Criminal Justice Management Reading Articles

CRIMINAL JUSTICE Management Reading articles The Boys in Blue After reading Erica Goode's article in the New York Times, "Police Chiefs Focus on Disparities in Gun Violence, With an Eye Towards Solutions," there appears to be a couple of different ways in which police management can successfully influence changes in gun laws that are necessary to reduce crime that is committed through the usage of fire arms.

One of the most effective ways would be to exert as much pressure as possible on the politicians, and their supporting lobbyists, that are widely responsible for the passing of legislature that could assist to change current laws. Although police are municipal, state and federally funded, these fraternal organizations have lobbyists as well that could do a better job of working in conjunction with the needs of police officers to help reduce crime.

Additionally, in attempting to actuate a political influence that could help sway both politicians and voters alike, police management can reassert the significant financial costs associated with gunplay and crimes committed with firearms, such as by telling people that a single week would exact a cost of upwards of 38 million for tax payers. It appears that some cities have more violence than others for a couple of facts. One would is the particular legislation regarding firearms utilized in these different municipalities.

For instance, it is highly significant that in a city in San Diego, in which there are stringent laws and punishments associated with firearm crimes, that there was less violence than that in other cities. However, legislation is not the only factor that plays a role in the disparity in the violence between the cities mentioned in the article. The proclivities of each municipality also influence the amount of crimes committed there.

Straw running guns is immensely popular in Texas, which partly explains why Austin had nearly 40 gun related crimes in the week referenced in the article. There are a couple of different reasons that help to account for the reasons why the rather lengthy research based on the Community Oriented Policing Services program has not stuck or been as effective as it potentially could be. John Laub's opinion that the research is not disseminated widely enough alludes to some of these reasons.

However, regardless of the amount of dissemination of the research that was involved in this program, there were certain issues with the implementation of the program that were responsible for its modest degree of success. One such highly significant problem was the fact that there was commonly a delay in the deployment of MORE technology, which slowed if not outright hindered the efforts of several key tenets of the COPS program.

Without the proper technology in place, it was difficult for various branches of COPS and MORE to effectively do their jobs. These delays also accounted for rising costs that were unexpected by many of these agencies, which only exacerbated the efforts to conduct efficient community policing. Furthermore, several of the partnerships that COPS agencies were able to produce within their disparate communities were little more than simple name recognition, and were not able to produce a significantly impactful relationship between those agencies and the surrounding communities.

This lack of a true cooperative partnership also accounts for why the research conducted for the COPS program did not truly have as successful an impact as it probably could have had. The strengths of CompStat policing is that it fosters a spirit of competition amongst precinct leaders to reduce crime in their precinct. Knowing that their jobs are on the line based on how successful they are with this task, precinct leaders have a great deal of motivation and management of resources to reduce criminal activity within their jurisdiction.

The major limitation is that some criminal behavior -- such as the car thefts and the incidents of stalker reports -- do not occur on a precinct wide basis and occur on a city wide basis instead, which severely limits the effectiveness in CompStat policing for these situations. The strength of the Intelligence Led Policing management strategies is that it keeps a vigilant overview of where the most commonly occurring criminals are and what their activities are.

In this manner, the people most susceptible to commit a crime are monitored, so that the theory that five percent of the people in a population account for 95% of the crime in that area allows such intelligence-based monitoring to significantly reduce crime in such areas. The obvious drawback to this type of policing.