Law Enforcement Organization and Administration (Inter

agency approach)

Topic 3

Law Enforcement & Policing

Concept of Law Enforcement. At its core, the, concept of law enforcement consists of
just enforcing laws. In its purest form, law enforcement requires an unwavering adherence to
rules and procedures. It is a focus on the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law.
Citations are issued, arrests are made, and force is employed with little regard on the reason or
meaning behind a particular law or policy.

Law enforcement can be a very effective way to maintain public order and punish crime
in as much as it is focused on requiring the members of a community or society to comply with
the law or face the consequences. The problem of law enforcement alone as a response to crime
is that it is singular in its approach, responding to effects without consideration for causes.

Concept of Policing. The term policing has come to mean an approach to crime fighting
through community service and problem-solving. The idea of policing requires a holistic
approach to community service, taking into account the problems that plague a community and
working with the people within that community to solve them.

Policing requires cooperation from residents, business owners, and leaders who
participate in the process of reducing crime and improving quality of life. While this idea of
community policing may sound revolutionary, it actually dates back to the earliest days of the
modern police force. The concept is best articulated in Sir Robert Peel's nine principles of
policing.

Note: Law enforcement implies compulsory compliance while policing suggests voluntary
adherence. In that sense, law enforcement is but one component of policing, one of many
tools in the toolbox available to police officers and law enforcement agencies.

What is Policing? It refers to the activities carried out by the police officers in order to
preserve law and order or the actions of a person or group in authority in order to ensure fairness
and legality in an area of public life.

What is the Doctrine of Policing by Consent? It states that police are a substantially
unarmed body who rely upon community support and goodwill, rather than force, in the conduct
of their duty.

What is Police Discretion in Policing? It refers to the fact that a police work with very
little direct supervision once they are in the field and often have to make choices about which
course of action (if any) is to be pursued.

Styles of Policing by James O. Wilson (1963)

1. Watchman Style. It focuses on maintaining order. This type of policing generally occurs in
heavily populated communities that generate a high number of calls for police assistance.
Watchman style departments employ discretion as a means of keeping the peace. Officers tend to
ignore minor infractions such as traffic violations and minor offense misdemeanors. Officers in
this type of department try to resolve minor issues, and the absence of the commission of a
serious crime, without involving other agencies. All police departments display some form of
watchman style, but in some departments, this style is the primary operating style.
2. Legalistic Style. Police departments operating under a legalistic style operate according to the
"letter of the law." Police conduct themselves in a professional manner. Citizen contact occurs in
a formal and neutral process, applying the law to everyone across the board. Procedures are "by
the book" with little to no discretion because citizens in a Legalistic-style community view police
discretion as unethical. Departments employing this style tend to have high performance rates
concerning job duties and often displayed in arrest and ticketing rates. Decision making tends to
occur from the top-down with little input from subordinates.

Legalistic style of policing is obsessed with accountability, impartiality, procedure, and

professionalism. It is often found where reformers have tried to clean up a watchman-style
organization.

3. Service Style. It occurs in the middle and upper-class societies. Service police departments
place a high emphasis on community opinion and public relations. Service-oriented policing
places less emphasis on minor infractions and more focus on crimes that violate a citizen's
privacy, such as burglary and robbery. Officers tend to make arrests only when necessary. Police
strive to keep communities safe from outsiders, while protecting the welfare of citizens within
the community boundaries. These types of departments run with abundant financial resources
and. Current technological equipment due to the financial status of the citizens.

Service style gives priority to advice-giving, counseling, and referral. They are often
found in affluent areas without much street crime and where the police think of the public as law
abiding. The priority is to help public and to maintain very positive community relations.

Policing Approaches or Models

1. Reactive Policing. It is sometimes known as the Fire Brigade Policing or Incident Driven
Policing. This policing involves following up on civilian calls notifying problems. Central to this
police strategy is routine patrolling. In effect, this means being on the move and ready to respond
to calls for help when they come in. However, claims have been made that because it is
"reactive", it can do little to prevent crime, and is essentially about mopping up after an offence
has taken place.

