Term Paper on "Styles of Policing"

Term Paper 7 pages (1951 words) Sources: 5 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Criminal Justice - Policing Styles

COMPARING THREE DIFERENT STYLES of POLICING

When American municipal agency policing debuted in New York City in 1845, the concept of public agency law enforcement was in its infancy and maintaining the public order was its primary function in society. Police officers focused mainly on the two polar ends of the spectrum of law enforcement in that their two most essential functions consisted of ensuring public safety and welfare on one end, and responding to the most serious types of crimes on the other.

New York City Police Department (NYPD) patrolmen walked the beat and monitored the streets within their sectors at night to deter and respond to hooliganism and serious criminal conduct, such as robberies of persons and commercial burglaries.

Initially, American municipal policing in general lacked the manpower and other resources to deal with all of the potential law enforcement issues in-between the two ends of the spectrum and left many matters to be resolved by private citizens, including the collection of sufficient evidence to support arrest warrants for unsolved crimes (Conlon 2004). Policing evolved as an institution in the 20th century, and police agencies gradually began to take on a more comprehensive role in modern society, addressing the full spectrum of law enforcement issues in-between maintaining public order and serious crimes (Scmalleger 1997).

One aspect of policing that remained relatively unchanged in many respects for the first hundred years of policing as a public institution is the degree to which the nature of the job was amenable to fundamental differences in style employed by individual police officers. Some officers enforced the letter of the law and issued summonses or effected arrests as their primary response to infractions of law and public order and purposely established hard-line reputations as a means of crime deterrence in their communities. Other officers employed a much more tolerant approach, establishing themselves as a neighborhood voice of reason, often settling minor criminal matters and resolving disputes among citizens without effecting arrests or initiating a formal police response unless absolutely necessary.

Today, modern policing has changed in myriad profound ways, but the opportunity for different approaches to performing police functions still leaves considerable room for independence and stylistic differences among them. In most cases, those differences are also manifest at the institutional level, and rather than characterizing the working style of individual officers, these stylistic differences represent agency-wide approaches to police work and the role of policing in the communities in which they serve.

The Watchman Style:

The watchman style of policing is an approach that emphasizes flexibility and officer discretion within a general philosophy that the main purpose of police agencies is to address crimes that effect society more than to respond to every conceivable technical violation of law on principle (Klinger 1997). The watchman approach to policing allows for significant individuality among police officers themselves, leaving to them the decision to address many routine police matters informally and without taking official enforcement action to resolve problems or respond to violations of law, notwithstanding the fact that, technically, they may justify formal arrest. The underlying rationale is that strict across-the-board enforcement of every penal law is both unnecessary to the execution of police functions necessary to ensure public safety; that it diverts manpower and other police resources away from more serious matters that warrant police attention; and finally, that a formal police response to every perceived infraction overburdens the entire criminal justice system from top to bottom (Scmalleger 1997).

For example, the watchman style might ignore violations of public consumption of alcohol and public intoxication under circumstances were the participants pose no threat, danger, or annoyance to others. On the other hand, the same activity in a different context may prompt an immediate police response, precipitated by the need to address the effect of the violation rather than the statutory element of the behavior. In this respect, the watchman style employs statutory law as a means of enforcement where enforcement is necessary for public welfare instead of responding to statutory infractions on principle.

The Legalistic Style:

The legalistic style of policing represents the polar opposite of the (strict) watchman style in that it conceives of police functions as requiring a formal response to any technical violation of law. The fundamental distinction is that it allows for significantly less discretion on the part of individual officers to dispose of routine statutory infractions informally or without arrest where arrest is technically authorized (Nolan, et al. 2005). Whereas the watchman might instruct citizens observed consuming alcohol in public to pour out their drinks, the legalistic approach requires the officer to initiate a formal police response, including arrest, even where the infraction itself occurs under entirely peaceful circumstances without disorderly conduct, inconvenience, or annoyance to non-participants.

The modern incarnation of the legalistic style of policing is known as the "zero- tolerance" approach that emphasizes formal police response to violations of law, essentially without regard to whether or not those violations have any actual detrimental effect on society in and of themselves. The underlying philosophy is that all infractions of law harm society, collectively, by undermining respect for the rules of society. A corollary of the legalistic style of policing uses the example of "broken windows" (Nolan, et al. 2005) in relation to the impression that is likely to be associated with un-maintained property left in disrepair.

According to this view, homes, commercial structures and other real property becomes much more likely to invite trespass and to be targeted by indigents and criminals alike, drawn by the perception that their unlawful presence or illegal activities are no more likely to be addressed than the broken windows are to be fixed. In this view, un- addressed violations of law, regardless of how minor they may be, invite more serious violations in the same way that broken windows invite trespass by the general impression they create in the minds of those inclined to look for criminal opportunities.

Likewise, the legalistic style considers the public expectation of a more permissive attitude toward minor infractions as a threat to maintaining respect for police authority in general (Black 1971). In this view, officers who fail to respond to technical violations, particularly when their lack of response is noted by perpetrators and uninvolved observers, corresponds to a measure of reduction in public respect for law enforcement and may account for less compliance on the part of subjects in circumstances where officers initiate formal contact in connection with more serious offenses (Conlon 2004). The Service Style:

The service style of policing is, in many ways, a hybrid of the main elements of the watchman and legalistic styles (Ellison 2006). This approach authorizes maximal discretion with respect to minor or "technical" violations of law while emphasizing formal police response to more serious crimes or threats to the community. Like the watchman style, police agencies employing the service style allow individual officers to address minor violations without initiating formal police response, and without effecting arrests for every arrestable violation of law (Schmalleger 1997).

However, with respect to more serious violations, agencies employing the service style may require officers to initiate a formal response, including arrest, for specific types of serious crimes. The extended concept of service style policing incorporates the principles of both "community oriented policing" (COP) and "problem oriented policing" (POP), the former of which constituting the more watchman-like elements of policing and the latter emphasizing the more legalistic elements of patrol policing. In principle, this hybridization of the various components of two very different policing styles is intended to afford maximum community relations functions directed at the segment of the citizenry for whom that approach is most appropriate while directing formal enforcement action at serious crime. Unlike the strict legalistic style of policing, the POP version of service style policing allows for non-enforcement of crimes that are harmless in their actual effect while requiring strict formal police response to specific classes or categories of crimes (or even of minor violations) upon the direction of police agency administrators.

Often, the community policing aspects of the service model also allow for significant input from citizens and their publicly elected representatives, particularly in identifying types of violations considered to impact negatively on the community which may be targeted for specific enforcement. Typical examples would include New York City's targeted enforcement of noise ordinance violations in the late 1990s, along with mandatory arrest for every instance of marijuana smoking in public.

Previously, the former was largely ignored unless it was associated with other criminal activities and the latter was virtually always addressed (at most) by a desk appearance summons in lieu of arrest. Citizen complaints about blaring radios prompted the police attention directed at noise ordinance violations, and the "broken windows" concept in relation to social conduct generated the enforcement of marijuana smoking as a means of reducing public nuisances (Conlon 2004). Essentially, the service style of policing also represents a combination of more modern responses to serious criminal activity while promoting positive, non-enforcement-related… READ MORE

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