Question

Choose a rural area of the United States and identify the issues in police and community relations that are prevalent. Discuss the roles of detectives and patrol personnel in establishing police and community relations in rural areas.

Answer 1

Police and community relations generally refer to the sum total of attitudes and behaviors between police and the communities they serve.

Usually there are many reasons in rural areas of USA that why the police have difficult interactions with the communities they are supposed to “serve and protect due to contrasting “perspectives, poor communications, and concerns about the nature of social control in a free society”. The police deal with the community on several levels: individually, as a group/organization, and as political actors. When there is good police–community relations, police have a better understanding of the public’s concerns. Police becomes more proactive, by preventing crimes before they occur or minimizing their impact, instead of simply reacting to calls for service. Good police– community relations prevent the possibility that the public thinks that police are simply a mechanism for intelligence collection.

Whereas, when there are poor police–community relations, the police typically lack a basic understanding of community problems, goals, and desires, and the community, particularly those citizens who are experiencing high rates of crime, poverty, and homelessness, perceive police as an occupying and out-of-touch force that does more harm than good. In these situations, police departments primarily assume a reactive mode of response to community problems.

Hence, a community relation refers to the ongoing and changing relationship between the police and the communities they serve. This includes issues of cooperation, race relations, fear of police, violence, and corruption.

Issues in police and community relations that is prevalent:

Police-Latino Community Relations (Rural Community in USA, Addressing Challenges in Rural Communities:

Interactions between police and ethnic groups, particularly Latinos, have been largely ignored t that included excessive police violence, discriminatory treatment, and inadequate protection. Latino residents believed that the conflict between their community and the police could be attributed to harassment, prejudice, and over-patrolling characterized by suspicion, fear, and hostility. In a recent survey report, it was found that Latinos consistently rate the police less favorably than white Americans and Latinos are also more afraid than whites of being stopped and arrested by the police when they are completely innocent, yet not as afraid as African-Americans.

Issues in police and community relations:

• Language Barrier: complaints of “police nonresponsiveness in protection and services” are due to the inability of the police to communicate with members of the Latino community. Officers may regard the speaking of a foreign language as deviance or may become frustrated at the inability to communicate. If a non-English-speaking citizen is arrested, officers may be unable to advise him/her of constitutionally protected rights. The language barrier is even more problematic for rural police departments who are not likely to have the resources to provide their officers with training to acquire special language skills.
• Fear of the Police: Latino fear and mistrust of the police is another considerable challenge for law enforcement. Personal experiences of mistreatment by the police in their native countries affect Latino residents’ reluctance to form relationships with American police. A national survey revealed that police in Mexico as brutal and stated that some members of the Latino community recounted stories of being beaten by the police. Abuse by the police in Mexico and other Latin American countries is well documented.
• Immigration: Members of the Latino community may not initiate contact with the police for fear that officers will inquire about their immigration status. For undocumented immigrants in this country, there is no incentive to be candid about their status. Some research has found that police officers convey to Latino residents that immigration is not their concern. Perceiving that the issue was a potential barrier in establishing trust, police officers in a California community informally communicated to residents that immigration status would not be a focus of their law enforcement duties.

The roles of detectives and patrol personnel in establishing police and community relations in rural areas.

Community y policing has a variety of organizational styles in the United State. They range from home-beat officers, to crime control teams composed of both patrol officers and detectives.

Patrol officers have a number of skills from which community supervision agencies can benefit. They have also developed patrol strategies that can be useful for improving Moreover, patrol officers with strong ties to the community have better and more timely information to exchange with supervision officers. Patrol officers can work with community supervision agencies to identify behavior among parolees that could lead them to commit crimes, and with this knowledge the partnership can intervene before the supervisees actually recidivate. In doing so, the police can prevent crime from occurring. They may also be able to contribute valuable information about probationer and parolee behavior based on their experience with working in the community.

Whereas, in contrast to patrol officers, detectives engaged in casework are in some ways more similar to supervision officers in their focus on individuals, as opposed to areas. Through the course of their investigations, detectives routinely encounter information pertaining to supervisees as potential perpetrators, victims, witnesses, or persons otherwise connected to crimes. Detectives assigned to offense-specific details, such as gang units or sex crimes units, gain even more specific information relevant to supervisees and may benefit from supervision caseloads in their jurisdictions being constructed to serve the same targeted populations (see Partnership Example Nine, The Southwest Los Angeles Gang Partnership, on page 37). Finally, detectives engaged in fugitive apprehension are key resources for probation and parole officers when they need to locate and apprehend supervisees immediately.

As partnerships develop between police and supervision agencies at the organizational level, the patrol officers’ and detectives’ contacts in probation and parole departments can help build more formal interagency Police and Community relationships. Hence promote organizational strategies that support the systematic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues such as crime, social disorder, and fear of crime.