Strengthening Community Safety Through Enhanced Law Enforcement Collaboration

Strengthening Community Safety Through Enhanced Law Enforcement Collaboration

Identify at least two major law enforcement issues specifically within your area.

Civil Unrest

The two major law enforcement issues in California are Civil Unrest and Cyber Crime. In the case of civil unrest, it has been found that policing public protests has been difficult historically (Bell,2002). The reaction of law enforcement agencies towards public demonstrations often leads to police criticism for either being relaxed in their enforcement, leading to situations that are riotous, or being too strict, leading to rights restrictions preserved under the Charter. The reactions of the police also tend to be criticized when the mere police presence escalates the situation or it is perceived by the public that their use of force is excessive. This kind of tension is worsened by the nature of public protests, as groups of demonstrations can range from anti-authority groups that are violent to groups that participate in peaceful demonstrations.

Due to the potential instability of the group protesting, intelligence sources are usually used by the police to identify the group members who are violent or aggressive (Bell,2002). Once they have been identified, strategic incapacitation can be used by the police to counter the resulting violence from the violent protestors. Even though this strategy enables law enforcement agencies to restore or preserve order in the short run, it gives them a tool to repress protesters’ civil liberties. These techniques are meant to protect property, ensure peace, and safeguard society and not for the protection of civil rights. The strategies include establishing no protest regions, strategic use of arrests, use of less deadly weapons, and the infiltration and surveillance of the protest groups.

Cyber Crime

The hasty expansion of the connectivity of computers has given criminals the opportunity to exploit the vulnerability in security in the online domain (Broadhurst, 2006). Most damaging are exploitation and malicious codes that tend to interrupt the operations of computers globally and, alongside other cybercrimes, end up threatening e-commerce. Often, the cybercrimes are traditional crimes, they include, identity theft, fraud, child pornography, among others. They are swiftly executed and to a large number of prospective victims, as well as unauthorized access, interference, and damage to the system of the computers (Broadhurst, 2006). The nature of the majority of cybercrimes has rendered policing methods both locally and internationally ineffective, even in advanced countries. In response to cybercrime threats, there exists a need for the reformation of methods of mutual legal assistance and the development of capabilities of transnational policing.

Identify and discuss how local, state and federal law enforcement cooperate on these issues

As technology is becoming intertwined in every aspect of life, local, state, and federal law enforcement must understand better how technology influences the behavior of human beings, including crime commission (Hinduja, 2004). Police administrations and scholars have argued in the past that local law enforcement must assume a significant role in cybercrime prevention and investigation. Effective cooperation between all levels of law enforcement is vital in defending the United States’ economic and national security from this kind of crime.  Law enforcement develops a technology system that helps people to report cyber crimes easily and essentially, share evidence with law enforcement in a manner that is trustworthy (Hinduja, 2004). As the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) is responsible for collecting complaints, law enforcement has taken the system a few steps further. The system is automated, and it helps victims understand what happened, assists them, and facilitates criminal activity sharing and their indicators across law enforcement and government agencies. To effectively combat such threats, the cooperation of law enforcement has looked at the theory of broken windows. This theory recommends that attention should be paid to small incidents by law enforcement; such an incident can include vandalism to get rid of the trend before more significant crimes are committed.

On the issue of civil unrest, there is little that the local police can do. In most cases, the local police often try to displace the crowds and control their movement, something that has not been quite effective in the past (Flamm, 2007). People have become more resilient in their protests and, to some extent, violent marches in the streets. However, the collaboration of local police and the state and federal law enforcement teams has established a strong team that can deal with civil unrest. For instance, in cases of unorganized protests, the state can allow its troops to be deployed in areas where civil unrest cannot be controlled by the local police. This has resulted in less time taken by the state to mitigate chaos in a region.

Discuss the arrests that have been made to close the cases and the relative amount of unsolved crimes

According to the 2011 FBI report, three hundred thousand individuals were victims of cybercrime to the tune of over one billion dollars (Broadhurst, 2014). Even though this averages out to about three thousand six hundred dollars per victim, a typical cybercriminal commits thousands of such crimes and evades arrest. Those who are arrested are less likely to stay in prison, and if they do, they probably will serve a few years in a low-security correction facility. The 2010 rate of conviction was even worse. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Report of 2010, from over three hundred thousand complaints, less than one thousand five hundred cases were prepared, and only six convictions were made. That is equivalent to just one conviction for every fifty thousand victims.

Civil Unrest

In the year 2009, angry civilians marched down the city streets of Oakland on New Year’s Day in protest over the killing of an unarmed man who was under the care and protection of the state’s police force (Ramakrishnan, 2014). Many were aggravated with the man’s death because they could not understand how an unarmed man had died in the hands of those who were supposed to take care of him. Civilians burnt down cars and smashed storefronts, which resulted in the local law enforcers pleading with the civilians to end the rampage. A day after the young man had been shot dead, more than 120 people were arrested during the violent protest. Most of the protesters were arrested on charges of unlawful assembly, vandalism, police assault, and rioting.

