That rigid, top-down, highly centralized, militarily oriented "command and control" system simply does not work for policing-not in America, not in our multicultural, ostensibly pluralistic, democratic society. The paramilitary bureaucracy, or "PMB," as I've referred to it in my notes over the years, is a slow-footed, buck-passing, blame-laying, bullying, bigotry-fostering institutional arrangement, as constipated by tradition and as resistant to change as Mel Gibson's version of the Catholic Church. I cannot imagine other essential reforms in policing-improved crime-fighting, safety and
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