From Warriors to Guardians: Recommitting American Police Culture to Democratic Ideals

This is one in a series of papers that will be published as a result of the Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety. This paper is about how American policing has slowly drifted away from Plato’s vision of guardians and Socrates’ view of guardian education as expressed in Plato’s Republic. This view of guardian education is humanistic. It takes shape through criminal justice education that is not only vocational but also stresses ethics, theory and the nature of virtue.