Special Problems and Challenges and the Future of Policing In America (URC, NCIC)

SPECIAL PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES AND THE FUTURE OF POLICING IN AMERICA
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Law enforcement in the present day has come to incorporate quite a lot of things that have made it as dynamic as the ever-changing characteristic of this generation. Whereas the old way of doing things simply involved the use of basic, hands-on applications, the current system of law enforcement incorporates the use of data collection, population prioritization and employment of technological anticipation processes to deal with crime, especially organized crime. Additionally, the current law enforcement agencies have chosen to specialize in specific fields so as to master and deal with cases in those respective fields in a much better way that it used to be. The United States has taken this specialization issue with a lot of seriousness and attention it deserves, ensuring that all its levels of administration, be it state or federal, have specialized units and respective departments in place. The sense of urgency in such strategic alignment and specialization has been fueled even further by the growth of global terrorism, especially with radical groups such as Al Qaeda and The Islamic State posing a security threat now more than ever. This paper will discuss the roles of the security agencies, their categorization and the explanation of various policing roles using the Mintzberg model.
Department of Justice
This is the executive branch of the government that is in charge of law enforcement as well as justice administration within the United States. The head of the department is the attorney general, who is usually selected by the nation’s president but has to go through the congress for vetting. The department is in place to ensure that all the policies and Acts passed by the congress and other federal acts are observed throughout the nation. There are four main agencies under the department of justice that would be of much importance in the discussion of law enforcement in this paper. These are the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and the U.S Marshals Service (U.S.M.S) (Dempsey & Forst, 2015).
Functions of the agencies of the Department of Justice
* Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI)
The FBI has got a wide range of duties. First of all, it usually scrutinizes all the activities done under the legal banner, against more than two hundred references so as to pinpoint any violations that might arise out of them. The agency is also mandated with searching for, finding out, and nullifying any potential infiltration of the country and its various systems, by external influences. The FBI manages to do this by also performing a parallel anti-terrorism and counterintelligence procedure almost similar but with the opposite goals to what the external entity had. FBI also offers assistance to other law enforcement agencies within the different jurisdictions (Dempsey & Forst, 2015).
* Drug Enforcement Agency(DEA)
As its name suggests, the DEA is mandated with investigating both local and international chains of drug syndicates, and coming up with measures to curb the vice by apprehending any culprit i...