ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to compare two large American police departments that are Eastern City and Western City, to discover what difference a high level of "professionalism" makes in the handling of juvenile offenders. The police are one of the agencies that has the most extensive and continuing contact with juvenile delinquents as well as of the political and organizational situation explaining the 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. A nonprofessional department relies to a greater extent on particularistic judgments— that is, judgments based on the significance to a particular person of his particular relations to particular others. Certain structural and procedural dissimilarities undoubtedly account for some of the differences in arrests. In Eastern City the juvenile officer on the police force is the prosecuting officer.
