ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the role of the American police in sustaining the distribution of the valued, or symbolic, capital in policing domestic conflicts. The police apply violence, reducing the capital of the working classes and the poor, and mystify their own strategies and tactics. A conception of policing would require a definition of the police consistent with a theoretical analysis of social control. The police control and coerce groups regardless of the degree of citizen compliance and represent the essential need for violence in a democratic society. Police work is best viewed within a theoretic perspective sensitizing the observer to how the differential application of violence and the threat of violence sustains social order. The problem of police response to domestic violence has general theoretic potential. The order-maintaining activities of the police are focused on the working classes. The police act to maintain the symbolic capital of the dominant classes in unrecognized fashion is mystified by a democratic ideology.
