Police Organization and Management: Key Functions and Strategies

1. CHAPTER 6 • Police Organization and Management

2. The Police Mission • The purposes of policing in democratic • societies is to: • Enforce and support the laws • Investigate crimes/apprehend • offenders • 3. Prevent crime • Ensure domestic peace and • tranquility • Provide the community with • enforcement–related services

3. Enforcing the Law • Only about 10–20% of all calls to the police require a law enforcement response. • Police cannot enforce all of the laws. Resources are limited. • Law enforcement priorities are significantly affected by community needs. Individual discretion also impacts them. • Police are expected to support the laws they enforce.

4. Apprehending Offenders Offenders may be apprehended: • While committing a crime • Shortly after committing a crime • After an extensive investigation

5. Preventing Crime • Crime prevention is proactive. It aims to: • Reduce crime and criminal opportunities • Lower the rewards of crime • Lessen the fear of crime • Law enforcement’s ability to prevent crimes relies in part on their ability to predict crime. • Determining when and where crimes will occur • Allocating resources accordingly • Crime mapping, as with CompStat, helps

6. Preserving the Peace Law enforcement do a number of activities to help ensure domestic peace and tranquility. Examples: Supervising parades and public demonstrations Officers may focus on quality-of-life offenses, acts that create physical disorder or reflect social decay or that could lead to further deterioration (broken windows theory). Examples: Vandalism, excessive noise.

7. Providing Services • Law enforcement provides the community with enforcement-related services. Police are just a phone call away. • Police handle emergency and non-emergency calls, such as: • Barking dogs • Lost and found items • Minor accidents

8. Operational Strategies • There are five core operational • strategies, each with unique features: • Preventive patrol • Routine incident response • Emergency response • Criminal investigation • Problem solving • Additionally, there is an ancillary • operational strategy: support services.

9. Preventive Patrol • The dominant operational policing strategy • is preventive patrol, which places • uniformed officers on the street in the • midst of the public. • Patrol is designed to: • Deter crimes • Interrupt crimes in progress • Position officers for quick response to emergencies • Increase the public’s feeling of safety and security

10. Routine Incident Response • Routine incident responses include restoring order, documenting information, or provide another immediate service to the parties involved in routine occurrences such as minor traffic accidents. • This is the second most common police activity. • Having a good response time is strongly linked to citizen satisfaction.

11. Emergency Response Emergency responses (or critical incidents) occur in response to crimes in progress, serious injuries, natural disasters, and other situations in which human lives may be in jeopardy.

12. Criminal Investigation Criminal investigations dominate media attention but constitute a relatively small proportion of police work. An investigation involves discovering, collecting, preparing, identifying, and presenting evidence to determine what happened and who is responsible.

13. Criminal Investigation • First responding officers: • Provide assistance to the injured and in capturing suspects. • Secure the crime scene. • Conduct the preliminary investigation. Sometimes, special crime-scene investigators will come in to assist. Follow-up investigations are based on solvability factors.

14. Problem Solving Problem solving policing requires: • Gathering knowledge of problem causes • Developing solutions in partnership with the community • Responding with a workable plan • Assessing the progress

15. Support Services Support services are ancillary services such as dispatch, training, personnel, property control, and record-keeping that keep agencies running.

16. Managing Police Departments • Police management refers to the administrative activities of controlling, directing, and coordinating police personnel, resources, and activities in order to: • Prevent crime • Apprehend criminals • Recover stolen property • Perform regulatory and helping services

17. Line Operations Field activities or supervisory activities directly related to day-to-day police work Staff Operations Include support roles, such as administration Police Organization and Structure Most police organization is structured along lines of authority.

18. Chain of Command • The organizational chart of any police agency shows a hierarchical chain of command. • Represents order of authority • Quasi-military structure

19. Policing Styles • History helps shape policing styles, • how agencies see their purpose, and • choose to fulfill it. • There are three basic policing styles: • Watchman • Legalistic • Service

20. Historical Eras in American Policing

21. The Watchman Style of Policing • The watchman style of policing are typically in lower- or lower-middle class areas that have a lot of crime. • This style is marked by: • Order maintenance • Controlling illegal and disruptive behavior • Considerable use of discretion

22. The Legalistic Style of Policing Legalistic style police departments are committed to enforcing the letter of the law and take a “laissez faire” stance on behaviors that are simply bothersome.

23. The Service Style of Policing • Service style police departments strive to meet community needs. They are: • Concerned with helping rather than strictly enforcing the laws. • More likely to supplement law enforcement activities with community resources. • Popular today.

24. Police-Community Relations (PCR) • The Police-Community Relations (PCR) movement began in the 1960s and 1970s. This movement recognizes the need for the police and the community to work together. • Consistent with this movement are: • Store-front auxiliary police offices • Neighborhood watch • Drug awareness programs • Project ID

25. Team Policing • Team policing is an extension of the PCR movement. • With team policing, conventional patrol strategies are reorganized and police teams are assigned to fixed districts. • Police become more familiar with the people of their districts and their problems and concerns.

