Enforcing the Law And

C H A P T E R 7

Enforcing the Law and

Keeping the Peace: The Nature and Scope of Police Work

SUMMARY

Police have many functions. In a democratic society like the United States they serve as enforcers, investigators, and traffic controllers. In addition to these roles, police also serve a quasi-judicial function in that officers must determine if a crime has actually been committed and, if so, which response is the most appropriate for the situation. In spite of conventional beliefs, the chief function of the police is not to enforce the law but to keep the peace. As demonstrated consistently in the Uniform Crime Reports and other data, serious crimes constitute only a small fraction of all arrests in any given year. By contrast, the daily activity of most officers involves administrative work, answering routine calls, controlling traffic, testifying in court, and providing assistance to citizens.

The peacekeeping role of the police is the key factor that differentiates them from private citizens. Peacekeeping involves the mobilization of the legitimate right to use force in situations where urgency requires it.

Police departments are bureaucratically structured on a military model. All large police organizations and many smaller ones have a fixed division of labor, chains and units of command, and rules, regulations, and discipline. In essence, the militaristic nature of police organization derives from a punitive model of administrative control where deviation from the rules and regulations of the department is met with a variety of punishments designed to ensure compliance within the ranks.

Patrol is the most basic concept and technique of police work. It is through patrol that police protect public safety, enforce the law, control traffic, conduct criminal investigations, and interpret the law. In years past, foot patrols were considered the mainstay of policing. They evolved from earlier traditions of night watch systems but were displaced by motorized patrols because of criticisms characterizing foot patrols as inefficient and ineffective. Currently, they have been replaced almost universally by motor patrols, although several researchers and law enforcement professionals have expressed growing interest in putting the cop back on the beat. Those most interested in reviving foot patrol as an enforcement strategy cite the need to increase and improve contact between citizens and police.

A police department’s detective force specializes in the apprehension of offenders. Detective work includes the identification and arrest of criminal offenders, the collection and preservation of physical evidence, the locating and interviewing of witnesses, and the recovery and return of stolen property. In spite of this concentrated activity, however, for their numbers detectives make proportionately few arrests.

Most police departments also have officers assigned to specialized units designed to handle specific types of enforcement situations — surveillance, decoy operations, intelligence gathering, and other enforcement activities. In addition, many departments have highly trained officers assigned to SWAT teams to deal with such high-risk situations as hostage taking and riot control. In recent years, there has been an emphasis on community policing, which involves a variety of linkages between police officers and the communities they patrol.

Police officers, whether detectives or those in uniform, are called on to immediately judge whether a law has been violated, whether to invoke the powers of arrest, and whether to use force in invoking that power. Considerable discretion must be used in making these judgments because departmental rules and guidelines are frequently ambiguous. An outgrowth of this discretionary power is selective law enforcement.

There is the police subculture — a system of shared norms, values, goals, and style of life that is essentially different from that of the wider society within which officers function and which they are charged to protect.

In the majority of jurisdictions in the United States, legislation has mandated that male and female officers have the same professional opportunities. State and local codes require that the hiring of police recruits be based on physical standards and competitive examinations that are designed to be nondiscriminatory; that all recruits receive the same training and all officers have the same legal authority; that promotions are awarded on merit as decided by competitive procedures to determine professional knowledge and decision-making abilities; and that equal positions rate equal pay regardless of the officer’s gender. However, this was not always the case, and even now at the beginning of a new millennium, gender bias in policing remains a problem.

Finally, in recent years there has been an emphasis on community policing, which involves a variety of linkages between police officers and the communities they patrol. However, because of terrorism, this model is undergoing change.

CHAPTER TOPIC OUTLINE

1. The Functions of Police

a. Police work involves enforcing the law and keeping the peace. Police work is primarily a peacekeeping operation.

·  Exhibit 7.1, A View from the Field: Terrorism, Peacekeeping, and Police Patrol in Cairo, Egypt: Some Personal Observations

b. The peacekeeping role is the key factor that separates the functions of police from those of private citizens. This role involves the mobilization of the legitimate right to use force in situations where urgency requires it.

