The Concept of the Extended Policing Family - Term Paper Example

The Concept of Extended Policing Family Collage: Crime is a social problem as well as a police problem. The government invested a considerable amount of its citizen money into the hands of law enforcement officers. The recent cut on police salaries made them to be de-motivated and thus unable to effectively protect their communities while others reverting to a reactive policing environment. This interferes with the progress made in the defense sector as private policing is gaining stronger grounds in the community (Button, 2002). The cut in salary is attributed to the decline in the US economic performance thus forcing the state, local and regional government to adopt the massive cutbacks. The danger of this step is increase in the new wave of violence, crime and insecurity. The introduction of a web portal to ease information sharing among police chiefs in the ways of confronting challenges facing the 21st century policing initiative. The new reality in the American policing develops from economic slowdown that obstructs the enforcement of law in the community. The extended police family is made up of the Police community Support Officers, Designated Detention Officers, Special Constables and the Station reception Constables. The Police Community Support Officers are responsible for offering a vital link between the police and the community as they help in combating anti-social behaviors from the community thus enhancing safety. They also do patrol roles in public places and residential areas to ensure security and order has been bestowed in the society. The DDOs offer support to police officers in carrying out tasks that are connected with detention and treatment of detained persons as they are designated with appropriate legal powers to carry out their roles (Crawford & Listers, 2004). The Metropolitan Special Constabulary form the integral part of the metropolitan Police service as they increase policing priorities throughout London. The MSC is made up of special volunteers who are trained and confirmed as police officers and are majorly used in employer support schemes due to the increase in demand for security by most employers in the country. The Station Reception Officers are trained in matters of initial investigation and customer care and this has made to be effective in the front office of most police stations. Many sectors of the economy have been affected in the past due to insecurity and this led to the development of the extended policing family. For instance, limited number of police presence in the community propelled the growth of crimes in most parts of the country. To counter this, there was need of organizations other than the central government to take initiative in fighting security concerns in the community through the purchase of additional policing and patrols. An act that led to the upsurge of several policing providers geared to enhance security in residents groups, local authorities and housing associations (Innes, 2003). The challenge has been on the roles, responsibilities and limitations of the diverse policing providers being unclear. The need for the extended policing family was propelled by the challenge in responding to the demands of the public that called for patrolling presence in their locality. The social and economic changes pose great impact on the systems of social control. The income generated from the community through provision of additional security is nothing to be overlooked by the police. The community is willing to pay additional cost to enhance their security, peace and order in the society. As the system of social control intends to bring about change in the norms, ideologies and values of the existing community, oppositions are bound to occur from the parties that resist change (Newburn, 2009). Private security came in as a relief to the communities living in residents that are manned by insecurity. The police should accredit and coordinate the work of other providers of security and patrols. The relationship between the police and the private security patrols is not valuable and productive as is the case with council run patrols and warden schemes (Crawford & Listers, 2004). The extended policing family is crucial in improving the physical environment by revitalizing neighborhoods and reconnecting with people as they mostly work in areas prone to crime in order to engage communities and social cohesion. Policing employs a number of theories in fostering effectiveness in the operations. These are Intelligent Led Policing (ILP), Problem Oriented Policing (POP), Predictive Policing (PP), Community Oriented Policing (COP) and the recently adopted Dynamic Effective Policing (DEP). Each theory is applied in different situations, departments, front line staff and operations thus impacting the police agency and the community at large. The applications of these theories were hindered by communication problems given that implementation requires a deep level of communication with the police department and to the public. The policing and reassurance approaches require effective partnership between enforcement, patrol and problem solving. In enforcement, policing personnel should be given coercive powers that will emphasize compliance like provision of fixed penalty notices (Hoover, 2005). Patrol is concerned with the presence and visibility of policing personnel’s an act that will put anti-social groups at bay. Lastly, the causes of local problems need to be addressed either through partnering with a wider stakeholders or