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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (July 30, 1973)
Citizens don’t care, but Survey finds policepersons change patrol By JUDY NICOL (C) 1973, The Washington Post WASHINGTON — The presence of a woman officer in policeman-policewoman patrol teams here appears to have a dampening effect on the investigation of suspicious persons or situations, a survey by the Police Foundation has found. The study found that policewomen generally made fewer arrests than their male counterparts and, at the same time, appeared to have won greater cooperation from the public in the performance of their duties. The foundation, a privately-financed group that studies police methods throughout the country, com pared the performance of 80 newly-hired policewomen with an equal number of new policemen during the first four months the men and women patroled the streets of the District of Columbia in 1972. Although women officers handled instances of violence as well as men, they generally failed to change the negative attitudes most male police officials hold about policewomen being assigned to patrol, the report said. D.C. police chief Jerry Wilson declared the nation’s first large-scale attempt at equal assignments for policewomen a success last year, according to James Murray, the department’s administrative ser vices officer. Following that decision, based on monthly discussions with district inspectors, Wilson moved to place women on a common civil service register for applicants. There previously had been a separate list for women, he said. Washington now has 195 policewomen of a total force of 4,700. Rookies—both men and women—are assigned to patrol where they write tickets, make arrests, oc casionally wield a nighstick or wrest away a gun and patrol the city interchangeably. “Judging the success of policewomen is very complex,” said Peter Bloch, one of three authors of the report, which was financed by $150,000 from the Ford Foundation. “A traditional police view is that the most important measurement of success is the number of arrests and summonses the person issues.” On this basis the women did poorly. Only 47 per cent of the policewomen made one or more felony arrests in the four-month period, compared with 61 per cent of the policemen. “Other people,” said Bloch, “consider public ser vice to be more important than arrests.” The authors were unable to detect any differences in public attitudes toward the public service of policewomen and policemen. In 507 interviews with persons who had summoned police, 75 per cent of the callers said the police who came were “very respect ful,” and 14 per cent said they were “somewhat respectful.” Citizens, the report found, reacted principally to what the police did, rather than whether they were male or female. If an officer talked to a complainant or gave advice, the officer was regarded favorably; if he or she; used force, they tended to be regarded unfavorably, according to the report. According to a survey of patrol officers, both men and women, the policewomen felt they received greater community cooperation than men in obtaining crime information. Women reported receiving 33 per cent fewer insults, and three times fewer threats of injury as men. Newly-hired police officers patrol the city in teams, with the recruit paired with an experienced officer, virtually all of whom are men at this point. The police foundation report found that male-female teams were less likely than all-male teams to initiate such activities as questioning suspicious persons, stopping cars for traffic problems, or making spot checks for stolen automobiles. Women officers also were more likely to take a subordinate role in an incident than male officers, the report said. “Women were observed to take ‘complete charge’ in 3 per cent of all incidents, compared to 15 per cent for male officers. Most of the observers in the study were graduate students. In an anonymous survey, patrol officers were asked if they thought women should be a regular part of the patrol force; 46 per cent of the men answered no. Fifty per cent of all police officials said no. Eighty-eight per cent of all police officials said that having women assigned to their districts made their jobs harder. The reasons they gave included: Women are “not strong, hard to supervise, hard to discipline, not aggressive, not emotionally stable, slow to learn police work, indecisive, undependable, lack confidence, interested in their salary not their job, and can’t drive well.” Patrolmen, patrolwomen and police officials all said they would prefer to patrol with a man rather than with a woman partner. The police foundation is continuing to evaluate the performance of policewomen, and to monitor attitudes of their male co-workers. Heroin use might be declining BY STUART AUERBACH <C> 1973, THE WASHINGTON POST WASHINGTON — The new chief of President Nixon’s war or. drugs, Dr. Robert Du Pont, declared that the nation’s heroin epidemic “is now approaching the point of a turnabout.” While stopping just short of saying that the nine-year epidemic has ended, Du Pont cited three indices that show that the number of heroin users in the nation has been cut in half since the epidemic’s peak in 1971. In a few years—he refused to specify how many—he said the number of addicts should be reduced to a pre epidemic level. Du Pont, who was appointed director of the white house’s special action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention a month ago, estimated there are now between 200,000 and 300,000 daily heroin users in the country, compared to 500,000 to 600,000 daily users in 1971. “Only a year ago,” said Du Pont, former