2. Proactive policing. It is the practice of deterring criminal activity by showing police presence
and engaging the public to learn their concerns, thereby preventing crime from taking place in the
first place. In contrast, responding to a complaint after a crime has been committed is reactive
policing. Proactive policing is closely related to the practice of community policing.

3. Problem-Oriented Policing. This policing identifies a repeated problem and then setting out
to devise a solution. This can involve traditional reactive techniques but may also require
innovative and cross-institutional work or be tied to community policing initiatives.

4. Evidenced-based Policing. This policing tries to seriously evaluate policing activity and
perhaps using properly designed trials to see "what works" to reduce crime or to respond to
community needs. Proponents suggest that evidenced-based policing can see existing practices
and routines subject to scrutiny, better resource accountability and changed enabled. Further, it
seeks to improve policing efficiency by formulating policy on the basis of the outcomes of
evaluation of research.

5. Intelligence-led Policing (ILP). It is a policing model built around the assessment and
management of risk. Intelligence officers serve as guides to operations, rather than operations
guiding intelligence.

6. Team Policing. This approach emphasized the delivery of round-the-clock decentralized patrol
services by a team of officers, usually under the direction of a sergeant or lieutenant, in a specific
geographic area. Team commanders were responsible for conditions in the patrol area, regardless

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of whether they were on duty. Deployment decisions were made in consultation with local
leaders and residents. The fixed territorial responsibility of the teams, it was hoped, would break
down barriers between residents and police, enable police to provide services tailored to the
needs of residents, and improve the job satisfaction of police officers.
7. Community [Oriented] Policing (CP/COP). Also called as Neighborhood Policing, it
emphasizes proactive enforcement that proposes street crime which can be reduced through
greater community involvement and integration between citizens and police. The main idea is to
allow police to feel like the public can trust them. Also, it is based on the assumption that an
effective fight against crime and antisocial behavior requires close cooperation between the
Police and members of the community. COP is aimed at working with the community, taking
into consideration the opinion of people and thoughts considering the issues COP departments
and officers must commit time to develop a "partnership" with the community to:
a. Prevent and counter crime;
b. Maintain order; and
c. Reduce the fear of crime.

Note: Community policing is related to Problem-oriented Policing and Intelligence-led

Policing.

What is the SARA Model of Community Policing? The SARA Model is a department's
approach to community policing agencies consists of four components of the problem-solving
process: scanning, analysis, response, and assessment (SARA).

a. Scanning. It means that crimes should be identified. Police department should identify the
problem by complaints from merchants, residents, and other people in meetings; through personal
interviews; from surveys and records analyses; and through observations made by officers or
others in the community.

b. Analysis. It means that crime patterns should be synthesized to develop a well-defined

problem.

c. Response. It means that, based on careful analysis by working with the community and
businesses, a crime-reduction strategy is developed and introduced to address the identified
problems.

d. Assessment. It means that the response is evaluated to see if the crime reduction strategy was
effective at solving or reducing the problem. It means evaluating the results of the efforts of the
problem identification, the analysis of the problem, and the response by all participants in solving
the problem.

8. Zero-Tolerance Policing. It is one which imposes strict punishment for infractions of a stated
rule, with the intention of eliminating undesirable conduct. It is a strategy that involves cleaning
up crime-prone areas through saturation policing and arresting or ticketing even minor offenders.

The origin of the policy lies in the theory of broken windows expounded by James Q.
Wilson and George Kelling in 1982. They suggested that a great deal of crime is simply a
response to visible signs of disorder. Broken windows in a building that do not get fixed is a
statement that nobody cares and in effect, an invitation to vandals to simply break the rest. By
analogy, graffiti, drug needles, squeegee bandits and street corner drug dealers sent out the signal
that a particular neighborhood is a place where crime can take place.

9. Predictive Policing. It refers to the usage of mathematical, predictive analytics, and other
analytical techniques in law enforcement to identify potential criminal activity. Predictive
policing methods fall into four general categories: methods for predicting crimes, methods for
predicting offenders, methods for predicting perpetrators' identities, and methods for predicting
victims of crime.

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Basic Policing Theories According to Purpose

1. Continental Theory. It states that police officers are considered as servants of the higher
authority and people have little or no share of all their duties, nor any direct connection with
them.
2. Home Rule Theory. It states that police officers are considered as servants of the community
or the people who depend for the effectiveness of their functions upon the express wishes of the
people.

