The Policeman's Tortured Psyche

 

Norman Mailer, in a letter to William F. Buckley, Jr. quoted in The New Yorker, wrote this:

"I'm not the cop-hater I'm reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to in your speech if we were debating is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would maintain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal...."