An Overview of the Criminal Justice System
Law Enforcement
One of the hard jobs that law enforcement face is working with and comforting victims of crime. Image: Victim being Consoled. Authored by: FBI. Source: https://www.fbi.gov/image-repository/original.jpeg/view. License: CC-0
Victims first come into the CJS through law enforcement, so it is important to understand how law enforcement is structured and the changes that have taken place as the field has evolved. The goal of this section is to understand how law enforcement works and how communities and victims are part of the system. Law enforcement is made aware of a crime in three ways:
• The victim informs law enforcement of a potential crime. An example is someone calling the police because they have been robbed.
• An observer or nonvictim notifies law enforcement of a crime. An example would be someone who sees a robbery or theft in process and calls the police.
• Law enforcement discovers a crime on their own. An example would be the police observing someone robbing a store.
The United States inherited much of its laws and law enforcement process from Britain. Originally, a justice of the peace or constable was the local individual who oversaw investigations, organized night watches, and held criminals for trial. Victims would seek these local officers or the night watches to report a crime. This informal system had serious issues, including corruption, abuses of power, and the inability to effectively prevent crime or solve crimes. These problems eventually lead to a call for a more organized and structured law enforcement system. Responding to this call, Sir Robert Peel created the London Metropolitan police force; the officers eventually became known as bobbies. The four operating philosophies for the police still hold today (Manning, 1977):
1. Reduce tensions between officers and the public. 2. Use nonviolent means to solve issues, with violence only being an absolute last resort under rare circumstance. It’s why police in London did not carry guns.
3. Relieve the military from certain duties like controlling urban violence (thus also helping to reduce the use of violence).
4. The effectiveness of policing should be judged by the absence of crime rather than visible police actions.
These philosophies of policing eventually made their way to the United States, with the goal of creating a professional and effective police force. According to Gains and Miller (2009), policing in the United States can be divided into three eras in terms of the development of a formal policing structure and culture.
The first era (1840 to 1930), also called the Political Era, was when formal policing first appeared in the United States in the form of night watches. The job of the night watches was to stop anyone who might be causing trouble or committing minor offenses at night. Eventually, crime became enough of a nuisance that American cities, just like in the United Kingdom, needed to form day watches as well. By the Civil War, many major American cities had started formal policing agencies, combining day and night watches into a single organization under the control of one police chief. Foot patrols in neighborhoods were the primary policing strategy with the goal of helping citizens. This era was also characterized
by corruption and abuses of power by politicians and police, both in cities as well as in small towns as America spread West. During this time, victims and communities in general were suspicious of the police because of the corruption they had witnessed.
The level of violence, spurred on by the lack of jobs after the Civil War, economic depression, and the lack of laws, made the West an easy target for crime. The ability to effectively engage in law enforcement was difficult in the West, with victims having few resources or even access to law enforcement. As the population in a county grew, citizens would hire a sheriff to patrol the county, which was often hundreds of square miles. During this era, police were used to enforce Jim Crow and other discriminatory laws. In addition, the vast majority of officers were white, and some were members of racist organizations such as the KKK. This provoked and entrenched a distrust of law enforcement among minority communities and fear of law enforcement by victims. Regardless, victims still needed law enforcement when serious crime occurred, leading to renewed calls for a professional law enforcement structure in order to protect them. Even with these issues, good officers took their jobs seriously and did their best to protect their communities and bring criminals to justice.
The second era (1930 to 1980), also called the Reform Era, saw radical changes including the creation of professional standards, the use of technologies like cars, radios, and forensics, and changes in how police engaged in law enforcement. In response to the increasing public outcry about policing, in 1929, President Hoover created the Wickersham Commission to address police brutality and corruption, and the use of police as private enforcement agents for local politicians. The job of law enforcement officers has been to protect and serve their communities, which makes their roles as personal enforcers for politicians problematic. Many of the recommendations from the commission mirrored others, such as Berkeley Police Chief August Vollmer, who encouraged educating and training law enforcement to create a more professional workforce.
Under this professional model, police chiefs took control over operations, developed crime fighting strategies, and worked to create a single police structure within a defined jurisdiction rather than the patchwork that was in place at the time. They also set up special units, such as criminal investigation units, to focus on particular types or aspects of a crime. This created a level of expertise of law enforcement that had not existed previously. As technology developed, new technologies were integrated into policing efforts. The use of cars and radios for targeted patrols increased responsiveness to calls, and the utilization of forensics created a more efficient police force armed not only with weaponry but also with scientific and technological tools. The increased use of technology brought with it an end goal to solve crimes as quickly and thoroughly as possible. As investigations become more sophisticated, the role of the victim as a source of evidence evolved. Victims and witnesses remained important sources of information about the crime and the offender, although forensics, especially through TV shows and movies about forensics, created the expectation that “hard evidence” was always part of a case and skewed the public perceptions about what
a case should look like, especially in terms of the presence of forensic evidence to support the case. Although there was a push for more technical sophistication in policing, it remained that in many cases, the victim was the only source of information because forensics was just being developed. It was simply too new to find ubiquity among police departments.
