Police: Mandate, Strategies, and Appearances (From Police and Society: Touchstone Readings, Second Edition, P 94-122, 1999, Victor E. Kappeler, ed. --See NCJ-183265)

• NCJ Number: 183266
• Author(s): Peter K. Manning
• Date Published: 1999
• Length: 29 pages
• Sale Source: Waveland Press, Inc.
• Publication Format: Book (Softbound)
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This chapter provides an overview of the nature of the police mandate, or their definition of social trouble, their methods of coping with this trouble, and the consequences of their efforts.

Abstract

After developing a sociological analysis of the paradoxes of police work and discussing the strategies police use to untangle these paradoxes, the chapter considers the recommendations of the President's Crime Commission and assesses their value as a means of altering and improving the practical art of managing public order. In discussing the police mandate, the chapter notes that because the police mandate automatically entails mutually contradictory ends -- protecting both public order and individual rights -- the police resort to managing their public image and the indexes of their accomplishment. The ways in which the police manage their appearance are consistent with the assumptions of their occupational culture, with the public's view of the police as a social control agency, and with the ambiguous nature of the criminal law. Subsections of the discussion of the police mandate address the problematic nature of law and order; police work as peace keeping; the police in the political system; and the efficient, symptom-oriented organization. The discussion of the major strategies of the police notes that the strategies incorporate the use of technology and official statistics in law enforcement; of styles of patrol that attempt to accommodate the community's desire for public order with the police agency's preoccupation with bureaucratic procedures; of secrecy as a means of controlling the public's response to their operations; of collaboration with criminal elements to foster the appearance of a smoothly run, law-abiding community; and of a symbiotic relationship with the criminal justice system that minimizes public knowledge of the flaws within a privately operated system. An assessment of the President's Crime Commission recommendations notes that it failed to focus on the heart of the problem: anachronistic, moralistic laws, with which the police are burdened, and a dated political system, which is unable to bring political units into a state of civil accountability. 24 notes