In an interview on Policing

Street Corner Society by William Foote Whyte.

I read this in college [it was published in 1943] and again it was required reading for the sociology course, but it was different. Most sociology books, you wouldn’t get past page ten.  But this book was about a participant observer actually going into the Italian community of North Boston and living in and with that community, understanding their daily lives, their mores, their culture, and their seemingly mundane existence.

To the average person corner boys are up to no good, but one corner boy, Doc, takes Whyte under his wing for a year and a half and Whyte learns that things are not as simple as they appear. The corner boys’ organisation is much more complex than you’d expect, with rules and regulations, leaders and deputy leaders, due deference; you speak only when spoken to.

I was born in Ireland but grew up in New York from the age of 12, and it’s interesting the way different groups, especially different ethnic groups, congregate on the street corners in their neighbourhoods. The corner is a part of growing up. They could be doing something as innocent as getting together before going to play sport, they could be involved in gambling, they could be trafficking narcotics. As a police officer, if you assume they are involved in narcotics you might be totally mistaken. The more books like Street Corner Society that a police officer is exposed to, the better position he is in to understand the cultural mores of the community he is serving. Throughout my career, I have served in Latino communities, African-American communities, Jewish communities, Chinese communities, Haitian communities and assorted other communities, including Irish and Italian. While they are all considered communities within an American city, they all have their distinct differences. Failure to understand these differences can be insulting at the least and fatal at the worst.

So this book would help an officer take a gentler approach?

Gentler? No. More educated. A more educated approach. Then again, you can be as educated as you want, but as a police officer on the street you still need to be a tough guy. I’ll give you an example of how you need to understand your surroundings, or ‘be gentler’, as you would say. When I was the Captain of Chinatown, for example, there were things that, unless you knew the culture, it is impossible to police the community.

As another example, I was amazed by the number of women being struck by vehicles in Chinatown. ‘What is going on, here?’ It turns out that walking with their heads down is part of the culture for Chinese women.

You mean for reasons of modesty?

Right. Modesty, tradition, exactly. And another fascinating thing about Chinese people is that they are all about face, or not losing face, so if they are accused of the most minor transgression they’re likely to exaggerate their response. If your average New Yorker is presented with a parking summons he or she is going to either curse the cop out or just rip it up. The Chinese will look at it as if they have been accused of committing a mortal sin, and they will overreact to that simple infraction. As Captain of Chinatown I would have a Chinese-American citizen overreact to a minor citation and the police officer, in turn, would overreact and then before you knew it someone’s brought in in handcuffs.

I once conducted a roll call where I said to my officers, ‘You guys all complain that nobody takes you seriously, and now here’s a community that thinks the law is serious, that takes you seriously and you complain that they take it too seriously!’