Answer the following questions based on this passage. 

Community-oriented policing requires a change in the balance of power between the police and the community. Under the traditional policing model, the police alone determine what level of service is to be provided and the manner in which that service is to be delivered. Under community-oriented policing, these decisions are shared with community representatives. The notion that community groups should be involved in identifying problems and devising solutions to them may be difficult to accept for traditional police officers, who are not accustomed to sharing their power.

In addition, community policing requires that police departments be evaluated differently from the way they are under traditional styles of policing. Rather than being evaluated on the number of crimes that are committed or the number of arrests and conventional they record, police departments may need to be evaluated on the level of satisfaction with their services, fear of crime in the community, or how sensitive they are to community concerns.

Similarly, community policing, with its emphases on decentralizing the decision-making process and giving more authority to individual police officers to make decisions about what kind of services are to be provided to the public, may require that police officers be judged according to the different standards of performance. Rather than being concerned with the number of arrests made or the number of self-initiated citizen contacts recorded, it may be necessary to examine more closely the quality of work. Officers in the future may come to be evaluated on the bases of their judgment and reasoning ability, problem-solving skills, human relations skills, and their sensitivity and responsiveness to community concerns and expectations.

Despite the advantages to be gained from adopting some form of community policing strategy, such a move should not be attempted without recognizing some of the difficulties involved. Community policing involves a major shift in our traditional views about the role of the police in the community. This shift will affect how police priorities and objectives are established, how police organizations are structured and managed, and the manner in which their performance is to be evaluated. The adoption of community policing represents a major change in the delivery of police services. As such, a number of problems may be encountered.

Some have suggested that a possible negative effect of community-oriented policing is that the police run the risk of dividing the community between those who are willing to work with them and those who are not. The police may find themselves caught between various community factions, causing greater alienation and anti-police sentiment. Thus, any attempt to implement community policing should involve local community representatives in the planning stages, so that the police cannot later be accused of implementing the program to favor or appease one particular segment of society to the detriment of another. 

 

Answer the following questions based on this passage. 

Complaints have been made that police are too strict in their supervision of legitimate demonstrations. The condition laid down by the police, the ground rules, are sometimes regarded as unfairly restrictive. Some complaints allege suppression of legitimate demonstrations. This would involve such practices as refusal to grant parade permits and blocking access to the objective of the demonstration, as, for example, city hall. Some demonstrators have complained about police taking pictures during a demonstration, a procedure they regard as a threat.

Associated with this charge are additional complaints of police brutality. Demonstrators who refuse to move after proper warning and who have to be bodily carried to police vehicles complain of intentional rough handling. Occasionally, women have complained that officers have taken immoral advantage of this situation or have embarrassed them by careless, “undignified,” or “ungraceful” handling.

It is unquestionably true that improper policing of demonstration can divert the demonstrators from their original target and cause them to focus on the police. Militant leaders can take advantage of inept, incorrect police action to escalate the demonstration and enlist sympathizers. The right to demonstrate peaceably, the right of peaceful protest, is basic to our form of government. The actions of demonstrators and protestors, no matter how peaceful, however, cannot be permitted to prohibit the free exercise of the rights of others. This is one of the reasons police control is required. In our democracy, it is not the function of the police to prevent properly conducted demonstrations or protests, no matter how distasteful they may be, so long as they do not violate the law. It is the function of the police to protect peaceful demonstrators against interference by rowdies or counterdemonstrators. The police are not in business to maintain the old way of life by preventing social change. In these matters, there is a fine line between proper and improper policing. This is one of the reasons a community cannot afford untrained police. 

 

Answer the following questions based on this passage. 

 

There is a common belief that the general population consists of a large group of law-abiding people and a small body of criminals. However, studies have shown that most people, when they are asked, remember having committed offenses for which they might have been sentenced if they had been apprehended. These studies of “self-reported” crimes have generally been of juveniles or young adults, mostly college and high school students. They uniformly show that delinquent or criminal acts are committed by people at all levels of society. Most people admit to relatively petty delinquent acts, but many report larcenies, auto thefts, burglaries, and assaults of a more serious nature.

One of the few studies of this type dealing with criminal behavior by adults was of sample of a sample of almost 1,700 persons, most of them from the State of New York. In this study, 1,020 males sand 670 females were asked which of 49 offenses they had committed. The list included felonies and misdemeanors, other than traffic offenses, for which they might have been sentences under the adult criminal code.

Ninety-one percent of the respondents admitted they had committed one or more offenses for which they might have received jail or prison sentences. Thirteen percent of the males admitted to grand larceny, 26 percent of auto theft, and 17 percent to burglary. Sixty-four percent of the males and 27 percent of the females committed at least one felony for which they has not been apprehended. Although some of these offenses may have been reported to the police by the victims and would thus have appear in official statistics as “crimes known to the police,” these offenders would not show up in official arrest statistics.

Such persons are part of the “hidden” offender group. They evidently at one time or another found themselves in situations that led them to violate the criminal law. However, most people do not persist in committing offenses. What is known today about offenders is confined almost wholly to those who have been arrested, tried and sentenced. The criminal justice process may be viewed as a large-scale screening system. At each stage it tries to sort out the better risks to return to the general population. The further along in the process that a sample of offenders is selected, the more likely they are to show major social and personal problems.

From arrest records, probation reports, and prison statistics a “portrait” of the offender emerges that progressively highlights the disadvantaged character of his life. The offender at the end of the road in prison is likely to be a member of the lowest social and economic groups in the country, poorly educated and perhaps unemployed, reared in broken home, and to have a prior criminal record.

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