Volume 7, Number 3 · September 8, 1966
Who Can Police the Police?
By Herbert L. Packer
What may the police do to persons whom they suspect of committing crimes? What may be done to the police if they do what they are not supposed to do? The range of discourse implicated in these simple-sounding questions is broad, running as it does from the nicest technicalities of lawyers' law to the most impalpable speculations about the uses of coercion in a free society. The pressure for answers has never been more strongly felt than it is being felt just now. And the competition to provide the answers, drawing into the pit institutions as diverse as the Supreme Court and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, has never been more savage. Many people find the controversy deeply disturbing: They find in it evidence, depending upon their predilections, that our society is dangerously authoritarian or dangerously permissive or dangerously divided. I find in it evidence of a different proposition: that our society is becoming increasingly self-conscious about the paradoxes of coercion. This seems to me a good thing, because it focuses attention upon prime questions that political thought has tended lately to ignore. In the commonplace ugliness of the criminal process there is concealed the starkest example of a dilemma as old as political thought: quis ipsos custodes custodiet? Who will watch the watchers?
Feature, 6421 words
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