What is the importance of knowing the principles of management in the police service?

Summary

This chapter examines the primary ethical issues relevant to law enforcement command, human resources, and related mechanisms for accountability. From a command perspective, police administration involves setting agency policy and making operational decisions that best achieve the aforementioned goals without violating the law or the public trust. This includes knowing the law, adopting lawful and ethical departmental policies, enforcing those policies, and setting a clear professional example for subordinates to follow. From a human resources perspective, police administration involves making ethical and lawful decisions relating to the hiring, management, retention, discipline, and termination of law enforcement personnel. All of this requires accountability, both internal and external.

Questions

List three different approaches to policing.

What is an administrative investigation? Provide two examples.

Explain the significance of the Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland (1963).

List three examples of screening tools that can be used to assess officer integrity. Explain why integrity tests are used.

Explain the importance of crime statistics.

6 Forensic Examiners Must Demonstrate an Understanding of Behavioral Science, Forensic Science, and the Scientific Method

Victimology is a multidisciplinary field, based on the principles of the forensic and behavioral sciences. Given the advanced level of knowledge required, it is unclear how a forensic victimologist could perform examinations competently without receiving a baseline of formal education and ongoing training in these areas from non-law enforcement forensic and behavioral scientists.

Consequently, any purported expert in the area of forensic victimology should satisfy at least the following minimum criteria:

At least an undergraduate education in a behavioral science (psychology, sociology, social work, criminology, etc.). Graduate-level education in these areas is preferable. This criterion disqualifies those with undergraduate degrees in unrelated areas such as music, police administration, public administration, and education. It should be noted that there are some online university programs that offer graduate degrees in behavioral science-related areas, without an undergraduate degree requirement, without a thesis requirement, and without actual class time. These programs should be considered essentially worthless, as they are designed for professional advancement and resume enhancement as opposed to the discovery of knowledge and actual learning.

Advanced study of, and a working knowledge of, the published victimology and criminal profiling literature, to include the areas of behavioral evidence analysis, criminal investigative analysis, and investigative psychology—including the limitations and weaknesses of each.

Advanced study of, and a working knowledge of, the published literature in the forensic sciences, specifically those related to evidence analysis and crime reconstruction.

Advanced study of, and a working knowledge of, the methods, procedures, and requirements of a criminal investigation.

An approach to casework in accordance with objective forensic examination and interpretation, as opposed to a pro-law enforcement or pro-victim mindset.

Security

Proper scene security must be maintained at all times. This means limiting access to only necessary personnel and controlling it by means of a security officer who logs the entry times, exit times, reason for entry, and duties performed of each person who passes through the tape. This is a basic concern that is part of every scene-processing training course and program that the authors have encountered. However, it is still regularly ignored. Sometimes, a reminder is needed.

However, gentle reminders may not be enough. In one case, a Minneapolis police sergeant became so disturbed by the lack of security at a double homicide scene that he wrote e-mail to his supervisors to make an official record of his concern (Chanen and Collins, 2005, p. 1B):

A Minneapolis police sergeant sent an e-mail to his supervisors questioning why nonpolice personnel were walking around a taped-off crime scene where two men were shot to death in a north Minneapolis restaurant nearly two weeks ago. Members of the Police Community Relations Council (PCRC) were given copies of the e-mail that Sgt. Robert Berry sent to police administration and Fourth Precinct supervisors relating his concerns about the crime scene following the March 4 fatal shootings of Frank Haynes, 21, and Raliegh Robinson, 68, both of Minneapolis.

PCRC member Ron Edwards said the e-mail suggested that the crime scene may have been contaminated by unauthorized people.

In his e-mail, Berry said “people moved freely” and could have destroyed evidence. He said one woman was “confidently walking beyond the crime scene tape, as a number of others had, then passed by an officer and into a door leading into the restaurant from the south side.”

Berry said officers were hesitant to question those entering the site because they were concerned about creating controversy.

“The officers do not know who should or should not be allowed inside these scenes. Some of them were flat out ignored when they inquired about a person's presence inside the perimeter,” Berry said in the e-mail. “This should never be the case.”

Several community leaders were seen walking around the crime scene that stretched for blocks more than an hour after the shooting occurred at 3010 Penn Av. N. Some of them stood beside Police Chief Bill McManus behind the crime scene tape as he answered questions from reporters.

