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The article presents a paper that has attempted to illuminate the problem of the persistence of specific organizational forms, a problem which has received some theoretical attention, but for which few operational clues exist. A notable exception is researcher Arthur L. Stinchcombe's hypothesis stating that when organizational elite structures are compatible with the interests and purposes of relevant external elites who control the resources upon which the organization depends, then the organizational form has a better chance of survival. The example analyzed in this paper was that of a city police control system that by all odds should have died a hundred years ago. The first task of this paper was to show how the Police Control Board, gradually worked out a routine police control operation that proved to be of great comfort and satisfaction to nervous elites suspicious of the city's will and ability to keep the dangerous classes in check. The second task of this paper was to analyze the social backgrounds of commissioners in order to show that they could hardly be anything but acceptable to elites since they themselves were recruited from elites and brought an elite perspective into the organization.

This paper makes problematic the situational conditions under which policemen write official crime reports in field encounters with complainants. These reports are the raw materials for official crime rates-"crimes known to the police." They also are a prerequisite of further investigation of the crime by the detective bureau and thus of apprehension of the offender. They constitute official recognition of crimes. The findings derive from a three-city observation study of routine police encounters. Among the conditions that relate to the production of official crime reports are the following: the legal seriousness of the complaint, the complainant's observable preference for police action, the relational distance between the complainant and the suspect, the complainant's degree of deference toward the police, and the complainant's social-class status. However, there is no evidence of racial discrimination in crime-reporting. We interpret these empirical patterns not only from the standpoint of crime rates as such but also from the standpoint of the relation between police work and other aspects of social organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]