, according to Hampton, is that some recruits who enter the police academy with that sense of an ethic of service often leave with "a taste for authority, which they find easier to satisfy by policing racial minorities" (Kaminer, 1994, p. 114).
Police-Community Relations and Reorganization
In the aftermath of the inner city riots of 1965 and 1966 in Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, and elsewhere in the United States, many police agencies saw the need to develop and implement specific police-community relations programs. Early programs took on a variety of forms and formats, including citizen ride-along opportunities with patrol officers, putting officers back on foot patrols in neighborhood "beats," and school-based programs such as D.A.R.E. (Toelke, 1995, p. 7).
Much of the tension which continues to exist between the police and the public today is still racially- or ethnically-based. Ronnie Carter, now a Special Agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, remembers growing up as a black youth in the 1960s and 1970s "who feared the police" (Carter, 1995, p. 14). Carter writes:
While the vast majority of white Americans viewed police officers as protectors, residents of minority communities held a far different view. Because I had only negative contacts with police offi...