ABSTRACT
A major factor in historic analyses of policing is the great extent to which attainment of formally stated police goals has continually been affected by use of police departments as a means of politically dispensed upward mobility for newly arrived ethnic groups and recently empowered racial minorities. The consequences of vague definition of the police role and minimal police participation in specifying it are widespread. The historic reluctance of police to intervene in domestic disputes, for example, probably has more to do with the difficulty of straightening out other people's arguments in the middle of the night than with the purported danger to police of such assignments. The closeness of the police to communities and to politicians has also led to corruption, especially in inner cities, where police have been charged with enforcing laws that had been enacted by conservative rural-dominated legislatures, but that found little support in the hurly-burly of urban life.
