The Police - Role and Function

what are the purposes of police patrol?

• Visible component 

• Crime deterrent 

• Respond to crime 

• Public order maintenance

what is the broken windows theory

• Broken or boarded up windows suggest that residents do not care about their neighborhood and the neglect is a signal to criminals that no one is vigilant about protecting their property 

• The theory suggests that police need to intervene at the earliest stages if the deterioration process to ensure the safety of residents 

• Reclaimable vs unreclaimable areas

Community-Oriented Policing

a strategy of policing that focuses on developing relationships with community members

Problem-Oriented Policing

a policing strategy that involves the identification and analysis of specific crime and disorder problems, in order to develop effective response strategies

Intelligence-Led Policing

a process for systematically collecting, organizing, analyzing, and utilizing intelligence to guide law enforcement operational and tactical decisions

What are “neighborhoods at the tipping point?”

Neighborhoods where public order is deteriorating but not yet referred to as “unreclaimable”

What are the two traditions of communal involvement in maintaining order?

• community watchmen – volunteer watchmen would go around and punish people

• vigilante – would take the law into their own hands and sometimes act as an executioner. 

Who is Philip Zimbardo? Describe his experiments testing the broken-window theory.

• Stanford psychologist

• put an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California

• The car in the Bronx was attacked by "vandals" within ten minutes of its abandonment

• The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week….Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer…passersby were joining in.

What is Philip Zimbardo’s takeaway message from his Broken Window Theory experiment?

Vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers -- the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility -- are lowered by actions that seem to signal that "no one cares."

what is “the blue curtain of secrecy”

the practice of police officers to remain silent when fellow officers commit unethical actions