Although authors vary in emphasis, there is remarkable agreement on the characteristics believed 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 interaction 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 accents, being strange, weak, eccentric, or simply any rare minority--of their doing, in fact, anything that cannot be safely predicted. 3 Furthermore, policemen supposedly have no faith in their fellow man.Most are firmly convinced 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,
