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The interplay between professionals and clients has been examined in a number of settings and the impact of laymen on professional behavior is well-known to the sociologists. In this research report these insights are applied to police-citizen interaction in an effort to explain the dynamics of discretionary decisions by police officers and the role such discretion plays in their quest to attain higher professional stature. Specific attention will be paid to variations in the willingness of policemen to develop and utilize informers or "stool pigeons." This article examines information secured in tape-recorded personal interviews conducted during the winter of 1971 by the author in two European police departments. Discretionary decisions to arrest or not, or to press serious or minor charges, become one part of the negotiation between policemen and citizens, making it possible for the police to carve out a work style balancing professional rules and codes while also making sufficient concessions to client controls necessary to operate in the streets.

This article proposes a methodology of conducting a citizen evaluation on the public's satisfaction with police service. Police have traditionally relied on crime statistics as an indication of how well they are carrying out their duties. Preventing crime and apprehending criminals are, of course, primary goals of a police force. But to assess performance by this single standard is to discount many other services which police departments provide, services which help to maintain order but contribute only indirectly to crime control. For some time now, the Inspectional Services Unit (ISU) of the Baltimore Police Department had been performing a routine check on the response to calls for service. The Baltimore Police Department's efforts to monitor its performance with a quality control check raised the possibility of standardizing the procedure for use by other departments in the country. After several months of working closely with ISU, a method was developed that would provide a simple basis for comparison over time or among different departments. The major task was to construct an interview schedule, which included most of the features of the unstructured interview then in use.

The article analyzes perceptions of justice revealed by Blacks and Whites in a city of the U.S. In the research, an examination of the correlation of the distribution of expectations and perceptions is made. It is stated that measures of expectations and perceptions pertain only to policemen and judges who are key officials in the administration of justice. The research was conducted in Milwaukee, Wisconsin during 1969. Respondents were asked to evaluate the police, judges and courts. The distribution of perceptions of injustice is most closely related to experiences with specific court and police officials. As per results, perceptions of policemen varied between and within sampled neighborhoods in Milwaukee, perceptions of policemen were closely associated with that of judges and considerable gaps were found to exist between expectations about policemen and perceptions of their actual behavior among respondents in every sampled neighborhood. The gap was especially large and frequent in the Black neighborhood. This gap has been interpreted as a perception of injustice. It is stated that one needs to measure not only the distribution of injustice but also the intensity with which injustice is perceived.

This article presents a study of the acquisition of political philosophy during the adolescent years. At the threshold of adolescence, at eleven or twelve, the youngster has only a dim, diffuse, and incomplete notion of the political order, by the time he has reached eighteen, he will be, more often than not, a fully formed political creature, possessing a stable and coherent understanding of political structures and functions, and in many cases, committing himself to a philosophy of government. By interviewing youngsters from pubescence to late adolescence the authors tried to discern the maturation of political perspectives, and they compared youngsters in three countries with rather different political traditions to get some sense of the differential impact of social ideas. The authors remark that the most striking finding of their research was the tarp decline in authoritarian conceptions of government and law over the course of adolescence. It is a tendency which is equally visible in the three national samples presented in the article.