Operations & Functions

Content

• Reviewing the basic police functions which determines the nature of how officers perform

• Review the three different styles of policing

• Identify the benefits and consequences of police in media

Basic Police Functions

• Crime prevention, law enforcement, order maintenance

• Wide variety of methods to perform these functions.

  • Departmental organization, discretion, training, and otehr factors impact police performance, especially encounters with officers.

• Officers spend most time with routine tasks

  • Writing reports, taking statements, running errands, and attending court

• Small amount of time spent on serious crimes

• How the role is viewed determines its nature

  • How police, the public, and other entities view their role helps determine the nature of the functions they perform

Basic Police Functions

• Order maintenance is maintaining order using short-term interventions

• Distinction between order maintenance and law enforcement not always clear

• Police respond with on-scene objectives with preferred techniques

• Broken Windows theory

Broken Windows

• Broken windows theory - contends that neighborhood social disorder causes a decline of overall conditions and leads to more violent criminal activity, began in the 1980s

  • Early studies supported premise, but increasingly critiqued because evaluations did not show a strong casual relationship

• Giving police discretion to enforce public order laws, it has been argued, becomes extraordinarily problematic because of racial, ethnic, and class-based biases that can come into play.

• Order maintenance policing has also been associated with zero tolerance policing, an aggressive policing strategy in which all violators are ticketed or arrested and which disregards extenuating circumstances.

• Others question the theory, arguing that broken windows policing has resulted in “mass stop-and-frisks, mass suspicion less searches of housing projects, prohibitions against loitering with known gang members, and aggressive, even repeated arrests of minor misdemeanants,” and others cite increased crime rates as evidence against theory.

Policing Mentally Ill

• Interactions between police and people with mental illnesses have increased greatly since the deinstitutionalization of mental health.

  • The criminalization of people experiencing mental illness continues to be a rather significant public health concern and a resource-draining criminal justice problem nationwide

  • Training in appropriate responses to people with mental illnesses has become a more critical skill for police officers, as well as a platform that encourages the police to work even more closely and collaboratively with mental health professionals

• The 1988 shooting of a man with a mental illness led to the creation of the Memphis Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) model, which specializes in de-escelation techniques and mental illness education.

• The evaluation of CIT models is often challenging, and evaluations are often few, but co-response models have so far demonstrated success in a variety of measures.

• Finding a suitable alternative for people experiencing homelessness and those who are publicly intoxicated often becomes a difficult task for the police.

  • Partnerships between the police and community organizations and targeted legal restrictions can combine to generate effective order maintenance.

Investigations & Forensic Science

• Police investigate all types of incidents, from simple vandalism to homicide

• Depending on the strength of the evidence, the complexity of the case, and the seriousness of the crime, an initial investigation may result in further, more protracted investigation.

• Goal of the investigation is to identify, locate, and arrest the suspect for processing through the criminal justice system.

• Police have many responsibilities as part of an investigation unit.

Investigations and Community-Oriented Policing

• Departments reexamined the traditional method of permitting only specialists to conduct criminal investigations and have now trained patrol officers as generalists

• The first officer to respond conducts the complete investigation, leaving no break in the investigation and no information lost.

• Technological advances and techniques have tremendously improved work in crime scene investigation that can produce evidence for trials and hearings

• Forensic science: any branch of science used in the resolution of legal disputes

• CSI effect

  • Because of how shows depict the field people have the misconception that the job is easy

Styles of Policing

• Watchman style

• Legalistic Style

• Service Style

Watchman Style

• Involves

  • The watchman style involves the principal function as order maintenance rather than law enforcement in cases that do not involve serious crime.

  • Circumstances of person and situation are taken into account.

• Occurring

  • Officers are encouraged to follow the path of least resistance in carrying out their daily duties. This style of policing often occurs in departments with low-level educational requirements, low wages, little formal training, considerable on-the-job training, and few formal policies.

Legalistic Style

• Involves

  • Officers are encouraged to handle commonplace situations as if they were matters of law enforcement as opposed to order maintenance

  • The legalistic

  • style values technical efficiency, and promotions are based on such efficiency

• Occurring

  • The law is used to punish those perceived as deserving of punishment

  • Supervisors issue orders and officers follow them, regardless of whether orders seem right.

  • They are under pressure to “produce'“ arrests and ticket

Service Style

• Involves

  • Focuses on individual officers rather than entire police organizations, suggesting four officer personality types

    • Enforcers

    • Idealists

    • Realists

    • Optimists

• Occurring

  • Most organizations emphasize one style over the others

  • Other factors such as situation and environment may influence style

  • Factors are more important, such as personal, situational, environmental, and organizational characteristics

Patrol Strength & Allocation

• Presence

  • An agency must determine the desired outcomes of patrol.

  • Three related outcomes of patrol

    • Presence of patrol officers may frighten offenders away or influence them not to commit violations, at least until the police leave the area (preventive patrol)

• Opportunities

  • Patrol provides police an opportunity to determine the probabilities of criminal behavior and, through preventive strategies, to reduce or eliminate those probabilities.

• Respond

  • Patrol provides police the opportunity to respond to calls for assistance in a timely manner

• Three Measures

  • Patrol has three staff performance measures: crime, reduction, visibility, and political accountability.

• Assignment

  • Determining the number and assignment of patrol officers is critical not only internally, but also externally, when considering the impact of numbers on the type of police service that can be provided to the community.

