Police officers typically have a large amount of discretion when deciding what situations to become involved in and how to handle them. While a few situations demand specific and well-defined responses (for example, mandatory arrests in domestic violence cases), the vast majority allow for a variety of possible responses that are neither correct nor incorrect. As with any job that allows discretion, police departments and police officers develop ”working personalities” or ”styles” that guide their general decision making. Police personalities and policing styles are informal approaches to police work and represent ways that police officers ”do their jobs.” They tend to be unique for each police department and police officer and can change from situation to situation. Departmental policing styles are influenced by the mission and goals of the department, the needs of the town or jurisdiction, and residents’ views of the role of the police in their community. In addition, individual policing styles are influenced by an officer’s personal belief system, moral character, and outlook on police work. A department’s policing style greatly influences individual policing styles through hiring decisions (hiring those officers whose personal belief system mirrors that of the department), recruit training (selecting trainers who best represent the mission and philosophy of the department), and rewards and disciplinary action (promoting officers whose performance is most in line with the departmental style while punishing officers whose behavior deviates from it). Departmental Policing Styles Police departments have their own styles that reflect the organizational culture of the department. The departmental style influences every aspect of police work in that jurisdiction, ranging from hiring and promotional decisions, everyday police-community interactions, and budget decisions and resource allocation to police strategies and identification of crime problems within the jurisdiction. The most widely cited study on police departmental styles was conducted by James Q. Wilson (1968). He found three distinct departmental styles: watchman, legalistic, and service. The watchman style is based mostly on order maintenance. With this style, police officers judge the seriousness of violations by examining the immediate and personal consequences of the offense rather than the legal status of the offense. A watchman style department focuses its law enforcement activities on keeping the peace in the community. A police officer in a watchman department typically has the most discretion. In contrast, legalistic style departments have one standard: strict enforcement of the law. This type of department produces large numbers of arrests and traffic citations. Most calls for service are resolved in a formal manner in which an arrest or a formal complaint is made. The third type, the service style department, prioritizes all requests for assistance without differentiating between order maintenance or law enforcement functions. Police officers in these departments are not likely to make an arrest unless the situation renders it absolutely necessary. For example, in handling a situation where a group of youths is out past the town’s curfew, police officers in a watchman style department may not intervene at all, speak with the group without taking any further action, or simply tell them to go […]
Criminal Justice System
Police Supervision
Police supervision is the act of supervising, directing, or overseeing the day-to-day work activities of police officers. In most law enforcement agencies the majority of the policing services provided to the public are provided by uniformed patrol officers and detectives. These officers and detectives make up the lowest level of their departments’ hierarchical structure and are supervised by a chain of command consisting of multiple layers of supervisory officers. The chain of command structure of most police agencies is similar to that found in military units, where each employee in the chain usually answers to only one immediate supervisor. Requests and other sorts of communication within the organization usually flow up and down through each level of the supervisory hierarchy, and rarely is a level of command bypassed. Although rank designations for supervisory positions vary from agency to agency, the immediate supervisor of patrol officers or detectives is often a sergeant. (Some agencies also utilize a rank called corporal or officer in charge, which are basically officers who temporarily assume the role of the sergeant if a sergeant is unavailable at the time.) Sergeants in turn are usually supervised by a lieutenant, and lieutenants are supervised by a captain. The larger the police organization, the more ranks or levels of command that will exist, with some larger organizations having the ranks of major, lieutenant colonel, commander, or colonel. At the head of the police organization is a single police executive, often referred to as a chief or director in state and municipal police organizations or a sheriff in county law enforcement agencies. Difficulties in Supervising Officers Supervision of the activities of police officers is often very difficult for three primary reasons. First is the fact that uniformed officers usually patrol alone or in pairs, are mobile, and are dispersed across a wide geographic area. For example, in large-city police departments a sergeant may be responsible for simultaneously supervising up to twelve patrol