Police Supervision

Supervision is ideal in any means to keep a situation under control and assuring that the situation is performed in the most civil manner possible. A militarized structure only weakens supervision and leadership. Police officers on patrol can get away with using brutal force in cases not needed because there is not a supervisor over their shoulders. Sergeants are as close as it comes to supervision of the patrol officers. According to the book, Above The Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force, Jerome H. Skolnick and James J. Fyfe state that “Because of civil service procedures and safeguards, such sergeants have little authority to reward or punish their officers formally. Hiring and firing are not within the sergeants’ province” (123).

Hence they typically regard the possibility of transfers with favor rather than dread” (123). Supervisors in a police department are not looking to fire these officers that do the dirty work probably due to lack of knowing the actual circumstances and laziness of finding a replacement, and the sergeants just plain out do not have the power to take these matters into their own hands. Something seems to be seriously wrong with the system that is set in place. A police chief in charge needs to see what is truly happening on the streets with the interactions brutal exchanges between officers and the communities. Most police chiefs argue that they cannot be looking over the shoulders of their officers because they have too much work to be able to do so. One way this can be done is by something that has already slightly taken effect but should be implemented in every single police department is body cameras. These body cams capture the process of patrol officers handling the law, which could the give the chiefs of police the scoop without disrupting too much of their busy lives back at the

In the 1960’s when police were getting gun downed and America’s cities were experiencing chaos, the Los Angeles Police Department created Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams. The growth of SWAT then began to consume cities across the country. SWAT teams were created to carry out duties such as hostage and active shooter scenarios. Soon after, raids then followed as a collateral duty. According to the book, To Protect And Serve: How to Fix America’s Police, Norm Stamper identifies a flaw in the use of SWAT and the raids performed, “ just under 80 percent [of SWAT missions] were to serve a search warrant, meaning eight in 10 SWAT raids were not initiated to apprehend a school shooter, hostage taker, or escaped felon . . . but to investigate someone still only suspected of committing a crime” (qtd in Stamper 81). Actions like these are disgusting for citizens to comprehend, much of which is happening in our own neighborhoods. Police officers and innocent civilians are killed everyday because of raids performed on the wrong home of what was thought to be the actual suspect. Often times the police officer is injured or killed because a person in the home may think a robber is intruding, and if a weapon is on standby, it is typically used. The innocent are also dying when police forces charge inside of a house with a full intent to kill and begin firing before realizing innocent