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Essay On Law Enforcement Education

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Law Enforcement Education and Training in the 21st Century and its Relation to Police Professionalization
There is a great debate over the question of whether American law enforcement has achieved the status of a profession. In order to answer this question, there is a need to define what a profession is and identify the requisite attributes that qualifies an occupation to be identified as a profession. Criminal justice administrators have been actively pursuing professionalization for their chosen vocation while police researchers have been making recommendations which require increasing levels of higher education and an expanded college curricula for law enforcement service (Carter, Sapp, & Stephens, State of Police Education: Policy Direction for the 21st Century, 1989). However, it seems that part of the challenge of professionalization is the lack of general understanding of the concept. Professionalization occurs when an occupation ceases to be irregular in operation and transforms itself by "…the development of formal qualifications based upon education, apprenticeship, and examinations, the emergence of regulatory bodies with powers to admit and discipline members, and some degree of monopoly rights." (Bullock & Trombley, 1999, p. 689).
A substantive definition for profession has been elusive in the literature review; therefore, a profession can be constructively defined as a full-time, remunerated, services-oriented vocation governed by a code of ethics and based on

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