This article suggests that American municipal police departments are highly institutionalized organizations and should be studied in terms of how their formal structure and activities are shaped by powerful myths in their institutional environment. The incorporation of powerful myths into the structure and activities of police departments enables them to attain legitimacy; with legitimacy comes stability and protection from outside interference by powerful sovereign actors who are present in the enveloping institutional environment. However, legitimacy problems arising from conflicting institutional myths may precipitate full-blown organizational crises. Such police department crises are resolved ceremonially through a ritual that combines the public degradation of the department and the removal and replacement of the disgraced police chief by a new chief with a "legitimating" mandate.

This paper explores the relationship between liberalism, victimization experience (both direct and vicarious), fear of victimization, and attitudes towards purposes of incarceration. The study makes use of a national public opinion poll conducted for ABC News in 1982. The major findings are that both fear and liberalism contribute to punitiveness but, more importantly, individual demographic characteristics are ambiguously related to punitiveness. It appears that demographic characteristics are related to punitiveness through a complex of other attitudinal associations—in this instance, fear and liberalism. Neither direct nor vicarious victimization had a direct effect on punishment attitudes. To the extent that victimization experience affects punitiveness, the effects are indirect through fear.

Criminologists have long viewed homicide as the least difficult type of crime to measure.' The difficulty of disposing of bodies, the generally high level of agreement between the Uniform Crime Reports anci the Vital Statistics of the United States, " 2 and the monitoring function of coroners in recording homicide events all support the view that official statistics provide a highly accurate measure of homicide. The excellence of this official measurement, however, is confined to citizens killing other citizens. The official measurement of officials killing citizens falls far short of excellence. The widespread American belief that official killings do not constitute violence3 is reflected by the complete absence of

The Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey is a comparative organizational research platform from which studies of police organizational structures can be launched. This article briefly describes the survey and its origin, discusses its capacity to provide measures of organizational dimensions, and considers how the survey results can best be used to increase our understanding of police organizations.

No abstract