Police

views updated

POLICE

POLICE agencies in the United States are oriented toward local control. Their counterparts in other industrialized countries, by contrast, are usually part of a centralized national police force. As a result of the focus on independent local control, there are some 20,000 different police agencies in the U.S. (not including the wide variety of specialized federal forces), financed and managed by states, counties, and municipalities. The lack of a centralized national system has led to problems of jurisdiction, information sharing, and even basic ideology. But the overriding fear of a national force and the abuse of its power has long been a hallmark of the American system of law.

Police Organization

Metropolitan police agencies in the U.S. were originally organized on a military model, and their development in the second half of the nineteenth century was strongly influenced by Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police Force of London, founded in 1829. The British system used an organization of constables and watchmen who patrolled the streets and often charged fees for their services. Early law enforcement efforts in the U.S. were loosely organized, as there was no perceived need for full-time, professional forces, and watchmen were usually volunteers. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, large metropolitan areas such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago had created permanent fulltime police forces. Professional, fulltime state police forces were not commonplace in the U.S. until the twentieth century.

Because most U.S. police agencies have been created and funded by the local communities, and because they were created at different times, there are many variations in how the agencies are organized and financed. In general, city police are funded by the municipality and headed by a police chief, either appointed by the mayor or elected. Counties employ patrolmen and sheriffs, who usually answer to an elected county official. State police agencies, which have broader jurisdiction, assist in statewide investigations and are responsible for traffic law enforcement in areas outside municipalities. Local law enforcement agencies also have a variety of specialized units, including those for transit, parks, ports, housing, and schools.

Federal police agencies mostly developed later, although the United States Treasury established the U.S.

Mint Police in 1792. The Treasury Department oversees other specialized police agencies as well, including the U.S. Customs Service, the Internal Revenue Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; and the Secret Service. The Justice Department law enforcement agency was established in 1870 and includes the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the U.S. Marshals (in charge of guarding and transporting federal prisoners, among other duties). In addition, other federal agencies have been established for specific law enforcement. These include the U.S. Park Police, the Border Patrol, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Trade Commission. The executive branch directs most federal agencies, with oversight by the legislative and judicial branches.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 1996 there were 922,200 full-time, local police personnel, of whom 663,535 had arrest powers. Steady increases for the last two decades indicate a 2001 estimate of around 1,000,000 local law enforcement employees across the country, about a quarter of them women and minorities. Statistics from 1997 show that, on average, local police officers were required to have 1,100 hours of training (sheriffs averaged 900 hours), and, by 2000, more than thirty-seven percent of local police agencies were required to have some college education. In 2000, there were 88,496 federal officers, about thirty-one for every 100,000 people (in Washington, D.C., the ratio was 1,397 federal officers for every 100,000 residents). The majority of federal officers are in Texas; California; Washington, D.C.; New York; and Florida.

History of Police Forces

Permanent police forces were created in metropolitan areas such as New York (1853) and Philadelphia (1856) to handle the increase of population and the social problems that came with urban industrialization. Police officers were uniformed, making them easily identifiable on the street, which in turn expanded their duties beyond mere law enforcement; policemen gave directions, took in lost children, assisted the indigent, enforced health codes, and, with the emergence of the automobile, directed traffic and enforced the rules of the road. Police reform in the late nineteenth century made police officers civil servants, providing a salary and doing away with the earlier system of fees for services. As a result, police officers were more inclined to help all victims of crime, not just those who could afford the fees. In 1906, in an effort to end nepotism and favoritism, San Francisco established a system of hiring based on scores from civil service tests, a practice that became the national standard.

The twentieth century brought scientific research and technology to the world of policing. New techniques in identifying physical characteristics (such as fingerprints, first used in the early 1900s) meant police agencies spent more energy on criminal investigations, crime prevention, and other specialized tasks. Between the 1920s and 1940s, most large cities had special juvenile crime divisions; in the 1920s and 1930s, there was an expansion of traffic divisions; in the 1940s and 1950s, police agencies created public relations positions; the 1950s brought the first telephoto transmissions of documents, photographs, and fingerprints; and since the 1970s, police agencies have worked toward computerized data collecting, sharing, and analysis. By the end of the twentieth century, metropolitan police forces had specialized units for dealing with exigencies such as bombs, hostage situations, crowd control, underwater rescue, and terrorism.

Forensic science advanced evidence gathering and analysis in the last decades of the twentieth century, but smaller, rural police forces seldom had the resources or training to take advantage of scientific advancements. Whereas the results of DNA testing were usually considered reliable, such tests could take months without the necessary resources or trained personnel to conduct them. As of 2001 there were still several states with no uniform system of preserving crime scenes and gathering evidence.

Issues in Policing

Because police officers are authorized to use physical force, including deadly force, concerns over the abuse of power have long been a central and justified concern. The ethnic and racial makeup of early police agencies usually mirrored those who held political power, with nonwhites and women generally barred from employment as regular officers. Not until the 1960s did women and minorities became visible as police officers. By 2000, the Justice Department estimated that women and minorities represent around twenty-two percent of the nation's local police force.

Historically, the minority populations of urban areas have experienced strained relations with the police. In the 1850s, so-called nativist movements fought the inclusion of immigrants on police forces in Chicago and New York. Although police squads protected black residents from white mobs during the 1940s and 1950s, the 1960s brought race riots, including those in Chicago after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which left nine people dead, and the 1965 riots in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, which left four dead. Riots broke out in Los Angeles in 1992 after the not-guilty verdict in the case against four white police officers who had been videotaped beating Rodney King, an African American. New York had also notorious abuse scandals in the late 1990s, including the police torture of the Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in 1997 and the shooting death in 1999 of the West African immigrant Amadou Diallo. Such high-profile cases have spurred a reexamination of police policies and the way internal investigations are conducted.

Although abuse of power by police officers is a legitimate concern, according to a 1999 review of police agency statistics, police officers use force in only 0.2 percent of

their interactions with the public, the majority involving physical force without the use of a weapon.

Police Agencies in the Future

Social science has aided police work just as forensic science has. Most modern metropolitan police forces have adapted to the diverse needs of their communities, with specialized units and creative alternatives to traditional police methods. One of the strongest trends has been toward community policing, an attempt to make police officers more familiar to the residents and merchants of a neighborhood. Community involvement in policing has also influenced the investigation and rectification of police abuse and corruption, with the public demanding a greater role. Fears of "racial profiling," the alleged tendency of police officers to target minority groups, has spawned efforts to educate police about the cultural differences between ethnic and racial groups.

Police reform has been slow, because discussions generally take place at the national level, whereas new policies are drafted by local departments. This situation will almost certainly evolve as the need for interagency cooperation increases, and as federal police agencies work in concert with local agencies to form a national computer database for gathering information and sharing intelligence.