director of Washington’s Narcotics Treatment Administration, “the increase in heroin addicts was our chief problem and concern. ‘Today signs are that the rate of in crease in the number of newly-addicted individuals is on the down side This in dicator signals a likely reduction in the total addict population in the foreseeable future.” FEW NEWCOMERS To bolster his optimistic prediction—the first from an administration official on the nation's drug problems—Du Pont cited decreases in heroin overdose deaths, decreases in hepatitis cases and data showing that the number of people who started using heroin for the first time in the last year decreased sharply. “There are relatively few new users coming in,” he said. In the District of Columbia, for example, 2,500 persons were found to have first used heroin in 1909. Last year, there were only 90 first time users. He said that deaths from overdoses of both heroin and methadone (a synthetic opiate used in narcotic treatment programs) decreased almost 50 per cent during the first three months of this year compared to the same time in 1972. Overdose deaths traditionally have been used to measure the number of addicts in an area.. In New York City, he said, overdose deaths decreased from 267 to 167; in Chicago from 48 to 15; in Washington from 27 to 9, and in San Francisco from 11 to 9. He said the figures showed that the epidemic was slowing down fastest on the East Coast and in the Middle West, and slowest on the West Coast. The number of cases of hepatitis—often caused by the dirty needles used by ad dicts—decreased by one-fourth in the first three months of this year compared to the same period in 1972. By contrast, there was only an 8 per cent decrease between 1971 and 1972. ENFORCEMENT, ENLIGHTENMENT Du Pont credited the sharp decrease in heroin use to three factors: the spread throughout the country of treatment centers; a law enforcement thrust to reduce the amount of drugs available on the streets, and a realization among many young people that heroin is a dangerous, addictive drug. Despite his optimistic forecast, Du Pont said, “we still have a long way to go in the treatment of heroin addicts.” He said the government will be treating chronic heroin addicts for many years to come. To get these hard-core addicts, Du Pont said, “We will no longer wait passively for individual dependents on heroin to came to treatment centers. Rather we will actively reach out to penetrate the addiction un derground and urge heroin abusers to become patients in our varied types of care.” Justice Department reports: LBJ ‘bugged’ Agnew in ‘68 By WILLIAM CLAIBORNE (C) 1973, The Washington Post WASHINGTON—At the request of former President Johnson,the FBI conduc ted an investigation of Vice President Spiro Agnew’s personal telephone calls during the 1968 campaign, Justice Department sources have revealed. The FBI “checked out” telephone calls Agnew made while campaigning in New Mexico in November, 1968, the sources 'Cover your tracks9 is the word in D.C. By MIKE CAUSEY The Washington Post WASHINGTON-The bureaucracy is supposed to be famous as a memomachine, but insiders say they’ve never seen anything to equal the paper production in recent months. Apparently proven and alleged Watergate charges and actions have made career people more cautious than ever. Whenever they see—or are directed to participate in—any sort of action that might be questioned at a later date, they now write and file away memos which they hope will save their necks if the plan backfires. Because of the general uneasiness around town these days, govern ment brass are getting their memo files in order, wording them so that they can say they warned against project X, or action Y, if the roof falls in. The secret is to word the memos so as to protect the writer if something goes wrong, but not to appear so negative as to offend the boss. said, to determine if he could be leaking information about secret Vietnam negotiations to a prominent Republican supporter, Mrs. Anna Chennault. Chennault, the Chinese-born widow of the late Flying Tigers’ (Jen. Claire Chennault, was later accused of trying to sabotage the 1968 Paris peace talks to help the candidacy of Richard Nixon. The Senate Watergate committee ex pected to receive a memorandum from a former FBI official detailing the in vestigation of Agnew’s telephone contacts. One person who has seen the memoran dum, turned over to the committee by former Presidential counsel John Dean III, said it contains references to “elec tronic eaves-dropping” of Agnew and Chennault. However, an FBI official said the investigation of Agnew did not include a wiretap. The FBI source said that President Johnson was convinced that Mrs. Chen nault was obtaining classified information from Agnew relating to the secret October peace negotiations that led to the Oct. 31 bombing halt in North Vietnam. In his book on the 1968 campaign, Theodore White said Mrs. Chennault had been in contact with the South Vietnamese, government and that President Johnson was aware of her activities against a peace agreement as a result of FBI wiretaps on her phone. White said that when—two days after the announcement of the bombing halt—11 South Vietnamese senators voiced their support of Nixon and repudiated the peace negotiations, President Johnson com plained bitterly about Mrs. Chennault to Nixon in a telephone call to Los Angeles. Chennault has denied she was involved in a conspiracy to thwart the peace talks, claiming that she was being made a “scapegoat.” In her denial, she castigated what she termed “inaccurate political calculations in high places by those who presumably had all instrumentalities of intelligence at their disposal.”