2. The Police Bureaucracy (See Exhibit 7.2.)

·  Division of labor

·  Chain and units of command

·  Rules, regulations, discipline

·  Problems of enforcement

·  Strategic leniency

·  Exhibit 7.3, Historical Perspectives on Criminal Justice: L’Arma dei Carabinieri

·  Careers in Criminal Justice: Police Officer

3. The Organization of Policing

a. Line services

·  Patrol, investigation, traffic control

b. Administrative services

·  Training, personnel issues, planning and research, legal matters, community relations, internal investigation

c. Auxiliary services

·  Communications, record keeping, data processing, supply and maintenance, laboratory studies, temporary detention

d. Patrol

·  Functions of patrol: the mainstay of policing but most of it is routine and mundane

·  Motorized versus foot patrols

·  The Kansas City experiment

e. Detective work

·  Responsibilities

1) Identification, location, and apprehension of criminal offenders

2) Collection and preservation of physical evidence

3) Location and interviewing of witnesses

4) Recovery and return of stolen property

·  Effectiveness

·  Evaluation of detectives

o  Clearance Rates

f. Specialized police units

·  Decoys and blending

·  Web patrols

·  SWAT teams

·  Sting operations

·  Drug enforcement units

·  Exhibit 7.4, Research on Crime and Justice: Pharmaceutical Diversion Squads

4. Community policing is a collaborative effort between the police and the community to identify the problems of crime and disorder and to develop solutions from within the community.

·  “Broken windows” theory of policing

·  Changes in policing since September 11, 2001

·  Exhibit 7.5, Law and Criminal Justice: Harbor Policing and Terrorism

5. Women in Policing

a. The emergence of women police

b. Equal opportunity movement for women in policing

c. Current status of women in policing

6. Police Discretion and Selective Law Enforcement

a. Discretion exists whenever a police officer or agency is free to choose among various alternatives:

·  To enforce the law and to do so selectively

·  To use force

·  To deal with some citizens differently from others

·  To provide or not provide certain services

·  To discipline officers differently

·  To organize and deploy resources in a variety of forms and levels

b. Selective law enforcement

·  Problems of full enforcement

·  Factors in the decision to arrest

·  Command discretion

·  Exhibit 7.6, Gender Perspectives on Crime and Justice: Domestic Violence and Police Discretion

7. The Police Subculture

·  The police personality

o  Danger and authority

·  Isolation and cynicism

·  Sources of stress

Other Topics of Interest:

Critical Thinking in Criminal Justice: Rudy Giuliani and the “Spin Doctors”

Careers in Criminal Justice: Police Officer

Famous Criminals: David Berkowitz,“Son of Sam”

KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS

clearance rate police cynicism

community policing police discretion

full enforcement police subculture

patrol working personality

peacekeeping role

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After a thorough study of Chapter 7, students should be able to answer the following questions:

1. What are the functions of police?

2. What is the “peacekeeping role” of the police?

3. What is police discretion? Does it refer only to selective law enforcement?

4. In what ways are police agencies paramilitary organizations?

5. What gives police the right to use force?

6. How is the police bureaucracy organized?

7. What are some components of the police subculture?

8. What is the relative importance of patrol units, detective forces, and specialized squads to big-city policing?

9. What is community policing?

10. What is the status of women in American policing?

SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE MATERIALS

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND POLICE DISCRETION

The June 1994 murder of Nicole Simpson sparked considerable debate among criminal justice scholars, politicians, women’s rights organizations, and the general public about the nature and extent of police discretion and its relationship to domestic violence. According to the findings of the National Violence Against Women Survey, an estimated 1.5 million women are raped or physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States. Overall, intimate partner violence made up 20 percent of violent crime against women in 2001. Over the past several years, about 33 percent of female murder victims were killed by an intimate partner. Moreover, 2 million women, or one woman every 16 seconds, are beaten annually, and domestic violence is the leading cause of injury among women ages 15 to 44.

