The police officer’s job, Vollmer declared, was to form alliances in the community that would lead to strategies to deal with the “pre-delinquent” youngster, while at the same time working to alleviate the social and psychological causes of later delinquency and crime. His view of his idealized crime-fighting police officer was suggested in his 1919 article titled “The Policeman as a Social Worker.” In this article he described his view of the officer as the ultimate crime fighter who understood crime and worked to prevent its occurrence. In order to bring about this kind of police officer, he realized that the officer must be intelligent, educated, and trained. That meant, essentially, elevating the role and status of police officers to make
“For many early Victorians, policing was a new and low-status occupation. Few men became policeman for positive reasons" (Taylor 49).
"A policeman’s first obligation is to be responsible to the needs of the community he serves…The problem is that the atmosphere does not yet exist in which an honest police officer can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers. We create an atmosphere in which the honest officer fears the dishonest officer, and not the other way around.", -Frank Serpico.
According to Kelling, Pate, Dieckman, & Brown (1974), patrol is the “backbone” of police work. This belief is based around the premise that the mere presence of police officers on patrol prohibits criminal activity. Despite increasing budgets and the availability of more officers on the streets, crime rates still rose with the expanding metropolitan populations (Kelling et al., 1974). A one year experiment to determine the effectiveness of routine preventive patrol would be conducted, beginning on the first day of October 1972, and ending on the last day of September 1973.
In the early 1900’s the Boston police were ranked among the best law enforcement groups in the world. Underneath this reputation of being one of the best in the world, the police department was having some trouble. Most of the police stations were old and deteriorating. An officer would have to many hours a week. The pay for most policemen were very low. While inflation was in much affect the policeman’s salary stayed the same. And the men were promised raises but never saw much more than they had already made. The Boston city policemen were very angry over these iss...
It's up to the police to make a decision right on the street to act.
It is both a result and a cause of police isolation from the larger society and of police solidarity. Its influence begins early in the new officer’s career when he is told by more experienced officers that the “training given in police academies is irrelevant to ‘real’ police work”. What is relevant, recruits are told, is the experience of senior officers who know the ropes or know how to get around things. Recruits are often told by officers with considerable experience to forget what they learned in the academy and in college and to start learning real police work as soon as they get to their Field Training Officers. Among the first lessons learned are that police officers share secrets among themselves and that those secrets especially when they deal with activities that are questionable in terms of ethics, legality, and departmental policy, are not to be told to others. They also are told that administrators and Internal Affairs officers cannot often be trusted. This emphasis on the police occupational subculture results in many officers regarding themselves as members of a “blue
Crime is a part of society encompases the news and the public. A variety of studies of media content have estimated that as much as 25 percent of the daily news is devoted to crime (Surette 1992) and that crime is the largest major category of stories in the print and electronic media (Chermak 1994, 103). (Lawrence 18). With crime at an all time high, police are constantly having to deal with more and more issues. This can lead to stressed out and fed up officers, which can lead to poor decisions by an officer. The use of force by police is a highly controversial topic as it raises questions about a government’s ability to use force against its citizens (Lawrence 19). Today’s society is caught up on the ideals of civility and equality before the law, making police use of force a touchy
It is a myth to believe that an officers job is spend fighting dangerous crimes, in reality officers spend more time handing smaller cases. For example, police officers spend a lot of time doing daily tasks such as giving speeding tickets and being mediators in disputes (Kappeler & Potter, 2005). Handing out speeding tickers and handling minor disputes are far from fighting crime. Police officers spend more time doing preventive measures (Kappeler & Potter, 2005). Preventive measures involve officers intervening to prevent further altercations. Victor Kappeler and Gary Potter discussed the myth of crime fighting as invalid and misleading notions of an officer’s employment.
& Forst, L.S. (2016). An Introduction to Policing (8th Edition). Boston, MA USA: Cengage Learning. p.243 (245). Retrieved June 6, 2017, from https://www.betheluniversityonline.net
American policing originated from early English law and is profoundly influenced by its history. Early law enforcement in England took on two forms of policing, one of which heavily influenced modern policing and it is known as the watch (Potter, 2013). The watch consisted, at first, of volunteers which had to patrol the streets for any kind of disorder including crime and fire. After men attempted to get out of volunteering by paying others, it became a paid professional position (Walker & Katz, 2012). The three eras of policing in America are shaped by these early ideas and practices of law enforcement. Throughout time, sufficient improvements and advancements have been made from the political era to the professional era and finally the community era which attempts to eliminate corruption, hire qualified officers and create an overall effective law enforcement system.
This essay will discuss the role of the criminal justice professional in serving both individual and societal needs. It will identify and describe at least three individual needs and three societal needs, in addition to explaining the role of the criminal justice professional in serving each of these needs. Illustrative examples will be provided for support.
Young people and the police have, for many years, experienced a tense and confrontational relationship (Borgquist & Johnson et al., 1995). This has led to a great wealth of literature based upon the notion of police-youth interaction. Much of this literature has tended to focus upon juvenile criminality and the reasons why young people commit such seemingly high levels of crime. Whilst the relationship between young people and the police force has been widely theorised and explained, there is very little literature on juvenile attiudes towards the police. Research that concerns societies attitudes towards the police force tends to focus upon the views and opinions of adults (Hurst and Frank, 2000). In this first section of my literature review I am going to focus upon work that allows us to gain a deeper understanding of why young people are so important when looking at crime. This section will allow us to comprehend the ways in which, literature suggests, young people view the police. This knowledge will provide a basis for my research in which I look more specifically at youth attitudes towards PCSO’s.
Training police to enact broken-windows or zero-tolerance policies upon youths, who have, more than likely, only experienced areas of high-crime throughout their lives, is not the way to stop them from committing crime in their lifetime. These types of police tactics, when administered to juveniles, are more likely to skew the child’s view of themselves and their self-worth, serving to create, not only a distrust towards authority figures, but also a person who genuinely believes that they are destined to nothing more than a life of crime. Perhaps if officers were more lenient with inner-city youths, they would be more likely to see police as helpful and more likely to realize that the decisions that they make do have an effect on the outcome
In order to understand the attitudes towards police work and the actions of police officers one can make use of the Structure-agency debate which has three distinct perspectives; structure, agency and structuration. This essay shall argue which position is best to apply by drawing on sociological theories and concepts.
Its two o’ clock in the morning. You wake up to the sound of a drug-addict vandalizing a mobile home. When this happens, who do you call? Not your mother, but the cops. The typical cop faces this situation on a regular basis. A policemen’s life is far from Hollywood; it is quite difficult to work where most people don’t acknowledge your life or job. Most people think of policemen as a nuisance, but cops are much more than that; they save lives.