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Finest of the Finest

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The latest Vietnik demonstration on the campus of the University of Cali fornia at Berkeley was a boring bust.

The students seem to be losing their enthusiasm for the amorphous affairs; but, more important, the Berkeley police are not losing theirs. They were on hand once more last week, as they have been since the first volatile protests started. Helmetless in the thick of a riot, cool in the midst of frenzy, the department's skillful crowd-control experts were quick to head off trouble before it started. Time and again the Berkeley cops have been called the most enlightened police force in the nation. Says no less a home-town citizen than California Supreme Court Chief Justice Rodger Traynor: "They know their town well; they know their townspeople well. I respect them as officers of the law in the largest sense."

Rare Praise. Such praise has not been earned overnight. Berkeley's "finest" have been building their reputation ever since the force was founded. In 1905, August Vollmer, a self-educated criminologist, noticed that the then 130-year-old city had no police force and decided to start one. His name is still legend in law enforcement circles for the methods that he pioneered. His stiff rules of conduct are now standardized as a code of ethics for police across the country. His department was the first to use blood, fiber and soil analysis in detection (1907); the first to use the lie detector (a Berkeley cop collaborated in inventing the polygraph in 1921); it was an early developer of a fingerprint classification system (1924) and the first to use radio-equipped squad cars (1928).

Perhaps most significant of all, Vollmer established a school of criminology on the Berkeley campus in 1916, and he sent his men to it. Early detractors used to laugh at the "college cops," but Vollmer's emphasis on an educated policeman has been carried forward and expanded under each of the three men who have succeeded him.

Addison Fording, the current chief, earned an engineering B.S. at Cal before coming up through the ranks himself. He now requires every Berkeley recruit to have at least two years of college, an extensive psychiatric examination before joining, and an average of 260 hours in classes during his first year. Senior patrolmen spend 50 hours a year studying. To attract and hold high-caliber men, Fording has successfully fought for good wages. As a result, Berkeley offers one of the highest police pay scales in the U.S.A sergeant starts at $862 a month. Says Fording: "You can't pay a policeman a garbage-man's salary and expect to get quality enforcement."

When he gets the sort of man he wants, the chief does not waste him. "It's ridiculous to spend money on an above-average person," says he, "and then admit that he cannot do every phase of police work." When a crime is committed in Berkeley, the beat cop directs all phases of investigation. Backup detectives offer assistance and expertise, but the case is the patrolman's responsibility all the way through the trial. They do the job so well that Judge


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