Police

SIGNIFICANCE:Municipal police are the only segment of government that normally has the authority to use coercive force. As such, they represent a potentially coercive power of government. They have many responsibilities, but because it is they decide whom to arrest and take into custody based on current local, state, and federal laws, they are often considered the gatekeepers of the criminal justice system. Law enforcement agencies nationwide made more than ten million arrests, excluding traffic violations, in the 2010s. During an average twenty-four-hour period, police make about forty thousand arrests—a fact that contributes to the United States having the highest incarceration rate in the world.

In 2022, more than seven hundred thousand uniformed and armed municipal police officers were employed by more than 17,000 separate police departments to provide a variety of services to citizens. Before the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001,, municipal police were in the process of rapidly changing their philosophies to adopt more of a service orientation. This movement has continued; however, the threat of terrorism has renewed emphasis on law enforcement.

Police in a Changing Society

Balancing the rights of individuals against the needs of society is always difficult but especially so in democracies. Municipal police do much more than enforce the law. The fact that most of them are armed and uniformed makes them the most visible representatives of government, and this, in turn, makes them lightning rods for individual and public woes.

Modern police have come to realize that their tasks are far more difficult and sometimes even impossible to accomplish without the cooperation and assistance of the public. As public ideas of what the police should do evolve, and as other variables come into play, the only obvious conclusion appears to be that the police are changing at an unprecedented rate. In the early twenty-first century, some police watchers suggested that US police departments had changed more in the previous ten years than they had in the previous century. Several things have contributed to the changes that define modern municipal police.

Some of the changes have been driven by the recognition of a vast gulf between what police officers actually do and what the public thinks they do. For example, while the public long believed that municipal police spent most of their time investigating and solving crimes, arresting suspects, and enforcing laws, research has shown that most officers now spend 20 percent or less of their time in such efforts. Most of their time is spent responding to calls for other types of service.

In contrast to the manner in which working police distribute their time, basic police training in police academies has historically devoted at least 80 percent of training to crime and law-enforcement functions and the remainder of the time to miscellaneous services. Modern police training is changing to reflect the tasks that police actually do, but task-analysis research focusing on the police is woefully lacking.

The federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was the most far-reaching piece of anticrime legislation in US history. Among other things, it provided for the hiring of 100,000 new police officers—an approximately 25 percent increase nationwide. Many of the new officers were hired under the Police Corps program that was funded by the 1994 law and were four-year college graduates.

Changing Face of Police

The 1994 federal law changed the face of modern policing in several ways but perhaps none more profound than its injection of the college-educated into police roles. A 2015 study suggested that the higher the level of education, the less likely a police officer will use force against citizens. A 2006 report by USA Today noted that in the state of Florida, 75 percent of all disciplinary actions were against police officers who held only high school diplomas. Officers with four-year degrees accounted for 11 percent of the disciplinary actions in that state. In 2022, about 30 percent of municipal police officers were college graduates. At the same time, a higher percentage of American police chiefs had four-year college degrees.

A rapid increase in the number of women in policing has also contributed to changing the face of modern policing. Only about 14 percent of police officers nationwide were women in 2022. However, the numbers of female police were expected to rise. Research and replicated studies point to several attributes women bring to policing.

Although both men and women enter policing because of a desire to help people, they also appear to be attracted to the profession for different reasons. Men tend to be drawn to the potential for excitement and action, while women tend to have more of a service orientation. Women officers are far less likely than men to be involved in cases involving police brutality or police violence. At the same time, female officers initiate far more non-police contacts than male officers. This alone seems to cause increased interaction between the police and individual members of the community. Male officers are far quicker to employ force than female officers, but research has shown that female officers do not hesitate to use force when it is clearly necessary. Women are also better than men at handling certain types of cases, such as sexual assaults and problems involving female victims or complainants in lower-income housing.

Standards and Training

The training of municipal police has improved significantly in both quantity and quality since the mid-1990s, and this development has improved delivery of police services. Some of this improvement can be quantified. Municipal governments have had to pay out millions of dollars in settlements with plaintiffs who have sued their police departments, and police now realize that improved training of officers is the best defense against future litigation. The availability of government funding has always been a powerful incentive. The move to community policing and the desire on the part of the police to improve and professionalize also played roles in increasing the hours and quality of training for municipal police officers. The increasing complexity of police work contributed to the necessity of additional training.

Every state has a Police Officers Standards and Training, or POST, office that oversees municipal police departments and offers guidelines for training officers. The states now mandate minimum numbers of training hours for new officers; these requirements range from a low of 320 hours to a high of more than 1,200 hours—the equivalent of thirty forty-hour weeks of training. After officers complete the initial training, they must spend several additional months working under the supervision of field training officers. Only after both phases of their training are complete are the new officers allowed to work without supervision, and even then, most new officers remain on probationary status for several months more. Finally, many states now require all officers to continue their training with minimum numbers of in-service hours.