Note: The Home Rule Theory is practiced in the country.

Academic Researches on Policing: Research Revolution (1974 to 1984)

1. Kansas City Study which found out that preventive (random) patrol didn't work. 2.
Minneapolis Study which found out that formal arrest deters domestic violence. 3.
Cincinnati Experiment which found out that Team Policing improves police morale. 4.
Newark Experiment which confirmed that Foot Patrol decreases fear of crime. 5. San
Diego Study, which found out that one-officer & compact cars increased safety.

1. The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment. This experiment was instructive primarily
because it shocked the police community. Some have interpreted the study to mean that the police
have no effect on crime. On the contrary, it merely pointed out that routine patrol had a minimal
effect on crime. The experiment varied up the patrol routine in 15 beats. One variation was to
have no patrol at all, only response to calls for service. The second variation was the normal
level of "random" patrol, and the third variation was two to three times as many patrols. The
study found no differences between any of the three variations. In other words, no matter how
the police patrolled, there were no differences in number of arrests, victimization rates, fear of
crime, citizen attitudes, or response time. In fact, in the areas that had no patrol at all (except
calls for service), citizens didn't even notice the police were no longer patrolling. Yet, they felt
just as safe as if the police were patrolling. This phenomenon is usually referred to as residual
deterrence, or the phantom effect.

2. The Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment. In this study, officers responding to

domestic violence calls basically pulled a colored card out at random from a sealed deck (red,
green, yellow). Depending upon the random choice, they either arrested somebody, gave advice
at the scene, or told the couple to split apart for at least eight hours. The experiment found out
that arrest was the only option that bad any effect on re-offending (cutting it in half). It was the
first time any study had ever shown arrest to work for anything. Mandatory arrest policies, based
on deterrence became quite popular in the wake of this experiment.

3. The Cincinnati Team Policing Experiment. This study gave patrol officers the same sector
responsibilities as detectives (except for homicide), increased minority participation, boosted
salaries, and in general, created more face-to-face contact with citizens. There were no
discernable effects on crime or fear of crime, but police morale was boosted. The study drew
attention to how easily detective work could be done by regular patrol officers.

4. The Newark Foot Patrol Experiment. This research found out that while foot patrol may not
reduce crime, it reduces citizens' fear of crime. It, along with similar foot patrol studies going on
in places like Flint, Michigan, showed that foot patrol was not the old, antiquated thing that most
police supervisors thought it was.

5. The San Diego One/Two-Officer Car Experiment. This test found out that one officer in a
patrol car performed more safely and efficiently and as effectively as two officers, and at almost
half the cost with fewer public complaints. It brought on the time when the two-officer “partner”
system would be a thing of the past.

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Table 1. The Police Role and Activities by Eras
Eras Police Role Department Structure

Political Providing services, Decentralized, controlled by

especially to the community politicians. Few
disadvantaged. standards with most
Occasionally performing decisions political in

Progressive Reform
Professional
Community Relations
Return to Law and Order
Community Policing
Reference:
Eduardo, Jesster P. (2020). Law Enforcement Organization and Administration with Inter-
Agency Approach.
law enforcement duties nature.
Providing services to larger Introduction of selection
segments of the community. standards. Central authority
Law enforcement gaining beginning to wrest control
prominence of departments from local
politicians
Law enforcement and crime Highly centralized authority
fighting. Little attention using military model with
given to soft crime issues community. Emphasis on
such as maintenance. selecting, promotion, and
training standards.
Renewed emphasis on Participative management
service and order enters law enforcement.
maintenance. Realization Limited emphasis on group
that police cannot fight decision making and job
crime without citizen help restricting.
and support.
Emphasis on crime Return to a traditional
prevention and law police organization with a
enforcement functions. strict chain of command.
Belief that arrest and crime The creation and expansion
suppression activities were of drug enforcement units.
the most effective in
solving community
problems
Emphasis on active Contingency planning
participation by citizensin where police response is
law enforcement issues. molded by need and
Police are seen as problems. Police develop
community change and partnerships with other
social agents public and private agencies
to manage problems.
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