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.”