The local police chief, in a bid to calm the unrest, addressed the public, saying that details about the man’s death are being collected and the perpetrators of the crime will be apprehended as required by law (Ramakrishnan, 2014). With that, the public was willing enough to cooperate, and video clips of the man, Mr. Grant, being shot by an officer were presented to the police. The fact that it was a police officer who had committed the crime made the situation even worse since the conflict at hand was that of the public against the local police. Although the matter was eventually resolved, Mr. Johannes, the officer responsible, was convicted of murder. Civil unrest propelled the state to seek justice for Mr. Grant. This is one of the few examples which civil unrest has been for the right course.

Support the need for cooperation between agencies and stakeholders. Why is it important that these agencies work together to resolve major law enforcement issues?

For many years, the local law enforcement team has worked with different agencies in a bid to maintain law and order in the respective states. There are various governmental and non-governmental agencies whose main agenda is to ensure there is guaranteed security and limited occurrences of unrest in the community (Simmons,2007). In Los Angeles, the cooperation of the local police force and state and federal law enforcement teams has helped promote the effective maintenance of law and order in the region. The merging of these forces has significantly changed the functionality of the law enforcement team, making it more effective than it was as a single local unit. Different law enforcement levels come with different expertise; therefore, a collaboration between the local, state, and federal law departments creates a stronger team when tackling state crimes. The national law enforcement team most likely has access to more information about an issue and uses modern high-tech facilities that are rarely found at the local law enforcement level.

In as much as local town sheriffs do all they can to maintain law and order, there has been a need for more security needed in these local regions (Simmons,2007). With advancements in technology, there are some crimes that the local police cannot adequately handle. For instance, cyber-crimes have been on the all-time rise; without the proper approach and channels, it is difficult to ascertain who the hackers are, when the hacking was done, what is the extent of the damage and how the hackers can be arrested. Most local departments do not have all the required facilities to arrest such law offenders. Crime patterns have rapidly changed over the past decade. Criminals have devised new ways of carrying out crimes; this propels law enforcement agencies to collaborate and come up with effective measures to mitigate these advanced crimes.

In some states, the in cooperation of a bomb squad in the local police department has been ongoing; this is part of the government strategies to deal with terrorist threats that have been rampant over the past decade (Simmons,2007). The collaboration of law enforcement units has helped bring down large drug cartels, something that local police cannot effectively do on their own. The local, state and federal law enforcement teams have one common goal, maintaining law and order under all circumstances, this simple fact encourages further collaboration of state agencies and the local police to achieve this goal effectively.

References

Broadhurst, R. (2006). Developments in the global law enforcement of cybercrime. Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, 29(3), 408-433.

Bell, J. (2002). Policing hatred: Law enforcement, civil rights, and hate crime. NYU Press.

Hinduja, S. (2004). Perceptions of local and state law enforcement concerning the role of computer crime investigative teams. Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, 27(3), 341-357.

Manning, P. K. (1977). Police work: The social organization of policing (p. 178). Cambridge, MA: mit Press.

Broadhurst, R., Grabosky, P., Alazab, M., Bouhours, B., & Chon, S. (2014). An analysis of the nature of groups engaged in cyber crime.

Flamm, M. W. (2007). Law and order: Street crime, civil unrest, and the crisis of liberalism in the 1960s. Columbia University Press.

Simmons, K. C. (2007). The politics of policing: Ensuring stakeholder collaboration in the federal reform of local law enforcement agencies. J. Crim. L. & Criminology, 98, 489.

Ramakrishnan, N., Butler, P., Muthiah, S., Self, N., Khandpur, R., Saraf, P., … & Kuhlman, C. (2014, August). ‘Beating the news’ with EMBERS: forecasting civil unrest using open source indicators. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 1799-1808). ACM.

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Week 1 – Assignment: Identify Local Crime Concerns to Examine Collaborative Efforts

Assignment

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To begin this assignment, contact your local law enforcement agency and ask about annual crime statistics, arrest reports, and unsolved crimes in your local area. You can also visit the FBI website and research the Uniformed Crime Reports for your county. Review the reports and identify the main law enforcement issues. Once you have done so, prepare a letter to the editor of a local newspaper. In your letter, be sure to address the following:

Strengthening Community Safety Through Enhanced Law Enforcement Collaboration

• Identify at least two major law enforcement issues specifically within your area.
• Discuss the arrests that have been made to close the cases and the relative amount of unsolved crimes.
• Identify and discuss how local, state, and federal law enforcement cooperate on these issues.
• Support the need for cooperation between agencies and stakeholders. Why is it important that these agencies work together to resolve major law enforcement issues?
• Provide specific examples where necessary to support your findings.

Support your letter with at least three scholarly or professional sources. In addition to these specified resources, other appropriate scholarly resources, including older articles, may be included.

Length: 5-7 pages, not including title and reference pages

Your letter should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts presented in the course by providing new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards where appropriate. Be sure to adhere to Northcentral University’s Academic Integrity Policy.

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