Law Enforcement and Citizen Privacy - Essay Example

This paper seeks to analyze and find out the effect that police have on crime. There are several conclusions that have emerged from the various studies made. One study showed that police deployment and level of crime had a reciprocal relationship. This implies that an increase say in the number of police means a reduction in crime while a reduction in the number of police encourages criminal activity. Another study revealed that though some scholars believe that increasing the number of police does not have any effect on crime levels, the truth is that it does reduce crime rates for specific criminal activities.

The effect of increasing police numbers vary due to different factors such as the type of crime, police activities, environmental and social characteristics of an area (Ogilvie, Allard & Stewart, 2008). Aggressive patrols, which involve issuing citations, questioning or arresting suspicious and disorderly persons at a high rate tend to have direct and indirect effects on crime. The direct effect is that the patrols send a signal to potential offenders that their chances of arrest are higher than they are in reality.

The indirect effect is that the police will be able to closely monitor citizens especially those that look suspicious. They will, therefore, have a high likelihood of finding fugitives, detecting contraband and arresting crime suspects (Sampson & Cohen, 1988). While analysts traditionally embrace the increase in police numbers as an effective way to prevent crime through deterrence and increased apprehension of suspects, empirical evidence does not support this idea. The opposition to this idea is based on the fact that not all police work focuses towards crime reduction.

This means that while the police force my recruit more officers, these recruits may be deployed to departments that do not directly deal in crime prevention (Ogilvie, Allard & Stewart, 2008). A study conducted in the