officers, each patrolling independently, dispersed across an area of a dozen square miles. In sheriff departments or state police agencies sergeants may supervise fewer officers; however, these officers may be dispersed across even larger geographic areas, such as one or more counties. When not handling calls, uniformed officers are usually free to patrol randomly in an effort to detect criminal activity and be a visible deterrent to crime. Therefore, it can be difficult for a sergeant to locate subordinate officers and directly observe their behavior when they are not handling a call for service. Likewise, detectives spend the majority of their time out of the office conducting follow-up interviews with victims and witnesses. Contacting these witnesses may require travel to a number of different areas within the jurisdiction within one workday or even require travel outside the agency’s jurisdiction. Therefore, a detective sergeant supervises a unit of detectives who are constantly coming and going from the office at various times and traveling various distances. Rarely is the detective supervisor able to be present with subordinates while they follow up on investigative leads. […]
Supreme Court Decisions
While often characterized as enforcers of the law, police in America must also be upholders of the law. In carrying forth their law enforcement functions the police are sworn to uphold the Constitution. This oath demands that all arrests, searches, and the like be conducted in compliance with constitutional rules. Although all courts possess the power to declare a law to be in violation of the U.S. Constitution, the final judge of constitutionality is the Supreme Court. This article will highlight the primary Supreme Court decisions that have most affected the way police officers perform their law enforcement role. Arrest and Detention of Suspects Today, the circumstances under which an arrest may lawfully be made are normally specified by state statute, but certain minimum constitutional standards, such as the Fourth Amendment requirement of probable cause, must be met. The Supreme Court has indicated that the law of arrest has constitutional dimensions beyond the requirement of probable cause, however. In United States v. Watson, 423 U.S. 411, 96 S. Ct. 820, 46 L. Ed. 2d 598 (1976), the Court ruled that while the preferred practice is to obtain an arrest warrant prior to making an arrest, the Constitution does not require issuance of a warrant prior to arresting a suspect in a public place, even if officers had the time and opportunity to obtain a warrant. In Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573,100 S. Ct. 1371,63 L. Ed. 2d 639 (1980), the Court ruled that absent exigent circumstances or consent, police officers may not enter a private home to make a warrantless arrest. Issuance of an arrest warrant is a prerequisite to a valid entry in nonemergency circumstances. Further, the warrantless entry into a home to arrest an individual for a minor offense is rarely permissible, Welsh v. Wisconsin, 466 U.S. 740, 104 S. Ct. 2091, 80 L. Ed. 2d 732 (1984). Justices have also held that the Constitution permits full custody arrests even for minor traffic offenses punishable only with a fine, Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, 532 U.S. 318, 121 S. Ct. 1536, 149 L. Ed. 2d 549 (2001), and that the motive behind an officer’s decision to arrest is irrelevant to its legality so long as constitutional minimum standards are complied with, Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806, 116 S. Ct. 1769, 135 L.Ed. 2d 89 (1996). Recognizing the need to balance reasonable police procedures against the constitutional right of citizens to be free from unreasonable seizures, the Supreme Court has granted limited power to the police to conduct temporary detentions short of an arrest. In a case styled Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S. Ct. 1868, 20 L. Ed. 2d 889 (1968), the Court ruled that when an officer has a reasonable suspicion to believe that criminal activity is afoot and offers identification as a police officer, the officer may lawfully stop an individual for questioning. If the results of the inquiry do not dispel fear that the suspect is armed, the officer may conduct […]
Police Surveillance
In the popular imagination, surveillance involves public police agents working undercover against foreign enemies, organized crime networks, corporate fraudsters, drug dealers, and ordinary crooks in hot spots of thieving. The police do undertake such work, although it has a minor role in their repertoire of investigative methods (Marx 1988; Ericson 1993; Sharpe 2002). Surveillance of this type is more common among private security operatives, who have the advantage of greater legal and practical access to private spheres compared to their counterparts in public policing. Moreover, they can be paid at a fraction of the cost of public police officers for what is labor intensive and sometimes unproductive work. Some industries have developed substantial private investigation units based on this type of surveillance. For example, the insurance industry uses both internal special investigation units and private investigators on contract to conduct surveillance regarding fraud (Ericson, Doyle, and Barry 2003; Ericson and Doyle 2004). The undercover police operative who observes and records is only one role in the division of labor for surveillance. Surveillance is best defined as the production, analysis, and distribution of