NCJ Number
86749
Date Published
1981
Length
8 pages
Annotation
Instead of being trained primarily to rigidly enforce the law, police should learn to maintain order, resolve conflicts, and solve problems through the rational use of discretion.
Abstract
The police in Canada are not adequately prepared to perform their comprehensive role as agents of social control. Police functional skills, such as marksmanship, unarmed combat, criminal investigation, interview and interrogation, and arrest procedures, focus on a limited social control approach unrelated to the nature of most police-citizen encounters. For most citizen contacts, policing requires psychosocial skills and service skills that will facilitate dealing effectively with such circumstances as family quarrels, juvenile misbehavior, rescue and paramedical emergencies, and crime prevention. Strict enforcement of the law is an unambiguous function, but such an approach to policing has only fostered hostility between the police and the public and driven the police into a cynical isolationism out of which they view the public as the enemy. Police must not only be trained to exercise certain skills but must have an educational background that equips them to make sensitive and mature discretionary decisions that resolve issues of social control and citizen problems with a minimum of force and formal intervention, such that citizens are protected from unnecessary harm even while their damaging behavior is being controlled. A public which has reached new levels of sophistication will not tolerate nor respect an authoritarian police force that has neither the will nor the capacity to resolve conflicts in a way that fosters order with a minimum of repression or punitive action.