Comparative Analysis on Policing over last 50 years

Comparative Analysis on Policing over the last 50 years
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Comparative Analysis on Policing over the last 50 years
An old adage holds that people who do not remember the past are fated to do it again. Regrettably, a lot of law enforcement officers seem to believe that history of the law enforcement work started the day when they first strapped on a gunbelt and pinned on a badge. As such, each up-and-coming movement in police tends to be regarded as something that is totally new without a historical context, and such is mostly the case at present with community policing.
Police-Community Relations
An earlier articulation of what would later on develop into the philosophy of community policing is found in the case study of the San Francisco Police Department’s Community Relations Unit – the case study was done by Skolnick (Dunn 2008, p. 56). The San Francisco Police Department in 1962 created a specialized unit basing on the notion that law enforcement officers will help in reducing crime by reducing desolation – by acting as a social service organization to improve some of the challenges that people from the minority communities faced (Deichsel, 2012). Almost from the start, this specialized unit found itself hindered by its vague assignment. Officers were uncertain about the techniques to use to serve which minority population. In the end, the relationship of trust between the community and the specialized unit brought about complaints of bad behavior against other law enforcement officers, which sealed the alienation of the unit from the mainstream of the department and the program perished almost immediately (Patterson, 2011).
Team Policing
A new strategy emerged during the ‘70s known as team policing. Those who advocated team policing stated in recent years, because of changes in police patrol methods – less foot patrol and more patrol cars – and changes in the social climate, a lot of police organizations have become more and more isolated from the community. In turn, this isolation was making it more difficult to control crime (Patterson, 2011). The concept of team policing assigned responsibility for a given geographic region to a team of law enforcement officers who would learn its people, its neighborhood, and its problems (Dunn 2008, p. 12). Various cities in the United States tried different forms of team policing but they never went past th...