information about populations in order to govern them (Giddens 1987; Dandeker 1990; Haggerty and Ericson 2005). As such, surveillance is integral to the activities of all major social institutions, for example, governments that administer police, military, taxation, and social security systems, banks that profile credit ratings of customers, health service providers that compile medical histories, insurance companies that form risk pools for efficient underwriting and claims management, and marketing agencies that use media audience consumption and ratings data to place their ads and target consumers. Surveillance has been greatly enhanced by the development of electronic technologies—for example, computers, smart cards, video cameras, and satellites—that produce information about populations instantly and with worldwide transmission capabilities. Surveillance technologies not only monitor people as individuals but also through processes of disassembling and reassembling data about them. People are broken down into a series of discrete information flows that are stabilized and captured according to preestablished classifications. Their reconfigured identities are then transported to data systems to be reassembled and combined in ways that serve the specific purposes of the institutions involved. The accumulated information constitutes one’s ”data double,” a virtual/informational profile that circulates in the electronic networks of various institutions and their specific contexts of practical application. One result of this process is an enhanced capacity to govern populations across institutions through ”datamatching” or ”dataveillance” (Garfinkel 2000). Another result is ”datamining,” using applied mathematics and sophisticated computer systems to discover new data and patterns that are useful in strategic intelligence. Datamining has been used extensively in target marketing, but it also has a number of security applications, for example, to identify attacks on computer systems based on deviations from the normal flow of server traffic. The new surveillance capacities of data systems are making information an increasingly valuable commodity. Indeed, the population database of an organization is often one of its most valuable assets, sold selectively to other organizations that can use the data for further surveillance […]
SWAT Teams
In 1964, the Philadelphia Police Department, in response to an alarming increase in bank robberies, established a one-hundred-man Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) Squad. The purpose of this unit was to react quickly and decisively to bank robberies while they were in progress, by utilizing a large number of specially trained officers who had at their disposal a great amount of firepower. The tactic worked. Shortly after the successes of the Philadelphia SWAT team were publicized, other departments formed similar special units, most notably the Los Angeles Police Department (SWAT). Many different names were given to these teams: Special Reaction Team (SRT) by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, Metro Unique Situation Team (MUST) by the Nashville Police Department, and hostage rescue team (HRT) by others, to name a few. The formation of SWAT teams by major police departments marked a departure from traditional police service and the advent of a new method of crisis management by modern police executives. Many rank-and-file police officers were slow to see these teams as the most ideal element of a department to correctly handle certain high-risk situations. But police executives were quick to recognize that the use of highly motivated, specially armed, specially trained, and exceptionally well-led reams of officers, when faced with heavily armed criminals or media happenings such as hostage incidents, usually reduced civil liability and complemented public relations when the incident was resolved successfully in favor of the police with little or no loss of life. By the end of the 1970s, all major departments across the United States had formed SWAT teams, and the rank-and-file police officers of America had accepted them as an integral part of police service. Staffing SWAT teams are staffed by regular police officers selected for the teams after meeting certain stringent criteria. SWAT team members are required to have a normal psychological profile, with emphasis on the ability to work well as a member of a team. Without question, each member must be physically fit and not have any limiting physical characteristics, such as hearing loss or extreme myopia. Team members must be able to react well under stress and conditions of extreme fatigue. They must be capable of following orders without question and at the same time demonstrating the ability to lead others when called upon. Equipment Because SWAT teams are required to tackle situations that demand unorthodox entry into structures under extremely adverse conditions, they must be adept in the use of special equipment such as ropes and rappelling paraphernalia, which they can use to enter a structure from a rooftop or from a hovering helicopter. They must be able to use explosives to blast doors, walls, or roofs in order to make a quick and safe entry. The SWAT team uniform must provide all-weather protection. It must be able to be worn at night without making the officer an easily identifiable target. It must be loose fitting in order to allow the officer freedom of movement. Many teams have opted for a ski mask type of wool cap, […]