Police Policies and Evaluations - Term Paper Example

This makes it hard for the police to go against the generic plans that are already in place and go beyond the expected resources available to them so that they can respond to all citizen calls for service. The police have no say over their needs, policies, resource levels, as well as resource allocations because their field commanders are in charge of these processes (Chambliss, 2011). For example, police may need to respond to some citizen calls in areas that have high crime activity as speculated by the generic plans.

The police already have a statistical analysis that tracks all emergency calls that shows them the hot spots of illegal activity. When the police receive these emergency calls, they many not respond immediately to the emergency calls because the generic plans requires them to try and monitor the localities by effectively using police resources so that they can wait for the right time for the police to generate the most momentous results instead of responding to every emergency call that they receive from high illegal activity areas (Rosenbaum, 1993).

Another reason why provision of a rapid response to all citizen calls for service is not an effective use of police resources is because their tactical flexibility is relentlessly limited, for example, patrol, criminal investigations, and traffic. The police are deployed geographically and through functionality, and some officers can respond to some emergency calls while others cannot. If other police officers not expected to respond to such emergency calls, they may have to use extra resources, which the police department may not be able to cater for.

A number of police officers are assigned radio cars and not all of them. Therefore only these police officers can respond to emergency calls because they are the only ones supposed to utilize such resources for emergency calls because if all police officers had radio cars, almost all of them would respond to one emergency call and that is ineffective use of police resources (Carr et al., 2007). Tight budgets and small police departments accountable for many groups of people are other reasons why provision of a rapid response to all citizen calls for service is not an effective use of police resources.

If the police were to respond to all emergency calls rapidly, they might be using more than the resources assigned to them through tight budgets and a small number of policemen in the department. They might have to make emergency calls from high crime areas a priority compared to calls that might not have so much of an emergency. To the police, they will be using their resources effectively because the amount of resources that have been allocated to that department cannot cater for every emergency call that they receive.

On the other hand, the citizens will feel that the police do not use their resources effectively or else they would respond to each and every emergency call even with limited resources (Research Management Associates, Inc., 2004). Another reason why provision of a rapid response to all citizen calls for service is not an effective use of police resources is because some of the emergency calls made by citizens can be hoaxes or instances that the calls do not actually have to be checked out. Use of police resources requires to be accomplished at minimum costs or the resources should be utilized in the most dynamic and productive way probable.

When some emergency calls go through to the police depart