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PLAYBOY tion division. I-sgmebody is heat r brutalized by a policeraan, these uses - are investigated by the police them- selves. If he finds cause, Superintendent Wilson takes che matter to the state's ae. torney’s office for prosecution. We are proving in Chicago that the police can supervise themselves when the public de- mands it. BELL: Well. I'm not so sure about that; but my fear for our civil liberties is not a fear of police brutality or corruption. I ° think the average cop on the beat is doing a hard job well. What scares me is the greed for power of people like ]. Ed- gar Hoover and the far-right extremists who yearn for a police state. These Su- preme Court decisions which they so abominate aren't making the policeman’s job tougher: they're putting the bridle on Hitlerian bastards who have no place in our democracy. If we want to preserve it. we need only two inviolate rules, in ad- dition to the writ of habeas corpus and a judge-and-jury system: (1) You don't have "to -ay anything that may be used against you, and (2) you're entitled to a lawyer. If we can preserve just those two rules, we will be able to preserve our de- mocracy. If vou could get just those two Suarantees in’ Russia or China, those countries would be so changed that you couldn't tell them from the United States. Su let us not, in God's name, lose those guarantees here. INBAU: We're not about to lose them, Mr. Belli. But we cannot preserve law and order when all our concern is on civil liberties, for civil liberties cannot exist except in a stable, safe society. To have civil liberties without safety of life and property is a meaningless thing. We cannot abolish the police and still main- tain an orderly society, nor can we im- pose so many restrictions on them that they -agzapowerless to prevent-erime and apprehend criminals. Court decisions seeking to force the police to behave properly by releasing obviously guilty persons will not protect our liberties in the long run. The prime power police slfould have to combat crime effectively is the right to interrogate suspects pri- vately for a reasonable length of time hefore arraignment. Again. 1 emphasize that the suspect must not be mistreated and he must be informed of his right to remain silent. But the police must be allowed to question a suspect in private, or law enforcement as we have known it will- become a shambles. If police are de- prived of this basic right, we must brace ourselves for an avalanche of crime even freater than we suffer from today. COOK: I disagree completely. Regardless of the needs of law enforcement, we must preserve our liberties at all costs. The survival of each of us as an in- Move on, . oo . our liberties, we are that much closer tc disappearing into a «ast, faceless police State, just as Mr. Belli fears, and human society will become _ indistinguishable from a termite colony. I concede that we may have more lawlessness today than in the past. but I don't feel that there is a cause-and-eflect relationship between in- creasing crimes and court decisions that protect civil liberties. No, our whole mor- al tone is lower, thanks chiefly to our free- enterprise-racket society, our scramble for personal gain. You sce evidence of this lax moral tone, to name just one example, in the widespread practice of robbing insurance companies by making excessive and fraudulent claims. When the litde guy at the bottom of the heap sces those at the top taking moral short cuts, rigging prices contrary to the law, cheating on taxes, he figures it's only smart for him to grab his own picce of the action, In this kind of society. you're going to have more crime regardless of expanded or curtailed police power. The protection of individual civil liberties has nothing to do one way or the other with the crime rate; but in any case, they must be preserved. RUSTIN: I upree with Mr. Cook that the society we live in docs not really want true law and order, or at least is not willing to make those reforms that will lead to true law and order. In terms of human rights. the policeman is the patsy for our society: he is the instrument for enforcing a basically unjust system. Po- lice just cannot accept poor people as being of the same value as those who have made it. Any effort to improve law and order by increasing the number of police or their powers is doomed to fail. All you achieve is to create a larger num- ber of corrupt policemen. As long as so- ciety tolerates bad housing. antiquated school systems and massive~unenploy- ment, it will be. impossible to maintain law and order. Reliance on police power has not prevented and will not prevent outbreaks of lawlessness like the riots in Watts and Harlem. These controversial court decisions. far from cncouraging crime, are merely a small first step toward a larger justice. Without this minimal protection of civil liberties, law and order would be inipossible. For a more orderly and just society, we must tear down slums and build decent housing, throw out our 19th Century school system and set up schools to prepare people for the technological society of this century, to provide fyll and fair ‘employment for all people. Without reforms, we will be faced with increasing disorders regardless of the powers given to police. In the cor- Tupt society of today, the policeman is just part of the widespread decay of morals. The police are themselvés pris- “lice problem simpler. it would call not for more policemen with more po- lice powers, but for more justice. Who knows: Perhaps someday it will. PEMBERTON: Big government-—and that in- cludes its law-enforcement arm—threatens to become so powerful that to preserve the kind of democracy we've enjoyed in the past, we are going to have to inhibit rather than increase its power. Law in a democracy is always enforced more effec: tively by moral sanction than by police force. Respect for the law is the most important factor in maintaining law and order. And to preserve respect for the law. a society must have kuw-abiding police- men. If we maintain a police force re- cruited from superior types of citizens and trained in the best modern techniques of police work, it will not be necessary to abridge personal freedoms in order to preserve the peace. The public will re- spect the law because the police them. selves respect the law. LEIGHTON: J agree. We are.demonstrating. ° in Chicago that improvement of police’ communications, equipment, training and internal discipline does more for law enforcement than a dubious curtail- ment of civil liberties. LOHMAN: Giving the police greater au- thority to abridge the rights of individu. als is certainly not the answer. What must be done nationally, as is being done in Chicago, is to recruit a higher type of rookie and twain him in the lat est investigative techniques. But he must also be made to understand what civil liberties are, and what restrictions he must accept. Hf he learns his police work well, he will find that those restrictions do not hamper him. TURNER: The modern recruit. is already far superior to the old-time cop. In San Jose. California, for instance. 80 to 90 percent of the police are colleg*%radu- ates. Gradually a superior brand of po- liceman is crowding up from the bottom to replace. -the old-fashioned . martinet. who came up the hard way and hasn't even heard of such a thing as civil liber- tics. We still have a long way to go be- fore we reach Utopia, and we'll probably never quite reach it, but the quality of policemen is improving every day. Meanwhile, the courts are performing an absolutely vital function in protect: ing the individual against the crushing power of the state. Professor Inbau ap- parently feels that a clearly guilty person should be convicted regardless of police intrusion on his liberties: but once the police have a foot in the door, once they are permitted to violate anybody's civil liberties whether that person is clearly guilty or not, it will be no time -at all before we lose the civil liberties of everybody, guilty and innocent alike. peered ee if : a. acne es ae = am |