ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to compare two large American police departments to discover what difference a high level of "professionalism" makes in the handling of juvenile offenders. The most important difference between the police of the two cities is that in Western City the police department is highly "professionalized." The two police departments are systematically different both in their treatment of delinquents and in the way the members think and talk about delinquents; paradoxically, the differences in behavior do not correspond to the verbal differences. A "professional" police department is one governed by values derived from general, impersonal rules which bind all members of the organization and whose relevance is independent of circumstances of time, place or personality. Western City's police arrest a greater proportion of the population than do Eastern City's but whereas the former's rate is 50 percent higher for adults, it is over 100 percent higher for juveniles.
