Aggressive Patrol, Essay Example

The concept of aggressive patrol is interesting, insofar as it seeks to reduce crime through a heightened police presence. Although I favor the concept of aggressive patrolling with the aims of both deterring crime and eventually decreasing the amount of crime in a particular area, I do not think it is possible for police departments to perform aggressive patrolling everywhere, all the time. The inability to perform aggressive patrolling can be traced back to obvious factors such as limitations in terms of financial resources and personnel. Furthermore, such an approach implies that crime only occurs because of the absence of law enforcement. Rather, as the academic literature suggests, the reasons for crime are significantly more diverse. For example, as Hess and Orthmann note (2008), citing Klockars, police presence does nothing to ameliorate social and economic factors, which inevitably “influence the amount of crime in any society.” (p. 120)

Despite the complicated reasons for crime, I nonetheless remain a supporter of the concept of police presence as a method of deterrence. In most locations, a continued police presence can be sufficient to deter locals from committing crimes, because they know the police are already in the area or shall arrive there momentarily. I do understand; however, that in some locations police presence alone will not deter all crimes from happening. Alongside the economic and social reasons for the occurrence of crime, one of the key shortcomings of police presence is the problem of adaptation, which means that criminals will learn to adapt and overcome situations. For example, if drug dealers are operating out of a particular area and there was suddenly a higher police presence, the drug dealers may “lay low” for a while to determine how long the police will be there. Moreover, if the presence is indefinite, such a situation will force criminals to develop different strategies. Criminals need their crime in order to survive, and therefore they will find ways around the police presence to continue making money for their survival.

Accordingly, police presence remains a viable practical strategy to minimize criminal activity, but obviously will not eliminate crime in its entirety. Hence, whereas the advantage of such presence lies in its immediate, although, temporary form of deterrence, broader societal strategies need to be put into place to realize any significant and long-term decreases in criminal activity.

The tension between civil liberties and crime control is the result of the specific task of law enforcement as contrasted with individual liberties that are guaranteed by the law. Thus, whereas crime control obviously seeks to minimize criminal activity, in doing so, they nonetheless must respect the laws that protect individual rights: The problem lies in that some of these civil liberties can conflict with the effectiveness of controlling crime. Crime control must operate within the parameters established by the law to remain itself non-criminal. This is the paradox at the heart of the issue: there are many cases in which civil liberties serve as an impediment to crime control.

For example, one of the specific examples of this is the issue of racial profiling; which Siegel (2010) describes as follows: “police may sometimes be forced to use tactics that sacrifice civil liberties for the sake of effectiveness such as profiling people…based on their race or ethnic origin.” (p. 24) Accordingly, any attempts at crime control would have to push such individual liberties to their limit in order to realize the aim of deterring and preventing crime. Profiling, while being a valuable methodological tool for identifying gang members or terrorists, conflicts with such individual liberties, creating an inconsistency in the application of the law. As a side effect, this can produce the idea within the civilian populace that law enforcement itself is not operating according to the letter of the law, thus conferring a hypocrisy to law enforcement and diminishing its status within society.

In this regard, according to the complicated nature of the relation between crime control and civil liberties, what are needed are laws that serve both liberties and law enforcement. In other words, what is required is a rigorous theoretical approach that considers the entirety of society and its foundational norms. Accordingly, this problem remains out of the hands of law enforcement, which must operate according to the law to maintain its very credibility.

Works Cited

Hess, Karen M. and Orthmann, Chritine Hess. (2008). Introduction to Law Enforcement and  Criminal Justice. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.

Siegel, Larry J. (2010). Introduction to Criminal Justice. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.