While society always requires some means of preventing the breakdown of the behavioral values and patterns that perpetuate the benefits desired by the majority of those participating in a society, the use of police to accomplish this is not emphasized where the informal behavioral controls of family, neigborhood, and community effectively perpetuate a consensus and conformity to prevalent values. With the breakdown of these informal controls, however, and an increase in a diversity of behavior that appears to threaten rational social order, the police are looked to as the formal authority for ensuring that deviant behavior is contained. Further, the various groups who desire that their behavioral values dominate the accepted social order compete to legalize their values, thus making them enforceable through the government's law enforcement and court system, while those whose behavior violates legalized values become outlaws sought out by the police to receive sanctions and restraint. The police in a democratic society tend to become the power tools of the majority or the powerful who dominate the legislative and executive centers, since the police are required to enforce the laws devised out of the political process. Minorities and the powerless thus tend to become the targets of police activity, since they have difficulty incorporating their values and socioeconomic needs within the legitimate socioeconomic order. Footnotes accompany each chapter, and a subject index is provided.