Lt. Lee Edwards, head of the homicide unit, said at Wednesday's meeting that the scene was not contaminated, but he did cite other sites that hadn't been properly secured. He told attendees that police officials have already addressed internally the issues Berry raised. Capt. Rich Stanek said there still may be times when people will be allowed behind crime tape.

Although administrators may think that there are legitimate reasons for passing unchecked into or through the tape when one is not directly involved in the processing effort, this is entirely mistaken and can add to the evidence or even obliterate it.

Another example taken from one of the author's case files (Chisum) includes the following: A major West Coast city department had three employees (supervisors) shot by an employee who had “gone postal.” The shooter was arrested at the scene, so there was no question about the identity of the perpetrator. The crime lab shared the same building and was at the crime scene with the homicide investigators within 10 minutes of the shooting.

The lab personnel started into the scene and took only a few photos before they were then removed from the scene so that police captains could “evaluate the scene.” An hour later, they re-entered the scene, but again only for a few photos. This time, the chief (no longer) ordered them to stay out while the local TV station made a “documentary recording” (publicity) of the scene. When the lab personnel were finally allowed to enter the crime scene, they found it was a “shambles”—cam wheel tracks ran through blood, and cartridge casings recorded in the first few photos had been moved and some had been stepped on. Footprints were found in blood, but they were not the defendant's.

The proper way to handle this scene would have been to establish a command center. The captains could have “evaluated the scene” from this command center with a direct feed to the video cameras the techs carried. The only persons who should have been allowed into the scene should have been the trained lab personnel. (The chief originally came from an East Coast city where image was important, so he had wanted all the publicity he could get, to show how “good” he was at his job. The TV video was never shown.)

Once aid has been rendered and danger has been eliminated, the crime scene may be secured. Subsequently, the search for evidence may begin. The dynamic influences on physical evidence do not end with its recognition, however.

II.F.1 L. M. Ericsson

Lars Magnus Ericsson began his career as a smith's apprentice in Norway. He later tried his hand at mining and building railways. At age 20, Ericsson moved to Stockholm and started working as an apprentice under A. H. Öller, a maker of telegraph instruments. In 1876, Ericsson struck out on his own. Together with an associate from Öller's, Carl Johan Anderson, he opened L. M. Ericsson & Company, a small electrical workshop that specialized in the manufacture and repair of telegraph instruments. The small company did very well in its first year. Ericsson's reputation for quality work soon enabled him to obtain orders from a wide variety of public and private authorities in areas such as telegraphy, fire protection, police administration, and railway systems. The invention of the telephone soon made its way to Sweden and proved to be an important catalyst in expanding Ericsson's business operations. The company soon found itself repairing and manufacturing telephone sets. When Ericsson and his associate, H. T. Cedergren, toured the United States in 1885, they found that U.S. engineers were well ahead in switchboard design but that Ericsson's telephones were as good as any available. As production grew in the late 1890s, and as the Swedish market seemed to be reaching saturation, Ericsson was able to expand into foreign markets through a number of agents. Britain and Russia were early markets. This eventually led to the establishment of factories in these countries. L. M. Ericsson & Company changed locations within Stockholm several times as it grew. In 1939, the decision was made to relocate the company's central plant, offices, and workshops to the Stockholm suburb of Midsommarkransen. From 1910 on, it appears that Ericsson and his wife Hilda regularly worked on the first car telephone. Rather than using an over-the-air radio medium, Ericsson's first system required the driver to pull alongside a telephone poll. The person would then use a set of long sticks, similar to fishing poles, and hook them over a pair of telephone wires, seeking a pair that was free. When it was found, a second person would crank a portable dynamo that conveyed a signal to an operator in the nearest exchange. This approach would later be adapted for military field use. Such efforts marked the beginning of Ericsson's later work in mobile radio communication. Ericsson would figure prominently in designing the telephone sets used during the 1951 and 1956 Stockholm–Gothenburg mobile telephone trials. It was in the mid-1950s that the first phone-equipped cars took to the road. According to the Swedish Telecommunications museum,

This was in Stockholm—home of Ericsson's corporate headquarters—and the first users were a doctor-on-call and a bank-on-wheels.… These first car phones were just too heavy and cumbersome—and too expensive to use—for more than a handful of subscribers. It was not until the mid-1960s that new equipment using transistors was brought onto the market.

