Critical Issues Involved In Policing

Critical Issues Paper: Week Eight Assignment
CJS/210
09/18/2011

Critical Issues Paper: Week Eight Assignment

As outlined in the course syllabus for week eight this paper is going to focus in on critical issues involved in policing. I will first provide examples of technology involved in policing and how technology enhances or detracts from police organizations’ ability to function. Secondly, I will provide examples of less-than lethal weapons and how less-than lethal weapons affect policing in todays’ society. Last, I will show examples of dangers faced by police and how police organizations’ address these dangers.
Examples of technology used in policing and how technology enhances or detracts from police organizations’ ability to
Community policing, or variations of it, has become the national mantra of the American police. Throughout the United States, the language, symbolism, and programs of community policing have sprung up in urban, suburban, and even rural police departments. For more than 15 years and through at least one generation of police officers, community and problem-oriented policing have been advanced by their advocates as powerful organizing themes for an emergent style of public safety. How these themes have impacted American policing is yet uncertain. The range and complexity of programs associated with community and problem-oriented policing have often precluded systematic scientific investigation. Moreover, community and problem-oriented policing are themselves “moving targets”—changing and modifying themselves in what is an often turbulent environment for law enforcement. Despite claims and counterclaims, what we actually know about the efficiency and effectiveness of community and problem-oriented policing is rather small in comparison to what we do not know, although literature and practice in this arena are growing
. Every day we see evidence of America as an increasingly violent society. Our acceptance of it grows as we bat not an eyelash at even heinous E crimes. We are not an uncaring society, but we simply do not know what to do. We cry for help from the police. We demand more officers are hired and beating the streets. Yet through these truly trying circumstances we failed to realize one thing, “police need help as well.” The pressure to add new less-than-lethal (LTL) weapons to the crime-fighting arsenal is tremendous. Attempts to produce solutions to the problem began more than 30 years ago, it was not until 1985 that the task was given new impetus. It was a landmark year for law enforcement: the Supreme Court ruled in Tennessee v. Gardner, that the use of deadly force to apprehend apparently unarmed, non-violent fleeing felons was unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment. So the less than lethal concept took off and never looked back. Police officers on patrol were traditionally armed with a baton or pistol or both, and non-lethal methods of subduing an attacker centered on hand-fighting techniques such as Jujutsu and baton use. In the 1980s and 1990s officers began deploying non-lethal personal sidearm, such as pepper sprays, and eventually electroshock weapons such as Tasers, which were developed for use by police and also found a market in self-defense by