26. Community Policing Consistent with service policing, community policing emphasizes the idea that police must partner with the community to help fulfill the community needs. Police actively work with citizens and with social services to help solve problems.

27. Community Policing • Community policing involves at least one • of four elements: • Community-based crime prevention • Reorientation of patrol activities to emphasize nonemergency services • Increased police accountability to the public • A decentralization of command, including greater use of civilians at all levels of police decision making

28. Community Policing as Corporate Strategy Some suggest that police departments operate like corporations, and that community policing is the newest strategy. Other strategies are strategic policing and problem-oriented policing.

29. Critique of Community Policing • Some criticize community policing, citing problems such as: • Too abstract of a concept • Hard-to-measure success • Difficult to conceptualize and quantify “citizen success” • Not readily accepted by all police officers or managers • Difficulty coming to a consensus with regard to what’s considered a “community problem”

30. Terrorism’s Impact on Policing The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks changed the role of police departments. The core mission has not changed, but all police departments now devote much more resources to preparing for a possible terrorist attack and intelligence gathering.

31. The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Approach • IACP announced its Taking Command Initiative in • They identified five key principles behind • an effective homeland security policy. • Homeland security proposals must be developed in local context. • Prevention is a key part of any strategy. • State and local law enforcement can help identify, investigate, and apprehend terrorist suspects. • Strategies must be coordinated nationally, not federally. • There cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach considering the vast diversity among state and local law enforcement and public safety agencies.

32. Intelligence-Led Policing and Antiterrorism • Intelligence-Led Policing (ILP) is a technique involving the use of criminal intelligence to guide policing in the fight against terrorism. • Police should be able to collect and/or analyze intelligence information and form an effective response to credible threat.

33. Community Policing and Antiterrorism • Community policing roles in the intelligence • process include: • Provide materials to raise community awareness of suspicious actions, behaviors, and events. • Organizing community meetings emphasizing prevention, vigilance, and awareness. • Ensuring that community members know how to relay information to the police. • Encouraging crime prevention, proactive policing, and close connections between the police and the public.

34. Information Sharing and Antiterrorism Sharing information across jurisdictions is crucial to effective antiterrorism plans and creating a fully integrated criminal justice information system. Such efforts are called boundaryless policing.

35. Discretion and the Individual Officer Even as police agencies adapt to threats posed by terrorism, individual officers still retain a considerable amount of discretion. discretion = choice

36. Factors that Influence Discretion • There are a number of factors that influence police decision making, including: • Officer’s background • Suspect’s characteristics • Department policy • Community interest • Pressure from victim • Disagreement with the law

37. Professionalism and Ethics • Today’s demands for police professionalism require that police officers have specialized knowledge and they adhere to professional standards and police ethics. • Accreditation is a step toward greater professionalism. • Ethics training is integrated into most basic training programs.

38. Education and Training • Modern police education programs involve training in areas like: • Human relations • Firearms • Communications • Legal issues • Patrol • Investigations • Report writing A post-academy field training program (PTO) is a recent development in police training.

39. Education and Training • According to a 1999 Bureau of Justice Report, the median number of classroom training hours required of new officers is: • 823 for state police • 760 for county • 640 for municipal • 448 for sheriffs

40. Formal Education Formal education is not required by all police departments, though for decades it has been recommended by several Commissions and groups. Departments vary with regard to hiring requirements. Some require no college; others require a four-year degree. Most federal agencies require college degrees.

41. Recruitment and Selection • Law enforcement agencies use a variety of applicant screening methods, including: • Personal interviews • Basic skills tests • Physical agility measures • Medical exams • Drug tests • Background investigations • Psychological testing

42. Percentage of Local Police Departments Using Various Recruit-Screening Methods, (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000)

43. Average Base Starting Salary for Entry-Level Officers in Local Police Departments

44. Average Base Starting Salary for Entry-Level Officers in Sheriff’s Offices

45. Ethnic and Gender Diversity in Policing • Opportunities for women and minorities in policing are expanding. • Many departments have dramatically increased their complement of officers from unrepresented groups. • In 2000, 22.7% of officers were racial and ethnic minorities. • Women are still significantly underrepresented, accounting for only 13% of all sworn officers.

46. Women as Effective Police Officers • Some women have integrated well into the role of police officer. Others feel strain and isolation. • Strain caused by family roles and parenting, underutilization, uncooperative attitudes of male officers.

47. Increasing the Number of Minorities and Women in Police Work • The Police Foundation recommends: • Involving underrepresented groups in departmental affirmative action and long-term planning programs. • Encouraging the development of an open promotion system. • Periodic audits to make sure that female officers are not being underutilized by ineffective tracking into clerical and support positions.