Squad-Car Lawyers

The police, sledge hammers in hand, battered their way into a Chicago apartment. It was empty. Where were the gamblers they had been tipped off about? Gone, said the tipster. They had moved their bookmaking and policy operation to another house down the block. What to do? Was it legal to go after them in their new lair even though the search warrant specified the first address and not the second?

The answer was yes, and the police got it on the spot from Lawyer Frank Carrington, 31, a legal adviser to the Chicago police department who had come along for the pinch. Reinforced with knowledge of the law, the cops rushed to the nearby building, arrested the bookie and four customers, and picked up policy slips and other incriminating evidence. "It was a good pinch," says Carrington. "I think it will stick in court."

Legal Interns. In the wake of U.S. Supreme Court rulings setting stringent guidelines for policemen to follow in searching, seizing and questioning suspects, many law-enforcement officers complain that they are hamstrung. Said one disgruntled Corpus Christi, Texas, cop: "It's getting so bad that lawyers practically have to ride around in patrol cars." That's precisely what Frank Carrington and a number of other young lawyers, trained at Northwestern's Law School under a $300,000, five-year Ford Foundation grant, have been doing. "The resolution of conflicts between maximum police efficiency and maximum individual liberty," says the program's codirector, Professor James Thompson, "calls for the application of sound legal counsel not only in the courts, but also in the police precincts, where the average criminal case begins." Under the Northwestern program, graduate law students divide their first year between studying in the classroom and working with the Chicago police. Their second year is spent interning full time with other police departments.

Northwestern-trained legal advisers are now with police in Pittsburgh, Corpus Christi and Chicago. At first, says Legal Intern Wayland Pilcher, who is with the Corpus Christi force, the cops were suspicious of him. But they came around once it dawned on them that his job was to make their own "work more effective within the guidelines of the law."

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