Law Enforcement

Perhaps the most cogent definition of "law enforcement" was contained in Sir Robert Peel's assessment of the role police play in society. In 1829, Peel penned nine main principles he believed applied to "modern" policing. His seventh principle states:

The police at all times should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police; the police are the only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interest of community of welfare (Worsnop, 1993, p. 107).

The law enforcement community is still very aware of its need to engage in public relations. However, in almost all agencies, the use of the phrase "public relations" is supplanted by the term "community relations." As it applies to law enforcement, community relations is thought of as the proactive (as opposed to reactive) involvement of the police department in the life of the community it serves. The goal of effective community relations programs is to bring the public to a better understanding of the problems both the police and the community face with regard to crime and public safety issues.

Current strategies in police-community relations have been shaped, in large part, by the breakdown of "professional policing" in the wake of incidents such as the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991, and the turbulent tim

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ime control. "The idea is that police departments will become more effective not by increasing their numbers but by extending their reach into communities" (Kaminer, 1994, p. 112). Kaminer goes on to state that, "A change to community policing is not necessarily supposed to result in more arrests, since its focus is on prevention" (p. 115). However, arrest rates are still the standard by which police effectiveness is measured, and that is probably not going to change anytime soon. In January 1992, James Lasley, of California State University, Fullerton, surveyed 2,800 members of the Los Angeles Police Department in order to examine "the relationship between police office ethnicity and gender and attitudes toward police-public interpersonal relations" (Lasley, 1994, p. 85). Noting that the relationship between society and the police is "clearly in transition," the researcher asserted that "growing numbers of police officers are rejecting the traditional notion that physical and emotional barriers between themselves and citizens are the essence of 'professional' policing" (p. 85). A positive impact of police-community relations as a result of the formation of police-citizen partnerships has been observed in the alleviat

Category: Government - L