In time, Ericsson would go on to become one of the world's leading manufacturers of cellular telephone equipment. Today, L. M. Ericsson has over 100,000 employees and facilities in over 140 countries.

What Is the State?

Everyday language sometimes depicts the state as a subject – the state does, or must do, this or that; and sometimes as a thing – this economic class, social stratum, political party, or official caste uses the state to pursue its projects or interests. But how could the state act ‘as if’ it were a unified subject and what could constitute its unity as a ‘thing’? Coherent answers are hard because the state’s referents vary so much. When pressed, a common response is to list the institutions that comprise the state, usually with a core set of institutions with increasingly vague outer boundaries. From the executive, legislature, judiciary, army, police, and public administration, the list may extend to education, trade unions, mass media, religion, and even the family. Such lists typically fail to specify what lends these institutions the quality of statehood and who can legitimately be described as an agent of the state.

One alternative is to define the state in terms of means rather than ends or statal entities. This approach informs Weber’s celebrated definition of the ‘modern’ state as the “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber, 1948: 78), as well as definitions that highlight its formal sovereignty vis-à-vis its own population and other states. This does not mean that modern states exercise power largely through direct and immediate coercion but that coercion is their last resort in enforcing decisions. For, when state power is regarded as legitimate, they can normally secure compliance without such recourse. Even then states reserve the right – or claim the need – to suspend the constitution or specific legal provisions in exceptional conditions and many rely heavily for their survival on force, fraud, and corruption and their subjects’ inability to organize effective resistance.

Other theorists regard the essence of the state (premodern as well as modern) as the territorialization of political authority. This involves the intersection of politically organized coercive and symbolic power, a clearly demarcated core territory, and a fixed population on which political decisions are held to be collectively binding. Thus the key feature of the state is the historically variable ensemble of technologies and practices that produce, naturalize, and manage territorial space as a bounded container within which political power is then exercised to achieve various policy objectives. The so-called Westphalian system of independent sovereign states exercising control over large and exclusive territorial areas dates back formally to treaties signed in 1648 but, as an effective institutional expression of state power, it has been more or less fully realized only in the last 60 years and was being challenged even as it was being completed. Other modes of territorializing political power have existed; some still coexist with the Westphalian system; new expressions are emerging; and others can be imagined. Thus one can ask whether the European Union (EU) is a new form of state power, a rescaled ‘national’ state, a revival of Medieval political patterns, a post-sovereign form of authority, or a new type of empire. Similarly, are we moving toward global governance or even a world-state?

Literature Review

Incidents such as that just described may cause feelings of fear, resistance, and acute stress. Researchers have examined the topic of police stress to help us understand the dynamic process involved with a law enforcement officer’s job requirements and its association to the amount of stress experienced.

A survey conducted by Violanti and Aron (1995) demonstrated that police officers experience two basic types of stressors: organizational practices and the inherent nature of police work. Organizational stressors refer to events stemming from police administration, which are found to be bothersome or intolerable to members of the police force. They include such issues as authoritarian structure, lack of participation in decision-making processes, and unfair discipline. Inherent nature stressors, or operational police stressors (Page & Jacobs, 2011), refer to those occurrences that may threaten to harm the police officer either physiologically or psychologically. Included in this category are such items as high-speed chases, dealing with crises, and personal physical attacks (Violanti & Aron, 1993). Another examination of police stress literature found that there are several different types of stressors which include four main categories: (1) intra-interpersonal (i.e., personality-related stressors); (2) occupational (i.e., job-related stressors); (3) organizational; and (4) health consequences of police stress (Abdollahi, 2002).

