The purpose and effectiveness of police patrol - Term Paper Example

Ingram, as well as “Measuring Crime: Police Statistics and Victimisation Surveys,” by Philippe Robert, Renee Zauberman, Marie-Lys Pottier, and Hugues Lagrange. Both were located in online library journals. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the purpose and effectiveness of police patrol. This article discusses certain types of behaviors that police officers have been noted to exhibit throughout many different studies. This particular article differs from others of its type in that it focuses on place.

This means that the author of this particular author was curious about how location affected the behavior of officers. In this context, behavior can be defined as what the officer chose to do when observing a citizen breaking the law, from issuing a citation all the way up to making a formal arrest (Ingram 2007) This article goes far beyond previous studies that covered the influence of merely situational types of factors on the behavior of police officers. Rather, this article claims that an overall more contextualized framework is now needed in order to study law enforcement tasks.

“Using multilevel and spatial modeling procedures, the current study examined the role that both immediate and surrounding neighborhood characteristics played on citation issuance within a large, metropolitan department. Findings indicated that neighborhood structural characteristics were significantly related to the number of citations written during traffic encounters, independent of situational factors” (Ingram, 2007, pg. 371). This article takes a look at numbers and trends related to police statistics and victimization.

According to the authors, “A conflict may now be arising between citizens and the State around the issue of crime. There clearly seems to be a yawning gap between the actions taken by the authorities and the expectations of citizens. Personal safety and the protection of property