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Often, there was no legal basis for these dragnet and residual arrests. In 1930, a New York businessman, a Mr. Turner, went to Dallas on business. He tried to make a phone call from a public phone booth; the line was busy. He went to a second booth, then a third—still busy. A policeman watched him go from booth to booth and decided the man was a thief: he “had entered three booths—he must have been pilfering nickels.” Turner was arrested—over his protest, of course—and held incommunicado for forty-eight hours. He was, “to all intents and purposes,” simply “kidnapped.”14

After this unpleasantness, the police let Turner go; but unlike the thousands of drunks and vagrants, he screamed bloody murder. It turned out that the Dallas police had arrested 8,526 people in 1929 “on suspicion”; less than 5 percent of them were charged with a crime. There was something of a public scandal over this “trial-and-error” style of crime control, but the police chief of Dallas was baffled by the uproar. What was all the fuss about? The practice, he admitted, “is not legal. But,” he added, apparently without any sense of irony, “illegality is necessary to preserve legality.”15

At the turn of the century, a police captain told young Cornelius Willemse, new on the New York City police force, that his job was to “protect the good people and treat the crooks rough.” The nightstick was not to be used on “inoffensive citizens,” but rather on “thieves and crooks.” As to “real bad crooks,” any force was justified: “They’re enemies of society and our common foe.”16 The rules of restraint, in short, did not apply to these “crooks”; or, for that matter, to scum of all sorts. There seems little doubt that most of the white, middle-class public agreed with this (and still does). It is what one might call the “sausage theory” of law and order: so long as the taste is good and the results are right, we would just as soon stay out of the kitchen and not know what went into the sausage.cy

Or perhaps it is another example of the double standard in criminal justice. But this two-faced system was not a historical accident, and tc call it “hypocrisy” is no help in understanding it. It is a system of social control, a system that demands high ideals; but at the same time demands deviations from those very same ideals—for a good reason of course. It also assumes (unconsciously) that the criminal justice system is better off with a double system, than at either alternative pole: the pole of pure due process, that is, the pole of the bleeding hearts; and the pole of the raw and brutal “police state.”

The double standard was at work in many, though not all, police functions. It was very noticeable in the “trawling” function—keeping order in public places. There was less of a double standard for traffic crimes and traffic control—that staple of twentieth-century police work—partly because drivers of cars were, on the whole, the better class of citizen. Even when dealing with drunks, the police were often careful to distinguish between respectable drunks, middle-class men on a binge; and the dirty common drunk.

Police work was thus drenched through and through with class consciousness. Leonhard Fuld, writing in 1909, deplored the fact that even “the most highly respectable member of the community, of exemplary character, habits, and associations,” ran the danger of arrest on a misdemeanor charge, which meant placement in a “station-house cell together with felons, drunkards, and men guilty of every vice. A night spent in such surroundings will inflict more hardship and suffering upon an honest man than almost any indignity to which he might be subjected.” 17In fact, police departments (and police courts) tried to avoid undue discomfort to the comfortable classes. One example illustrates this point. In San Diego, California, in 1915, when drunks were arrested, and held overnight, they went to “Sunrise Court.” Here, if they had no police record or prior convictions, and if they had a job and family,