Benefits of a National Police Force

*Running head: *BENEFITS OF A NATIONAL POLICE FORCE Benefits of a National Police Force Daniel Estrada 10/18/2009 AIU Online, CRJ 306, Tammi Clearfield {text:bookmark-start} Abstract {text:bookmark-end} Benefits of a National Police Force Other reasons that consolidating all police forces into a nationally unified group would be the issues of jurisdiction that can cause confusion of authority and cause feelings of competitiveness between different law enforcement agencies; causing what would be a simple process to potentially fall through, actually becoming counterproductive to the criminal justice process. Jurisdiction is basically the authority of a law enforcement agency to operate within their predetermined territory; or in some cases depending on the criminal infraction that is being committed, or the person who is committing them. Usually a police officer can only operate within their city limits, because if they were to make an arrest or act in any capacity outside of their territorial boundaries would be considered unlawful according to the laws of the United States and therefore the prosecution would most likely not be successful because of that fact. There are states that extend the jurisdiction of its officers and even in some of the states that have the limitations for the geographical jurisdiction, there are other small exceptions; for instance there was a case in Virginia where an officer actually saw a suspect commit a traffic infraction and was able to make an arrest that became a conviction due to the fact that the officer was considered to be in hot pursuit, therefore he was still operating within his jurisdiction. Yet today with the problem of terrorism and other dangers that are a daily reality in the United States, it has been proven that we can seldom afford to lose criminal activities in the gray area of issues having to do with jurisdiction (Legal Lad, 2008). Things have gradually changed throughout history

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