In Violanti and Aron’s (1993) study, they found that killing someone in the line of duty was found to be the most stressful event one could experience as a police officer. Experiencing a fellow officer being killed was found to be the second most stressful experience. Both of these stressors could be considered inherent to the nature of police work. The highest ranked organizational stressor was found to be shift work, followed by inadequate support, incompatible patrol partner, insufficient personnel, excessive discipline, and inadequate support by supervisors. Interestingly, seven of the top 20 stressors were found by the authors to be organizational/administrative. The authors further broke down stressors by job ranking and experience. Those with 6 to 10 years of police experience were found to have the highest levels of overall stress (organizational and inherent combined). The ranking of desk sergeant was found to be most associated with overall stress, as were those officers who were between the ages of 31–35 years, Caucasian, and those who were female. In a more recent study, Page and Jacobs (2011) examined stress and coping strategies in rural law enforcement agencies. They found that organizational police stress was predictive of general life stress, but operational stressors were not. The authors hypothesized that this may be due to recognizing and accepting these stressors as inherent in the nature of the work but viewing the organizational stressors as unnecessary yet unavoidable. Likewise, Shane (2010; cited in Page and Jacobs) found that organizational stressors were more stressful than operational stressors in large urban departments. Similarly, Buker and Wiecko (2007; cited in Stuart, 2008, p. 507) found that organizational and administrative factors are “more important indicators of job stress than the police work itself.” It is further noted that the officers “rarely mention danger, violence, or human misery as sources of stress unless specifically asked” (p. 507).

The concepts defined

Planning, management, and evaluation—associates in a dynamic process

As pointed out earlier, planning can serve as the basis on which program directions are identified. If this is done, programs can subsequently be managed and evaluated in relation to stated targets. Fig. 42.1 illustrates the component parts of the planning, management, and evaluation process.

Figure 42.1. The planning and evaluation cycle.

In embarking on this process, initial activities should focus on examining the situation for which solutions are being sought to determine the most appropriate strategies to deal with identified problems. When alternative program approaches are examined or tried and objectives set, with the least feasible or workable discarded, the evaluation process is in effect. Notably, nothing is wrong with altering a plan after evaluating its utility. In fact, that is the purpose of the entire process. When this approach is utilized, measurement strategies and monitoring approaches can be designed to consider whether a project or approach is having the desired effect on the targeted problem.

It is important to remember that management, planning, and evaluation do not provide rules that dictate action or guarantee positive results. Their main purpose is to provide a sound base for decision making and program implementation. Intuition and experience are not enough to decide what course to follow. Moreover, planning, management, and evaluation within a security or crime-prevention operation can be used to

•

clarify purposes,

•

organize relevant information,

•

generate alternatives,

•

offer early information on important positive and negative aspects of programs so that appropriate action can be taken,

•

provide direction and purpose to the security or crime-prevention unit, and

•

ensure that the unit’s overall efforts are less crisis oriented.

Community Policing

The final approach to reducing conflict being discussed here is community policing. It has been argued that traditional methods of policing, which emphasize motorized police patrols, rapid response to citizens' reports, and crime investigation have done little to assuage public fears of crime. Some criminologists argue that innovative styles of community policing may prove more effective in addressing the public's fear of crime. For example, several research studies show that where foot patrols are used, residents report less worry and concern about crime. Horse patrols in urban parks and bicycle patrols in downtown neighborhoods are also becoming increasingly popular.

Several factors contributed to the advent of community policing, including the isolation of police officers in patrol cars, the narrowing of the police mission to crime fighting, increased reliance upon technology to manage efficiency over human interaction, insulation of police administration from community input, and a longstanding concern about police violation of human rights.

Community policing (sometimes termed “community-based policing” or “community-oriented policing”) developed out of a critique of the conventional model of urban policing. The philosophy of community policing challenges the view that the primary activities of police should be making arrests, law enforcement, and crime investigation. Instead it emphasizes peacekeeping, order maintenance, and public service operations as central functions of policing. The community policing literature asserts that the most effective basis of social control and order in society is community-based. Modern police have removed themselves organizationally and operationally from the community. Policing has been rendered less effective and communities have become increasingly disorderly as a result of this separation of police from the community. The literature suggests that for the modern police to become effective and efficient agents of social control in urban settings, police must reintegrate their operations to respond to the community's concerns and priorities.

Four major features of community-based policing include (1) community-based crime prevention, (2) proactive service as opposed to emergency response, (3) public participation in planning and supervision of police operations, and (4) shifting command responsibility to lower-level ranks. Furthermore, community policing requires that police be encouraged to seek out alternatives other than law enforcement. This philosophy requires that urban policing be organized and operated at the community or neighborhood level. Police also need to address social issues and public order problems in addition to breaches of law. Finally, this approach claims community residents want more police presence, more visible and accessible police, and more personal contact with police.