Police response to domestic abuse has been ambiguous at best. Even in those states with mandatory arrest laws for domestic abuse calls, police are notoriously hesitant to make an official arrest. Jurisdictions without pro-arrest policies tend to produce arrest rates of just 4 to 12 percent, while arrest rates within legislated pro-arrest jurisdictions typically range from 15 to 30 percent. However, arrest rates can vary by location. In New York State, for example, although only one out of every five incidents falls under the mandatory arrest legislation, officers make high rates of arrests (70 to 85 percent) for these cases. But within the state, the percent arrested ranged widely, from approximately 30 to 80 percent, with domestic abuse offenders getting arrested, on average, approximately half of the time.

There appear to be a number of factors that influence police response in domestic abuse scenarios. Most notable are the historic legality of domestic abuse and the often ambiguous character of the domestic situation. The phrase “rule of thumb,” for example, dates back to English common law, which stated that a man could hit his wife with a stick no wider than his thumb. The legality of wife beating was formally established in the 1824 Mississippi Supreme Court decision that codified a version of the rule of thumb from English common law. From that time on, police, legislators, judges, prosecutors, offenders, and even victims have been reluctant to view such behavior as illegal. Subsequently, many police have responded to domestic dispute calls by simply talking to participants and allowing them to work it out on their own. Surveys of police attitudes toward domestic abuse have found that the majority of police surveyed believe that the best course of action should be to refer an offender to counseling.

In addition, police action in domestic abuse settings is inhibited by risk of physical harm to officers. Formal police action is also inhibited by the situational contexts of domestic abuse scenarios. In many cases, victims are often unwilling to initiate formal charges against their abusers. Victims may fail to do so for a variety of reasons, some of which may include feelings of shame, humiliation, confusion, or fear of retaliation from the abuser. Further, police may use discretion to handle domestic violence calls when they have reason to believe that an arrest will bring further harm to the victim. In these cases, police may refer the victim to a battered women’s shelter in order that she escape the situation without risking additional harm. See also Exhibit 7.6, Gender Perspectives on Crime and Justice: Domestic Violence and Police Discretion.

Recent research suggests that police presence in domestic violence situations might have a deterring effect on offenders from committing another assault. Researchers analyzed 2,564 assaults committed by spouses, ex-spouses, partners, and ex-partners, as reported to the National Crime Victimization Survey (1992–2002), to determine the patterns of repeat offenders. The results suggested that offenders were much less likely to repeat their offense when an incident is reported to the police; not reporting an incident increased the odds of a repeated offense by 89 percent. However, the results did not demonstrate a deterrent effect for arrest, suggesting that just reporting the incident to police deters offenders from committing another assault whether or not the police make an arrest.

Other research has examined the “second-responder” programs that send social workers to homes following a police report of domestic violence. These programs have become increasingly popular as police agencies no longer assume they can cope with domestic abuse by themselves. However, such programs are controversial, and some have even suggested that they may lead to further violence.

To examine the current lack of consensus among researchers as to whether second-responder programs are actually reducing domestic violence, the Police Foundation joined efforts of this multidisciplinary approach with the Second Responder Program of Richmond, VA, a collaborative effort by the Richmond Department of Social Services (DSS) and the Richmond Police Department (RPD). A recent study looked at the program’s practice of sending social workers to scenes of domestic violence while the officers who responded to the incident were still there (the “treatment” group) and compared the satisfaction of the victim’s experience with police and follow-up rates of violence with those of a control group who did not receive second-responder intervention.

The findings suggested that the treatment group received more social services than the control group and rated the second responders highly on major measures of satisfaction. The treatment group also received more services from police than the control group and were more satisfied with how officers handled their situation. Furthermore, the treatment group reported that they experienced less abuse than the control group during the six months after intervention, suggesting that second-responder-type programs have the potential to be very effective. (See Police Foundation Reports, Richmond’s Second Responders: Partnering with Police Against Domestic Violence, March 2005, available on the Police Foundation’s Web site at http://www.policefoundation.org/.)