• Contributions

  • Population size, types of services provided, resources, etc. contribute to patrol staffing

  • In some areas that lack police coverage, other agencies or the sheriff’s department patrol

Intuitive Approach

• Intuitive approach - involves little more than an educated guess and is often based on tradition, such as personnel numbers from previous years

• Research

  • Some research has suggested that differences in crime rates should not be attributed to variations in the number of police

Comparative Approach

• Comparative approach - uses the ratio of police officers (per one thousand in the general population) to a certain number of residents or square miles to be policed.

• Description

  • Communities possess unique characteristics

Comparative Approach

• Comparative approach - uses the ratio of police officers

• (per one thousand in the general population) to a certain number of residents or square miles to be policed.

• Description

  • Communities possess unique characteristics

Workload Analysis

• Workload Analysis - an important tool for administrations, which requires an elaborate information system, standards of expected performance, well-defined community expectations, and the prioritization of police activities

• Description

  • Police officers have substantial amounts of unassigned or uncommitted time, during which they may initiate a wide range of tasks at their own discretion

  • Police work is incredibly unpredictable with varied shift requirements and responsibilities

Other types of Patrol

Evaluating Patrol

• Little research into patrol division until 1960s

• Patrol officers were allocated on a case-by-case basis

  • Patrol officers provided a wide range of services, dealing with almost any problem presented to them, with minimal accountability to administrators, the public, or the courts; this kind of patrol can be referred to as “911 policing,” which involves allocating resources on a case-by-case fashion (incident-driven bias) as citizens demand them (reactively)

• Kansas City preventive patrol experiment

  • Kansas City preventive patrol experiment was one of the most comprehensive assessments of the effectiveness of random police patrol. The researchers concluded that decreasing or increasing routine preventive patrol in the areas tested has no measurable influence on crime, citizen fear of crime, community attitudes toward the police on the delivery of patrol services, police response time, or traffic accidents.

• Study had minimal effects on patrol strategy

• Random preventative patrol allows officer to control their territories

  • Random preventative patrol is a way of doing police work that allows police officers to control their territories; officers can decide to do what they want and where they want to do it, as long as they control what goes on in their territory.

• Patrol officers managed actively were more likely to be proactive

• About half of an officer’s time is not spent on actual assignments.

  • Research found that the police spent approximately 50% of their time on criminal matters, 16% on order maintenance, 8% on service, 21% on traffic, and 4% on medical assistance; thus about 47% of a police officers time was not spent on actual assignments.

Evaluating Police Performance

• Hard Measure

  • A hard measure is quantitative, expressed numerically, and is rather easy to formulate - the number, rate, percent, or ratio of something.

• Soft Measure

  • A soft measure is a qualitative or intangible attribute or characteristic that is usually expressed in terms of degree of excellence, desirability, attitude, or perception and is often based on output or outcome 9e.g., citizen satisfaction with or fear of police).

Evaluating Agency

• Focus of department mission statements

  • A substantial part of a departments mission statement often focuses on quality of life, professionalism, respect, and public safety

• Qualitative measures of police agency performance

  • Qualitative measures of police agency performance could be accomplished through “community leadership meetings and discussions with questionnaires, focus groups from the community where the services were delivered, and community attitude surveys.”

  • Measures include crime reduction, diversity, and others.

  • Value of subjective measures

  • Citizen perception is highly important variable in decision making

Police & the Media

• Goals

  • The police are particularly focused on using the media to accomplish the goals of the organization

• Attention

  • Widespread media attention to these events unfortunately conveys the impression that rates of use of force, or excessive use of force, are much higher than what actually occurs.

• Experience

  • Unless people have firsthand experience of the system, media images may shape their perceptions of the participants in police encounters, the issues involved, and police producers.

• Demand

  • Demand for police transparency also affects media reporting on police procedures; now with the internet and a growing number diverse outlets, media can be released moments after the activity occurred, even before the police chief is aware of the incident.

• Responsibility

  • The media have a responsibility to the community they serve: to observe with as much objectivity and to report with as much neutrality as possible. To fulfill this responsibility, the media actively seek to discover what is going on and why, and then to inform their readers, viewers, and listeners about their observations.

• Essential

  • It is essential that the police are aware of this aspect of the medias role. When appropriate, a department spokesperson should be available to furnish information about the role, obligations, and conduct of the police in the situations being discussed.

• Resistance

  • On many occasions, police resist disclosing information because doing so threatens investigators, creates a level of fear, or endangers the public (e.g., Walter Scott shooting death).

• Power

  • Media attention is a powerful tool, and continuing personal relationships with media representatives will establish a pattern of repeated coverage.

• Relationship

  • Not all coverage will be completely sympathetic to the police cause, nor should it be, but establish a solid professional relationship will create a foundation of honesty and mutual respect.

Media Relations Program

• Misconduct

  • Corruption, brutality, discrimination, and other forms of misconduct are frequently lead topics on television, radio, print, and Internet news.

• Media Relations

  • Police must convince the media to cover positive news as well.

  • A media relations policy must be based on the public’s right to know about the workings of government agencies and the media’s obligation to keep the public informed.

• Laws

  • Although various state laws and departmental policies restrict the release of certain information by the police, police personnel should be willing to explain why such information is withheld

Social Media

• After the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013, the Boston Police Department used Twitter to inform the public about the investigation, reassure the public and ask for assistance, and corrected erroneous news media accounts.

• By directly offering official information, the agency established itself as the source of reliable information, as opposed to the news media, where rumors were circulating

• Specially trained staff person designated to craft messages to public

• Department praised for “leading an honest conversation with the public” during time of crisis

• Agencies can use a social media presence to build a trusting relationship with the community, control its reputation, receive questions from the public and share tips, coordinate messages and disseminate information quickly, and enlist the public’s help