Law Enforcement Jurisdictions and Special-Unit Training, Essay Example

How does the issue of jurisdiction come in to play in law enforcement? Is it a good or bad thing? (explain)

The issue of jurisdiction is an integral part of law enforcement because it mirrors the federalist political model of the United States. This model delegates to the states all political power not enumerated by the Constitution. The states in their turn delegate rights and responsibilities to the local level of counties and cities. Thus it is built in to our system of government that non-military policing is always under the control of the civilian political authorities. A corollary of this system is that the enforcement of the laws are also ultimately under political control. And political control is determined largely by politics, which is to say by money. In short, policing in theory and policing in practice are very often different things.

Overlapping jurisdictions and uneven enforcement of laws within those jurisdictions are of course an inevitable outcome of this system, for good or for bad. Each state has its own traffic laws and its own system of granting drivers’ licenses. But enforcement of traffic laws within cities and counties will reflect local levels of vigilance and community funding. That experience is felt all the way up to the highest and most controversial levels of enforcement, like drugs. One leading example here is the growing authorization of medical marijuana. Regardless of how many states legalize it and tolerate or even encourage it, it remains illegal under Federal law and growers, retailers, and users are never exempt in principle. They can never count on being immune from arrest, prosecution, and fines and/or imprisonment.

In brief, jurisdictional conflicts have the potential for both good and evil. They may let some guilty persons escape prosecution via a porous organizational structure, but they may also lessen the effects of laws many view as unjust or contradictory even while they remain on the books. Americans have decided to error on the side of inconsistency.

Should specialized police units should come from within the ranks?

Yes. One of the founding principles of military and quasi-military organization is uniformity of basic training within the divisions of enlisted, non-commissioned, and commissioned levels of rank. This process is logical and the need for it is self-evident: there are some things that every patrol officer must know, and they must know them before they know anything else. Regardless of what an individual’s professional ambition might be within the force, the basics must be learned and mastered. Law enforcement is actually more uniform than the military in this regard, because the latter has different basic-training for commissioned officers and enlisted. But at least in the United States, career officers all undergo the same initial training. Specialization comes later, and individual with university degrees may be fast-tracked, once they show that they are good cops first.

Another reason for initial basic-training is to instill a cohesive esprit de corps — that underlying sense of all members, no matter what their rank, belonging to the same organization and all (theoretically) working to subordinate their individual ambitions to the needs of the organization. This would be difficult and perhaps impossible if an overall force were composed of members who shared no outlook in common. This principle extends even to advanced levels of training. For example, an officer whose daily job is to fly a helicopter over his city would not necessarily be qualified to fly that same helicopter for another force in another city. Nor would a patrolman be qualified to change cities without a degree of familiarization. There would be too many differences. Thus, along with basic operational skills, members learn geographical and cultural skills specific to their jurisdiction. Those latter two are as important a part of basic training as the ability to accurate fire a weapon.