Assignment task: Explain why the following two proposals are the most feasible to implement in American policing. Why? How?
Proposal 1:
Prioritize Crime Prevention over Arrest: Police should focus their efforts, reforms, and resources on sentinel-like activities that prevent crime and thereby avert the need for arrests and their ensuing costs.
- Arrest serves two important functions: bringing perpetrators of crime to justice and reinforcing the capacity of the police to deter crime through the threat of apprehension. The legal authority to arrest is a defining and dominant feature of the policing function (Bittner 1970; Reiss 1971). It is institutionalized in deployment and investigations, training, performance metrics and rewards, and organizational characteristics. Less well recognized by police and politicians is that arrests are costly for society as a whole, the person arrested, and the police themselves. Thus, our first principle follows Beccaria's admonishment: by emphasizing crime prevention, we try to avert the need for arrest in the first place. Particularly for serious crimes with identifiable victims, prevention averts losses and suffering, avoids expense to society of the perpetrator's punishment, and reduces costs associated with offenders' reentry into society. Police, however, cannot prevent all crime, which makes some arrests inevitable. Even so, it is important to recognize that most arrests are not for serious crimes.
Proposal 2: Reform Training and Redefine the "Craft" of Policing: Officers should be trained and socialized to believe that the fundamental goals of policing include not only arrests of perpetrators of serious crime but also prevention and maintenance of good community relations
- The mandate to maintain trust and confidence of citizens, like the mandate to prevent and address crime, is not explicitly established in law, the Constitution, or standard police operating procedures. Both mandates arise from the view that police in advanced democracies are responsible for the public's well-being and welfare. That welfare extends beyond "security" into many other cherished values, including personal freedoms, civil rights, protection against majority tyranny, and the ability to pursue happiness. Democratic governance cannot allow police unfettered authority to achieve security; rather, police must do so in a manner that not only is within legal bounds but also is acceptable to citizens. Police must be accountable, transparent, open, responsive, reliable, and fair (Trojanowicz and Bucqueroux 1997; Mastrofski 1999; Skolnick 1999; Skogan 2004). The ability of the police to maintain trust and confidence can be gauged in different ways, but none is as immediate and obvious as citizens' reactions to police activity. Citizen reaction can take various forms, including complaints, lawsuits, negative survey responses, protests, noncompliance, resistance, and defiance to commands. Accounting for people's reactions to police activity is important for many reasons. Citizen trust and confidence in the police matter in their own right in democracies and, like crime prevention, must be gauged as a performance metric. Further, citizens who distrust the police or are skeptical of their effectiveness in preventing crime may not report situations that might lead to crime. They might also choose not to identify perpetrators of crime, act as witnesses, or cooperate with investigations. If police are perceived as overly oppressive, this is a real cost even if police tactics are effective in preventing crime. Police tactics and strategies should be judged in terms both of citizen reactions to policing activities and of their effectiveness. Neither should be seen as trumping the other.
Source: Cynthia Lum and Daniel S. Nagin
Reinventing AmericanPolicing