THE "COOLING OUT" OF LAW STUDENTS: Facilitating Market Cooptation of Future Lawyers

This article is concerned with the ways the law school experience eases entry into a stratified market thereby further compromising adversariness in the American legal process. It identifies some dimensions of legal education, broadly construed, which tend to acclimatize some students to existing realities of the job market. Interpreting interview data gathered from first-year students at the University of Wisconsin—Madison Law School, it suggests that socialization to a professional identity can resemble "cooling out" in the ways it reconciles some to accept any employment in lieu of seeking employment more in tune with their personal goals. Such acclimatization thwarts adversariness because, in accepting the dictates of a stratified market, these lawyers are channeled to serve some interests and people to the disadvantage of others.     

THE MANAGEMENT OF VIOLENCE BY POLICE PATROL OFFICERS*

This study examines the dynamics of potentially violent encounters between police and public. It is based on systematic observation of about 350 eight-hour tours of duty by patrol officers in three precincts of New York City during the summer of 1986. It compares the tactics and resulting outcomes found in encounters handled, respectively, by patrol officers believed by their peers to be especially skilled at minimizing violence and a cross section of all other patrol officers. Its major conclusions are (1) violence, even verbal aggression, is relatively rare in police work: (2) most conflict is dampened by the arrival of the police, leaving little scope for the use of defusing tactics: and (3) the behavior of officers judged by colleagues to be skilled in minimizing violence is measurably different from the behavior of “average” patrol officers, and in ways that suggest that colleagues may be good judges of on-street performance.     

THE POTENTIAL FOR CRIME OVERREPORTING IN CRIMINAL VICTIMIZATION SURVEYS

A critique is offered of’ the methodology of the criminal victimization survey and several sources of error that may result in artificially inflated crime rates based on such data are identified. It is argued that much information about crimes given by respondents may be incorrect due to misunderstandings about what transpired, ignorance about legal definitions, memory failures about when crimes occurred, and outright prefabrication. Organizational imperatives that may cause interviewers and coders to skew the data toward a showing of greater criminality are analyzed. Some ideas for measuring response error more precisely are presented.     

DOUBLE MARGINALITY OF BLACK POLICEMEN

This article explores the extent to which black policemen are victims of “double marginality” (Alex. 1969). From secondary data on 576 black male policemen in a large metropolitan area, it was found that the concept of double marginality has little explanatory power in accounting for variation in either black officers' perception of public involvement in police affairs or black officers' perception of police authority. These findings raise serious questions about the general applicability of the marginality concept in explaining black officer' perceptions today.