prevention under problem solving. The success of policing lies on the tools employed in policing including legal, physical, personnel and symbolic. Furthermore, patrol is influenced by incident based activities and enforcement. Some of the police units argue that the work of patrolling should be provided by the police. They fail to acknowledge and accept the contribution of other policing units in fostering security. Time has come for the police units to work with the extended policing family in furtherance the safety of the public through development of greater mutual trust and understanding between different policing providers. Competition should be healthy, with respect and harmonious as co-ordination in their diverse efforts of protecting the community will be harnessed. The diverse policing efforts call for the establishment of information sharing protocols between the private security and the police. Police should view the extended policing family as a representative in the fight against crime and lack of order as this will improve sharing of information through effectual coordination (Reiner, 2010). The ILP practices ensures that patrols deployed are fed with up-to-date information on anti social conducts, insecurity hot spots and targeted criminal behaviors; thus joint tasking, structured briefing and information sharing is important. The extended policing family should be incorporated in local, regional, national and global levels. This can be done through establishment of policing boards responsible for regulating and coordinating service delivery across the private security. Most of the extended policing families have local and international presence, they are effective in promoting efforts of community safety once they are coordinated and regulated properly. The desire of every government is to have vibrant, safe and peaceful communities; however, this has become a challenge in the upsurge of criminals and the low number of police staff calling for dire integration need of the extended policing family. They help in policing based response and creation of a balanced community by filling the policing deficit (Bowling & Listers, 2004). Traditionally, communists formed their own patrols to control crime and offer protection against external attacks. This saw the need of the government to be more involved in policing crime so as to maintain law and order leading to formation of police forces with a central control and a uniform system thus facilitated growth in the political strength of in the professional police organizations. Racism, sexism and other prejudices inside and outside the police service have damaged the reputation of the police thus making it difficult for them to foster a harmonious relation with the public. Furthermore, the police officers have been unwilling to adapt to the new development in the police sector that involves intelligence gathering, restorative justice and community policing by holding onto the use of action when handling criminals. Most leaders in the police force fail to cooperate with other organizations involved in combating crime and community safety (Manning, 2005). They fail to understand that to be efficient in employing problem solving approaches in community profiling, they should in corporate extended policing family. Currently, personnel training and funding of extended policing family is not done by local agencies but rather by private investors. The work of policing has since been transformed from patrolling districts in order to foster peace, thwart crime and investigate local crimes which had not been contained to a new wave. The responsibilities of policing in the 21st century is to fight smuggling of illegal immigrants, ethnic strife, illegal drugs, cyber crimes, Irish terrorism among other threats of national security. With the help of law enforcement, policing has been consolidated from urban and rural forces in to a 43 services hence making them more efficient. In effect, the models of policing are changing at a faster rate and this calls for more specialized training, high-tech equipments and highly skilled personnel; all of which demand high amount of funding that the government need to part away with (Joyce, 2011). In addition, a joint task force should be developed as this will help in managing local policing while reducing duplications. The resurgent of private policing sector is presenting a threat to the dominance of the new police which had monopolize security provision thus leading to a mixed policing economy in most of the Western countries. Departments like the Post Office Investigations Department, the Atomic Energy Authority Constabulary, and the British Transport Police among other municipal security forces are hybrid of the private and public policing. The development of professional policing was facilitated by the growth in number of public constables who had to rely on stipendiary thief-takers and disappearance of law and order. This led to discredited high constables filled with corrupt bounty hunters thus promoting serious crimes and disorders. The police officers used the Peel’s Principle as they were to demonstrate impartiality, work in cooperation with the public in ensuring that the public observes law voluntarily, focus in crime prevention, use force to restore order when other means have been exhausted and carry out duties within the law limits. With the expansion of the extended policing family in Britain, accountability, quality relations with the police department in sharing of information is vital for joint problem solving (Crawford & Listers, 2004). The