With the advent of the professional era, the focus for police officers was a move towards administrative efficiency and crime fighting, exclusively. The primary focus was on training, discipline and respect. While this era brought about much needed organization, within the departments, it also segregated the police from the public, thereby, eliminating positive contact which caused a reduction in the services that were previously provided to the public. Community Policing evolved as a result of widespread public distrust of and uncooperativeness with police, and the realization that the police could not have an effect on crime rates without citizen cooperation and assistance. According to Gaines, police departments have three primary roles: …show more content…
The primary responsibilities police administrators’ are to provide leadership and structure to the police organization so that the agency can effectively meet the needs of citizens for an orderly and safe environment in which to live and work (p. 4). Also, organizations react to their environment. The environment of police administration plays an important role in shaping the police organization and helping managers improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their operations and can also be an instrument for creating public support. The environment must be studied so as to determine development and forecasts of factors that will influence organizational success. It helps the managers to decide the future path of the organization. Organizations should observe the internal organizational environment. This includes employee interaction with other employees, employee interaction with management, manager interaction with other managers, and organizational structure, etc. An analysis of internal environment helps in identifying strengths and weaknesses of an …show more content…
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), officially the City of Los Angeles Police Department, is the law enforcement agency of Los Angeles, California. The mission of the LAPD is “to safeguard the lives and property of the people we serve, to reduce the incidence and fear of crime, and to enhance public safety while working with the diverse communities to improve their quality of life. Our mandate is to do so with honor and integrity, while at all times conducting ourselves with the highest ethical standards to maintain public confidence” (Department). The department’s critical task is to prevent crime and disorder as an alternative to repression by military force and severity of legal punishment. The organizational structure of the department plays a pivotal role in the effectiveness of the department. The department works according to a philosophy that holds police managers directly accountable for combating the crime in their assigned area and providing them the authority to deploy their resources to achieve the desired results. Police authority is linked to responsibility because managers are responsible for accomplishing certain results and must have the authority to use the resources to achieve the organization’s goals. To coordinate the activities of people, functions, and divisions and to allow them to work together managers must develop a clear hierarchy of
“The LAPD struggled during the first dozen years of its existence, going through sixteen chiefs of police and developing an unsavory reputation for corruption and brutality.” (Escobar, 1999, p. 27) From the notorious “Bloody Christmas, to the infamous Rodney King scandal, the Los Angeles Police department has been at the forefront of unprofessionalism for the past few decades and has been deemed one of the most corrupt police departments in the country. Greed, race and politics played a role in the development of the LAPD. “To Protect and To Serve”, this is the motto of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD, 2014). Professionalism has changed throughout the decades within this police department. A majority of it has been designed around incidences
The professionalization of law enforcement gained prominence from the 1940’s through the 1970’s. It came out of a necessity to improve the capabilities of police. It was believed that the improvement of organizations through better quality personnel, upgraded equipment, and standardized procedures would lead to better departments and that would lead to safer cities. Numerous research studies showed that the move to professionalize law enforcement through a higher standard of efficiency led to a detachment of police from the communities they served. Many departments began to focus on response times and quantities of arrests, etc. This led to a diminished effectiveness of police in meeting the expectations of the communities they
The police are usually charged with the great responsibility of ensuring that citizens are living quality lives that are free of crime and fear. In order to perform this duty effectively, the police need accurate and deeper knowledge of the citizens and issues they encounter in their daily lives. This knowledge will not be easy to come by if the police work independently from the citizens. Over the last several decades, police agencies have been working to gain the respect and the cooperation of the communities they serve. Community Oriented Policing was introduced to bring a closer working relationship between the citizens and the police.
The police subculture is directed by both formal administrative and legal regulations, and informal characters that dictate behavior in the decision-making process (Herbert, 1998). In other words, the police work is an environment where they define the situation and try to apply action
Police administrator keeps abreast of past and current concepts and theories of criminal justice administrators to provide services to meet contemporary demands. It is very imperative that the LAPD practices theories, concepts and laws as it mentioned in Public Administration or Criminal Justice books. I believe in order any agencies practice theories, they should have well understanding of theories and concepts. Second proper training is very important. By providing different training and using past experiences it will help the LAPD or other law enforcement agencies follow theories. It is not easy to make a determination that the agency practices concepts and theories as it written in any books. What is written hard to follow and based on
Community Policing is a type of police that changed traditional policing in the late 20th century in The United States and abroad. In 1994 President Clinton created Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act that allowed the COPS(Community Oriented Policing Services) program was created Congressional Digest February 2015. Listed in (Understanding Community Policing find source...) the ‘key three common features: police-community partnerships, a problem-solving approach and organisational decentralisation’.