Wyatt Earp, as well as his brothers Morgan and Virgil, are some of the more famous law enforcement officers from the Political Era. Earp held numerous law enforcement positions, including forming a posse to hunt down the notorious “cowboy” gang after the shootout at the O.K. Corral, in Tombstone, Arizona. Earp, like many others, moved from town to town holding various law enforcement positions as well as seeking out fortunes during gold and silver rushes. Image: Wyatt Earp. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyatt_Earp#/media/ File:Wyatt_Earp_portrait.png. Authored by: unattributed. License: CC-0
The development of these advances had the effect of taking police out of the community. Rather than needing to get to know people in a neighborhood, police began to just respond to calls. This affected their ability to get tips about potential crimes, to get witnesses to come forward and talk about crimes they had witnessed, and to have victims report their victimization. Police became regarded as strangers who invaded neighborhoods. Starting in the 1930s, the focus became to solve serious crimes rather than to work on crime prevention (Kelling & Wycoff, 2002). During the 1960s, policing agencies realized that this strategy had isolated themfrom communities and was not an effective approach for law enforcement. The combination of police brutality, which was often the catalyst for riots, and the overreaction to protests further strained the trust of community and victims toward police. Law enforcement realized it needed to change its relationship with the community in order to be effective at their jobs, including getting victims to trust them enough to report crime. With victims and witnesses reluctant to work with police in certain communities, the ability of police to be effective was significantly compromised.
The third era (1980 to today), called the Community Era, started off in the 1960s but really did not come into full swing until the 1980s. Several laws passed, notably the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, that gave funding to police to implement more community policing programs, including summer and afterschool recreation programs to create friendlier police departments. The goal was to regain trust in the community, which in turn would help prevent and solve crimes while reducing victimization. Starting in the 1980s, police began to focus on proactive strategies, including returning to foot patrols to get to know the community, reaching out to the community to learn about issues they feel should be addressed, integrating research and best practices into policing, and shifting how police deal with victims. It is during this era that we start to see victim advocates within the police departments, especially advocates trained in child and rape/sexual assault cases, to improve police interactions with victims.
Although there was a move to improve community/police relations in the 1980s, crime increased during the late 1980s and early 1990s (arising from the war on drugs). The war on drugs resulted in many community police departments adding military equipment to help fight crime. Unfortunately, the increased amount of military equipment available to police created a contradiction in community policing, and the contradiction persists today. The militarization of the police forced community leaders and researchers to look for a balance between community relations and reactive crime fighting strategies. The sight of police in tanks and armoured vehicles does not help communities feel connected to, or protected by, law enforcement. Instead, the tendency is to feel invaded and even threatened. In addition, significant questions about police use of force against minorities, especially lethal force, continue to be raised. Significant issues still exist in trying to bridge the gaps with minority communities, despite an increased presence of minority officers. The Us versus Them narrative persists today, and the increasingly hostile rhetoric around minorities and immigrants during the Trump presidency has only increased this divide, making communities and victims concerned about calling the police.
Police have been increasing the amount of military hardware they are using, including armoured vehicles and tanks. This gives the public the impression that the police is a military force rather than a public service. Police point out that the increase in the use of firearms by criminals is justification for increased protection for officers. Image: Police Lenco Bearcat CBRNE Armored Rescue Vehicle. Authored by: sdlewis. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenco_BearCat#/media/File:Nash_Bearcat.jpg License: CC-0
The rise in the use of patrol car cameras and body cameras were seen by both police and community members as a way to ensure honesty of law enforcement, when they are used. But even with these changes, communities have greater confidence and trust in the police when they are perceived as fair and just in their treatment of community members (Corsaro, Frank, & Ozer, 2015; McClude et al., 2017). Thus, community and victims’ perceptions today often reflect the same narratives as from 100 years ago.
The development of sophisticated forensic techniques like DNA testing, fluid detection, and other technologies have also changed the relationship between victims, witnesses, and law enforcement. Eyewitness testimony is now viewed as one of the least reliable sources of information, whereas it had been relied upon heavily in the past. The reason for this change is that people make mistakes, misidentify individuals, and fill missing gaps in their memories with false information (Loftus & Zanni, 1975). Although victims and witnesses are still important to alerting police of crimes and giving information, law enforcement is also using technology to verify and support these statements to ensure the correct person is arrested. Unfortunately, while scientifically gathered evidence has proven useful, it is also often time consuming to gather and analyze correctly. This has created new problems, such as large backlogs of rape test kits and DNA tests, that have extended the length oftime it takes to investigate crimes and has had the effect of decreasing confidence in law enforcement for both victims and communities.
Bike and foot patrols are one of the ways police are trying to create stronger community relations. This enables them to get to know people in the community and vice versa, working on creating increased trust. Image: Police Officer on bike patrol at Hoover Dam. Authored By: U.S. Department of the Interior. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Police_Officer_on_bike_patrol_at_Hoover_Dam.jpg. License: CC-0