Community policing is intended to improve relations between police and minorities through increased daily face-to-face contact with communities, with the same officers working in the same neighborhoods to develop long-term rapport and mutual trust. The philosophy of community policing is designed to encourage community input into the police agenda and an emphasis on experimentation with creative solutions to problems as opposed to isolated incidents. This philosophy also encourages the recruitment of minorities and members of local communities into policing. In the Canadian context, community-based policing models have included recruitment of First Nations (or aboriginal) officers, as well as the developing of police programs that emphasize cross-cultural policing and an understanding of traditional native policing and ADR strategies. Despite optimistic praise for community policing, John MacDonald presents evidence, based on robbery and homicide rates in 164 American cities, that community policing had little effect on the control or decline in violent crime during the 1990s.

Administration of Justice

The contribution of the administration of justice to the restriction of liberty varied historically. During the Stalinist terror, courts served as theaters of repression and injustice. In less dramatic times, the administration of justice promoted etatism and protected the interests of the communist party. Most administrative decisions could not be appealed in court, although in Hungary and Poland, as a rule, there was the possibility of appeal against administrative decisions, except those involving the more sensitive issues of military and police administration.

As to judges, in the formative revolutionary years of socialist power, the legally trained personnel of the previous regime were replaced with incompetent but politically trustworthy laypeople. The basis of revolutionary justice was the revolutionary consciousness of worker-judges. After World War II, in the Soviet-dominated satellite states the ‘democratic attitude’ of lay assessors played a role in politically charged procedures. In more settled times, judges received formal legal training but worked in personal and organizational dependence on court presidents. Courts were technically under the control of the minister of justice. These courts were not structured to be independent, and the existing political control further increased the likelihood of ‘telephone justice.’

Socialist legal theory emphasized the key role of the Prokuratura in the administration of justice. The organizational design of the Soviet Prokuratura was inherited from the czarist administration. It was a select, centralized body; procurators served in total subordination to their superiors, in what was a quasimilitary organization. They were much better paid than judges. The Prokuratura was in charge of criminal prosecution, representing the state in court, but it also routinely supervised the activities of the state administration. Lenin considered the Prokuratura the bulwark of socialist legality. He knew that a centralized state power could not afford any particularism, and all local, particular normative systems represented serious deviance. Normative particularism was especially dangerous if it originated in state bodies. As Lenin wrote to Stalin, “legality cannot be legality of Kaluga or the legality of Kazan but must be one single all-Russian legality.” Thus the task of the Prokuratura was to “see to the establishment of a truly uniform understanding of legality.” The supervisory powers of the Prokuratura included the authority to ask for ordinary and extraordinary review of court decisions, even when it was not a party in the case it sought to review. Ironically, the fear of localism resulted in minimal protection for the population: the central bodies had an interest in mobilizing local populations against local authorities, and they encouraged denunciation of local (nonpolitical) abuses to the extent that they deviated from centrally authorized injustice. The dependence of citizens on local services was attenuated in the name of central law. Rules of procedure aimed to protect the material and political interests of the state, and allowed for paternalistic intervention in private litigation. The procedures followed simplified continental models that had traditionally existed in the given country. The inquisitorial nature of the traditional continental criminal procedure was further aggravated by Soviet solutions regarding the admissibility of police-gathered evidence.

In civil matters, judges were required to establish ‘objective justice’ and were not bound by parties' motions. The paternalistic nature of continental civil procedure dramatically increased, resulting in further dependence, as far as the parties were concerned. On the other hand, the simplifications and limited access to court yielded cheap and relatively swift administration of justice (where courts were available at all). Civil litigation rates were stable, and the most common type of litigation was divorce related. Criminal litigation (except when criminal justice was used as a tool of class struggle, in the 1930s and 1950s) stabilized at a low level. Criminal behavior was limited because of the efficient social control exercised by the oppressive state mechanism.

The perception of the role of advocates was also peculiar, as they had to seek cooperation in the course of their activities with the judge and the prosecutor, and reveal the matter before the court in all its aspects, even at the expense of proving the guilt of their clients. Hence advocates were considered as servants of socialist legality, who contributed to justice and put the interests of society before that of the pleaded individual. In the Soviet Union, the objectiveness of advocates was fostered by a collective organization of advocates. Individuals had to contact such groups of lawyers, which in turn designated their advocate and determined the amount of fee to be paid.