According to the Washington Post in 2016, the United States experienced 987 fatal shootings by on-duty police officers in 2015. In early 2016, police chiefs from across the United States met to discuss restructuring use-of-force procedures and training policies with the intent of decreasing the number of annual citizen fatalities caused by police officers. The forum was organized in the wake of intense and sometimes violent citizen protests following the well-publicized deaths of young, Black males at the hands of police officers, namely Michael Brown in Furguson, Missouri, and Freddy Grey in Baltimore, Maryland. While many criticized organizers of the forum for being motivated solely by the increased media scrutiny during the Ferguson and Baltimore protests, organizers themselves pointed out that police departments must enact proactive change in policy before controversial fatalities occur.

In 2020, a series of protests occurred across the United States in the wake of the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Many protesters and activists talked about defunding the police. This practice involves demilitarizing police and moving some funds from law enforcement to trained mental health workers and social workers to reduce violent and sometimes deadly encounters. By 2021, several police departments had made this move.

Technology and Equipment

Municipal police have profited greatly from advances in technology. Police cruisers, for example, were traditionally sedans, most notably the Ford-produced Crown Victoria. As of 2012, when Ford ceased to manufacture that model, many police departments across the United States replaced the sedan with new technology-filled sport utility vehicles (SUVs). These new cruisers were equipped with all-wheel, four-wheel, or front-wheel drive and were more roomy than sedans to accommodate prisoners, police gear, and police equipment. Many included backup cameras, in-dashboard touchscreen computers, Bluetooth connectivity, and engines that alternate between four and eight cylinders to save fuel. Many police SUVs are rated for speeds reaching over 130 miles-per-hour.

Despite the advances in motorized technology that supports police departments across the United States, police mountain bicycles are still considered effective tools in law enforcement. Many officers find them effective for their versatility, cost efficiency, and accessibility to crime and medical emergencies. Bike patrol, as it is often referred to, allows police to remain mobile and visible in myriad situations and environments. The average cost of a police mountain bike in 2023 was $1,200, which is a fraction of the cost of a fully-equipped SUV.

The refinement and sophistication of small portable radios and cell phones have freed field officers from dependence on patrol cars, while permitting them to remain in constant communication with their departments as they become far more accessible to the public. Virtually all municipal police departments now make extensive use of computers, and all large-city police departments enjoy the benefits of geographic information systems, which are used for crime mapping. Geographic information systems enable community policing to change the focus from the individual criminal to the areas where the crimes are committed, thus striking more closely at the roots of problems. Three-fourths of municipal police officers have access to in-field computers, and more than one-half have Internet access. Such technology greatly increases information sharing among different agencies.

Scholarly research on policing did not begin in earnest until the 1970s, and it was another two or three decades until replication studies were used to implement and institutionalize scholarly research findings into police practice and policy in the field. Through those years, research-based policing gradually replaced policing driven by emotions and tradition. Fewer police officers overlooked the law and proper procedures for the sake of expediency or custom. The quality of police services improved noticeably because research-based policing proved far more effective than traditional policing.

Community-Oriented Policing

Of all the changes in municipal policing around the turn of the twenty-first century, none was as well known or had an impact as great as the adoption of the new philosophy of community-oriented policing. Community policing has been defined in many ways, but as is the case with many complex subjects, it seems to defy precise definition. In general, community policing attempts to move municipal police ever closer to the ideal of the early nineteenth century founder of London’s metropolitan police, Sir Robert Peel, that the people are the police, and the police are the people.

The most successful community policing efforts and programs have been those that have resulted in closer permanent working relationships between police and individual citizens. The idea that the police are the experts and always know what is best for a city quickly has given way to the understanding that more can be accomplished when everyone works together to solve serious problems with long-range solutions, rather than applying quick fixes to the symptoms of the problems. Community-oriented policing involves community leaders who are often better equipped than police to engage fresh challenges and transform problems into opportunities.

During the 1990s, community policing reached a point of critical mass when the US Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which made billions of federal dollars available to municipal police departments to adopt community policing. Much of the funding was used to recruit a new breed of police officers, who quickly made their presence felt. At the same time, a new generation of college-educated police chiefs provided leadership that helped municipal policing to reach an unprecedented level of effectiveness.

The United States has always been an energized, dynamic society, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, served to renew the country’s commitment to improve and strengthen itself. As society changes, so do the police. In 2002, the International Association of Chiefs of Police adopted a resolution that recognized that the country’s most powerful intelligence source is its citizenry and that community policing is the best means of tapping into that intelligence.

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