Police Forces And The Police Force

Police have many roles to take on an everyday basis. The main goal for an officer is to keep criminals off the streets and to try and maintain a safe environment for people to live. Many people disagree with some of the decisions officers make to enforce these rules and causes a lot of controversy. Today many people don't respect our police officers because of actions made by others. A major issue today is police use of force, stop and frisk.

The history of policing dates back several thousand years ago when there was no order or peace and inhumane acts upon citizens was the norm with religious, political, or military police acting as the law. Policing was unstable and unorganized. Citizens took the law into their own hands and served as judge, jury, and executioner. There was not such a thing as being “innocent until proven guilty.” If the community believed an individual was guilty of a crime then the community would handle the offense themselves. American policing stems from the English heritage; crime prevention and control, preventive

The article spoke about the Freddie Gray murder and the affect it had on the community. It specifically addressed the actions of the baltimore community once Freddie Gray was laid to rest and how the black community in baltimore felt unheard and needed to retaliate in order show the higher authorities of how they feel social injustice. The article truly describes the tension between the police and the black community and attempt to figure out why the community was essentially destroying their future and their own neighborhoods.

Since the founding of the United States, the responsibility for enforcing laws has been given to state and local governments. The biggest strength that this distribution of power has granted is that the citizens can have a connection to their officers because they are feeling that they are being policed by one of their own. This keeps the law, law enforcement, and your connection to it close as opposed to (only) having it enforced by entities who do not know your area or the people that live in the area. Along similar lines, local policing provides the opportunity to build relationships with the people they serve, which can go a long way in reducing crime. Despite these two strengths, the biggest weakness is that local law enforcement agencies can, and often are both underfunded and understaffed, preventing the agency from being able to combat crime and help their communities to the level that they wish. The other big weakness to local law enforcement is that due to there being so many localities (most with their own law enforcement agencies), there can be some confusion to the overlap of jurisdictions. The alternative to local policing, which has been gaining some steam in the United States since the start of the 21st century, is placing the responsibility for law

The colors red, white, and blue in America represents freedom. When a police officer approaches a civilian in today’s times, those colors mean the absolute worst. With recent police mischief including shootings, red, white, and blue could mean absolute panic. Americans today feel as if there is a war with police officers. The most common question civilians have, why are innocent people being killed by police officers? The civic responsibility of a police officer is to serve and protect citizens while upholding the law. With many recent incidents, civilians no longer feel safe around authorities. A new policy proposed to congress by Barack Obama is for police officers to wear body worn cameras, or BWC’s. “... nine in ten Americans support the use of cameras on cops” (Boone). Therefore, police officers should be required to wear body worn cameras in order to have better security, behavior, and evidence for crime scenes.

There is only 9 patrol cars out at a time covering the city which is not enough to respond to the amount of calls that are constantly coming in. Most of the officers out on patrol are riding alone which can be intimidating and fear for

During the course of 12 months, data was collected and analyzed. The conclusion; no significant differences in the levels of crime, citizen satisfaction of police services, citizen fear of crime, citizen’s satisfaction of police response time, or overall police response times. The data also produced qualifying and quantifiable measures of police activities during shifts and insight into officer attitudes and understanding of preventative patrol (Kansas City Experiment Report, 1974).

Reactive patrols and proactive patrols are mainstays of American police agencies. Reactive patrols provide the required rapid law enforcement response to citizen requests for assistance and other emergencies. Meanwhile, proactive patrols provide the necessary planning and allocation of police resources to effectively respond to specific, ongoing problems such as "white collar crime" and the "victimless crimes" of drug transactions behind closed doors. Careful examinations of each patrol type and the effects of using exclusively reactive patrols or exclusively proactive patrols show that a balanced approach using both types of patrols gives the best law enforcement response to the needs of the community.

The articles I chose are from The Guardian and the Washington Post, and essentially combined they are an overview of what caused the tragic deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the community response to it, and how large of a problem police violence is. The argument put forth in the Guardian article is that the reason why black men are killed by white police officers is not due to an atmosphere of tension and mistrust between minorities and police officers or police in general, that atmosphere is merely a manifestation of the institutional racism that exists within police forces throughout America. And in turn the government has been essentially inactive when it comes to real reforms of the structure of police departments and their policies

Among our travels to a variety of different facility 's in the united states and in England there are vast differences and some similarities within each of our systems. When it comes to police, prisons, and other facility 's there are vast amounts of things that are done in each system that we can learn form each other and things that should be taken away.

Across America, there are a lot of small towns that make up this country. Within small townships there are police forces that only have five to ten officers that patrol acres of woods or farm land. On a daily basis these officers deal with minor crime like drugs, aggravated assault, burglary, and property crimes. If a crime happens it can take about twenty minutes for the township police to get there or it can at the state police up to an hour to get to the scene of the crime. In a big city like Baltimore police force take about three to five minutes to get to the scene of a crime. The township police force might get a new police car every couple

In determining the rationale of police use of force against individuals, it is also important to discuss factors such as the environment in which police officers in have in explaining police use of force during routine patrols. Terill et al. (2003) aimed to determine the effect of neighborhood context on the severity of force exercise by patrol officers (p. 292). Utilizing the findings of Black (1976), the authors reviewed that, "police will be more punitive toward suspects with lower economic or marginal cultural status, such as the poor, minorities, and the young" (p. 292). To test these explanations, the Terill et al. (2003) analyzed four sets of data collected by the Project on Policing Neighborhoods (POPN): systematic social observations,

Police use of force has received substantial scrutiny in various disciplines. In democratic civilizations, the police are required by the law and the public to use force when the situation warrants the use of ‘‘reasonable’’ power ‘‘necessary’’ to achieve ‘‘legitimate purposes’’ (Alpert and Smith 1994; Bittner 1970). According to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, use of force is the “amount of effort required by police to compel compliance by an unwilling subject” (NIJ, 2012).

The small & rural town law enforcement experience the same problems as metropolitan cities, but have larger areas to cover, with fewer officers and limited back-up (Dempsey & Forst, 2016, p. 46).

The psychologist serves a great purpose in the law enforcement as well. The police psychologists provide services that are used to counter police use of excessive force. The psychologists are there to characterize the types of officers who are known to abuse force and to recommend psychology-based intervention that could help police managers reduce cases of excessive force. Some think that the police departments should rely mostly on pre employment screening to identify violence-prone candidates.