police officers and private profiling officers should work together to ensure that as much as they offer protection to the community, their safety if also guaranteed. Connecting with the community helps in fighting crime as the community will be more ready to share any illegal activity, suspicious character or information on anti-social behaviors with the safety providers. The police department for a long time was concerned with the revenue it collects from felony arrests, drunkards, traffic citations among other arrests yet they can use this opportunity to promote a healthy relationship with the public by helping them to deal with their problems. The police used to wrongly exercise their powers by enforcing law at every angle thus making them to lose touch with the community that they are supposed to protect (Reiner, 2010). Hence, the communities have welcomed the private policing as it values them; use intelligence instead of action when looking and handling criminals thus facilitating effective information sharing leading to ease in dealing with crime cases. The policing employed will thus define the disorder, political instability and criminal activities in a given social setting. The variations in policing are attributed to the political, cultural and modernization changes leading to upsurge of multiple policing responses to counter the changing security and threats concerns of the world. The rise of the new global order makes provision of security services to the population decline in the recent years making the responsibility of policing to drift from the state to private, corporate and communitarian forms of social control (Button, 2002). The state, however, through non-state based mechanisms control the security system informally. The presence of transnational security threats such as international terrorism slows the decline in the state policing control given that private policing lack the necessary resources and funding to confront this security threat both old and new effectively. The concept of security sector and its reforms, the notion of a risky society and the com-modification of security affects the way globalization transforms policing. Moreover, the police have been accused of inefficiency and ineffectiveness in their tactics of social control. The result is increase in risk in the society due to communal cohesion and broken social bonds in the society and global system at large. Extended policing family will accumulate necessary information that detect and control marginal, deviant, dangerous and criminal groups from the community. Technology has played a big role in facilitating the effectiveness of policing in society through flow of information and surveillance. The expansion of multinational corporations and dominance globalized production contributes to the expansion of private policing to oversee the operations of these corporations in international countries. This follows the inability of national borders to provide sufficient protection against domestic and international threats, thus corporations turn to private policing to secure their own security and this promotes international private policing (Roh & Oliver, 2005). The move has been able to ensure security to multinational corporation, nongovernmental organizations and thus effective in combating local, national and international crime. In conclusion, the police and policing theories keeps on re-theorizing and re-conceptualizing to changing patterns of policing as the work of policing and social ordering as well as the real world is flow into different channels of the organization. The role of the police in process change contributes to the difference in theories and this presents the police as subjects and objects of history. As the actors of policing shape their histories, new forms of social ordering will be noticed and the changes in theories patterns. The policing theory tends to explain the differing policing systems in respect to organizations, power and authority. The police are the crucial elements of control in social system (Bowling & Listers, 2004). The effect of the policing is not experienced equally throughout the society due to divisions on the social orders in respect to cultures, class, gender, value systems and ethnic identities. The development in policing is in line with the factors that promotes economic development in societies. References Bowling, B. & Listers, S. (2004). Policing and the Police. In Maguire, M. & Morgan, R. & Reiner, R. (2010). The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. 3rd Edition. Oxford: OUP. Button, M. (2002). Private Policing. Devon: Willan Publishing. Crawford, A. & Lister, S. (2004). The Extended Policing Family: Visible Patrols in Residential Areas. New York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Hoover, L. T. (2005). From Police Administration to Police Science: The Development of a Police Academic Establishment in the United States. Police Quarterly, 8, 8-22 Innes, M. (2003). Understanding Social Control, Deviance, Crime and Social Order. Berkshire: Open University Press. Joyce, P. (2011). Policing: Development and Contemporary Practice. London: Sage. Manning, P. (2005). The Study of Policing. Police Quarterly, Vol. 8, 23 Newburn, T. (2009). Handbook of Policing. 2nd Edition. Cullompton: Willan Publishing. Reiner, R. (2010). The Politics of the Police. 4th Edition. Oxford: OUP. Roh, S. & Oliver, W. M. (2005). Effects of Community Policing Upon Fear of Crime: Understanding the Causal Linkage. Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, Vol. 28, 670-683 Read More