Police: Mandate, Strategies, and Appearances (From Police and Society: Touchstone Readings, P 97-125, 1995, Victor E. Kappeler, ed. - See NCJ-151401)

• NCJ Number: 151405
• Author(s): P K Manning
• Date Published: 1995
• Length: 29 pages
• Sale Source: Waveland Press, Inc.
• Publication Type: Survey
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Peter K. Manning and John Van Maanen (Eds.), Policing: A View from the Street, (1978) pp. 7-32. Reprinted with permission of the editors.

Annotation

This article examines the professional mandate given by society to the police. The analysis is based on the assertion that the police profession best symbolizes the shifts and strains in America's changing sociopolitical order.

Abstract

By virtue of their assignment to the functions of crime prevention, crime detection, and the apprehension of criminals, the police have staked out a mandate that claims to include the efficient, apolitical, and professional enforcement of the law. This author contends that the police are trying to cover too large an unmanageable a social domain. As a result of their inability to accomplish the goals of this self-declared mandate, police officers have resorted to relying on the manipulation of appearances. After outlining a sociological analysis that considers the strategies used by police to cope with the paradoxes of police work, this author proposes three interrelated organizational changes that must be made to ensure that police are able to maintain public order. These include reorganizing departments to keep the peace rather than to enforce the law, reallocating rewards along similar lines, and decentralizing police functions to reflect community control without diffusing responsibility and accountability to a central headquarters. 24 notes