New Police Plan Aims To Improve Relations With the Community

Training in community relations will become a 15-hour required course for every member of the Cambridge police department following the Christmas holidays.

An Arthur D. Little, Inc. (ADL) study last April devised a syllabus in which Cambridge police will play out scenarios such as rumbles at a ballpark, "hippie" gatherings, and marital fights.

Past Experiences

The course will also emphasize relations with minority groups and conduct at student demonstrations. The approach will focus on class discussion of individual policemen's past experiences rather than lectures on psychological theory. Community representatives will attend and participate in some of the classes.

"It's been all set up," said James Reagan, chief of the Cambridge police. "We've already had a pilot run on it and we'll go into it in full scale after the holidays. It was accepted very well by our people."

George Powers, the policeman who administered the pilot program, said yesterday, "The guys felt very comfortable. Now they'll be more willing to take time to explain their actions to people with whom they deal."

Powers will teach the course to groups of six policemen. He estimated that administering the program to everyone on the force will take 18 months.

The $17,000 Arthur D. Little study was subsidized by Federal and local funds under the Safe Streets Act. The report, written after interviews with about 90 police and 200 community residents, criticized sharply the police, students and upper income adults.

Referring to police-student friction, the report stated that "both groups have prejudged each other, and each is ready to do hard battle with the other on sight." But ADL said the police cannot take too much advantage of the students, whom the report called "sufficiently bright and sufficiently well-informed about the law to know how to limit police actions."

Double Barrier

ADL criticized Cambridge police treatment of minority groups, especially Puerto Ricons, who "face not only a color barrier, but also a cultural and language barrier."

"The black community would appear to rank a close second to the Puerto Ricans in the amount of difficulty they report with the police," the report stated.

"Complaints from blacks involve harassment of interracial couples . . . the practice of stopping any black walking along streets in the 'better' sections of town, and the general tendency to treat blacks as second-class citizens."

The report also cited the detachment and apathy of upper-income adults. They "seemed to regard the whole business of law enforcement as having nothing to do with them. They had not personally experienced any trouble with the police and they did not seem to perceive any threat to themselves in the difficulties between police and other community groups."