Police play a vital role in maintaining safety and welfare at all levels of government and across the country. Policing can also be described as an aspect of overseeing others to ensure that they keep to law and order. Policing is about helping people and maintaining community quality of life as it is about enforcing laws and apprehending criminals. The most important work of the police is to enforce public orders and enforce the law. While crime fighting is an essential role of law enforcement, it is not the most prevalent, and in the view of many, not the most important. Officers spend far more time engaged in the provision of far ranging non-law enforcement services. In enforcing the law, the police force also helps to maintain public order. Diversity in the police force is one of the most important aspects that should be looked at. This is due to the effect that it's likely to have on the overall perception and the effectiveness of the police force.
The police handle an essential part in society as its protectors. The law enforcement officers look out for the citizens and try to protect their safety and happiness whenever possible. Throughout the years, however; the society has questioned the use of force, racism and internal corruption as well as other forms of misconduct by officers of the law. Some people claim that many of these problems are misconstrued by the media and blown out of capacity; these officers are simply doing their job. Others argue that these circumstances can be drawn back to poor training and policies. Others maintain that the whole system needs to be changed and that with the rise in crime; officers have become enforcers more than protectors.
Community policing has emerged since the 1970s as an increasingly important strategy for controlling and preventing crime and enhancing community safety. It is both a philosophy and an organizational strategy that allows the police and the community to work closely together in creative ways to solve the problems of crime, drugs, fear of crime, physical and social disorder, neighborhood decay, and the overall quality of life in the community. Community policing is difficult to define. Although it does not have a single definition, there are many elements of community policing.
In Florida, every law enforcement official uses the tools of planning, management, and evaluation. For example, a patrol officer plans how to cover a beat, makes rounds or manage activities, and evaluates how they did at the end of the day. An officer plans what to do and how to do it before taking action. Unfortunately, this same approach is not consistently applied in police agencies and security operations as a whole. In fact, although a certain degree of planning is usually conducted by all prevention organizations, the major emphasis has traditionally been on the management and evaluation of an officers work; every sergeant knows to manage a police force in such a way that the commander will conclude that they are doing a good job. The major purpose of the discussion that follows is to provide crime prevention personnel information about planning, management, and evaluation so they can take advantage of those tools in performing their jobs.
August Vollmer, the chief of police of Berkeley was a leading advocate of professional policing. There were other police reformers that stood along with him, so he urged that the police should be made into a professional force that is a nonpartisan agency of government committed to public service. The professional policing has six elements which include: (1) the force should stay out of politics;(2) members should be well trained, well disciplined, and tightly organized;(3) law should be enforced equally;(4) the force should use new technology;(5) personnel procedures should be based on merit;(6) the main task of the police should be crime fighting. I see these six elements as strengths of policing in the professional model
The need for the police and the public to work together was recognized as far back as the 19th century. In 1829, the Metropolitan Police of London was established by Sir Robert Peel. Peel worked in many areas of government during his career striving to pass legislation to reform child labor laws and other statutes to help protect working Londoners. However, he is recalled by many as the “Founder of Modern Policing” (Jones, 2004). During his time as British Home Secretary, Peel took on lowering London’s rising crime rate, in addition to reforming the criminal code of the time. Peel’s police force was uniformed and its members were taken from the people it served. He believed this, along with strict discipline, was a key to keeping law and order in the streets of London (Jones, 2004).
The key characteristics of community policing are as follows: Police officers are usually called upon to be particularly thoughtful, creative problem solvers. They are asked to listen to the concerns of community members, to logically reason out the roots of problems, to identify and research potential answers, to implement solutions, and to assess results. Police officers work in partnership with concerned citizens. The second characteristic is that police officers are visible and accessible component of the community and work with youths and other community members top address delinquency problems. On the third characteristic, police officers patrol a limited number of jurisdictions on foot. The so-called foot patrol officers are believed to be more approachable and offer a comforting presence to citizens. The fourth and last characteristic that will be mentioned on this paper is that the community policing have decentralized operations, which allows officers to develop greater familiarity with the needs of various constituencies in the community and to adapt procedures to accommodate those needs.
Community policing as it is now known today has been evolving slowly since the civil rights movement in the 1960s and exposed the weakness of the traditional policing model (law. jrnk. org. n.d.). Unfortunately, it was not until the 1980s when it began to be called community policing because police departments and the community felt that police officers need to be better involved in the community by committing more foot patrol and problem solving in the community. Therefore, they felt that it would build a better relationship between the police and the community. Although, foot patrol is a key component in community policing a lot of cities that use this model as of today have gotten away from the foot patrol due to the way some people view
All roles within local, state, and federal agencies provide what we have made of law enforcement today. The levels within the department are effective in the support of their own and effective uses of personnel. Departments are further finding ways to operate more effectively and make the funding of their departments go further. The different roles and training that go into the officers and the multiple forms of patrolling is a time honored tradition that has adapted over time and offered a safer approach to apprehending today’s criminal.