Louis A. Radelet was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on December 10, 1917. He attended the University of Notre Dame where he earned his undergraduate degree and an MSW. He taught there before moving to New York City to work with the National Conference of Christians and Jews. In the mid-1950s, he came to the Michigan State School of Police Administration, as it was then known. He established the infrastructure of colleagueship, thinking, and feeling that emerged as the major movement designed to transform American policing. He died in 1991 having only had a glimpse of the ramifying power of his influence.
His many contributions to the thinking of many of the major figures in the field of criminal justice are beyond easy elaboration. These include his publications, his tolerance of eccentricities, and his invitation to and hosting of speakers such as Michael Banton, Richard Myren, James Q. Wilson, and David Bordua. He also nurtured the hopes of marginalized officers throughout the Midwest, people of color, females—bright and innovative officers and other visionaries who rallied together yearly at his Police and Community Relations (PCR) conferences first held in East Lansing in 1955. Because he was both kind and generous, his good humor and gentility almost endless, his intense focus on doing the right thing and his burning sense of obligation to the collective good were sometimes overlooked. He saw through falseness and pretensions with uncanny wisdom. His ability to bring out the best in people was unrivaled.
Radelet fashioned his own view of policing and its obligations from the ground up, not from the then-scant literature. He relied on his acute and abiding commitment to democratic values. These, for him, were not the narrow pseudo-legalistic and positivistic standards that were emerging in the 1970s. He integrated conceptions of fairness, justice, and equal access to service into the standard views of ”professional policing.” He assembled in his own vision the vast chaotic, uneven, and proscriptive literature in what became, in part through his influence, the field of criminal justice. He was a bricoleur, picking up bits and pieces of ideas when others were still opting for the positivism of the social sciences, or the simple (still popular) idea that vicious attacks on minorities masquerading as ”crime crackdowns” and attention to ”hot spots” were the route to social order. He argued that there could be no social order under a crime-focused police. According to Radelet, the way to reduce crime was to increase justice.
The turning point of Radelet’s career, and indeed of the field, was the rebellious outbursts in the late 1960s in Detroit, Los Angeles, and other cities, and the dramatic Kerner Report (1968) and the Report of the Presidents’ Crime Commission (1968). At this time, Radelet seized the opportunity to carry out some sponsored research. He had the help of the Chief of Police in Toledo, Ohio, a young graduate student, Robert Wasserman, and funding from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). Police and community relations (PCR) was dismissed in most police departments as code for ”giving in to minorities.” The Toledo project was intended to make PCR the deep commitment of every officer in practice, rather than an isolated and unrewarded concern of a few officers. This project was not realized, but it was the first serious attempt to implement what was later christened ”community policing.” This idea of police reform that addressed the divide between ”two societies, black and white” and the conditions that produce violence and hatred began to be woven into the rhetoric of policing. It is far too early to say whether and to what degree they altered police practice.
Michigan State University created an undergraduate program in police administration and graduated its first class in 1938. In time, Radelet became its moral and intellectual leader. In part as a result of his quiet stewardship, it could grant a Ph.D. after 1969, and was renamed the School of Criminal Justice in 1970. In those days, the school was seen as a bit too applied even for a land-grant university. The Ph.D. program, with its associated research impetus, brought to the surface a long-running tension between “academics” and “professionals” within the school. In fact, some faculty were both, some were one and not the other, and some were neither. The transition from General Arthur Brandstatter to George Felkenes and later to Robert C. Trojanowicz was toward a research-based school. As the critical mass of Ph.D.-trained researchers grew, Radelet mediated between the lawyers, political scientists, and practice-oriented colleagues to produce a grounding for and clarify the mission of the school. It was grounded on shared values, not on publication, research, or even disciplinary pedigrees. The students and young Ph.D. faculty of the school in the late 1970s are among the present leaders in criminal justice.
Radelet (he pronounced it ”Radlet” not ”Radlay”) wrote the first scholarly topic intended to speak to the police as holding a convent of trust—to assess trust, to be trustworthy, to represent trust—Police and the Community (1973). This topic was a very new kind of text—not a proscriptive laundry list; not a pleading assemblage of tasks and exhortations; not full of ”war stories” passing as systematic knowledge. It was a creative and wholly original effort to imagine a field. The topic remains a best-seller. He wrote it in his basement, mobilizing tidy piles of notes, reprints, typescripts, and mimeos for each chapter. His lust for detail was as extraordinary as was his assessment of people. The topic was finished before the American Society of Criminology (ASC) became a major force, before the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) was assembled, before there was a national stage for policing. This was a move to reshape ”the job” from a craft to a kind of knowledge-based work.
Because Radelet was a deeply committed person, he made some academics uneasy. He radiated intensity. He knew his position, he knew why he took it, and he said so if necessary. Nevertheless, as might be expected, others who grew under his direct influence took credit awkwardly and incompletely for his ideas. Lacking his depth and insight, they bowdlerized them. Ironically, his originality became the cant of superficial followers in later years and the conventional rhetorical wisdom of the last fifteen. These ideas, principles of a kind, include the following:
• The social distance of police from their public(s) is problematic and not to be assumed or maintained exclusively by threat or violence.
• Fairness and justice must be done and seen to be done.
• Police organizations are neither just nor fair in their own internal operations.
• The criteria for success of police should be the absence of crime and the presence of orderliness.
• The police should be held accountable and responsible for their actions and words.
• The police and the community are essentially mirror images of each other.
A further irony of his gracious and lively career is that as those who followed his lead became seduced by the rhetoric of his vision as they imagined it, the conventional wisdom of the police elites and their admirers transmogrified the above principles. The present generation sees his ideas as a shadow, not in their elegant shape as principles.
In many ways, Radelet must be counted with those who shaped the field of criminal justice—he stands with practitioners Voll-mer and O. W. Wilson, with scholars such as Banton, Wilson, Bittner, and Westley, and with other fine teachers.
