Law enforcement is a way in which police ensure that law is obeyed and followed by discovering, deterring, rehabilitating and punishing those who violate law and norms that govern societies. Law enforcement is one of the components that make up the criminal justice system alongside court and correction. The three components of the criminal justice system work together from the activity of investigation of the suspected criminal to administering of criminal punishment. Even though the criminal justice system component works together, each of them work semi-independently according to the roles assigned. To properly perform its laws, the law enforcement work through government police agencies which include county sheriff, city and state police departments and the federal law enforcement agencies. Focusing on policing component of the criminal justice system, it has been assigned several roles and tasks in the society. The policing personnel maintains law and order in the society, investigates the suspected criminal and reports the investigation results to the court ( Whetstone et al., 2019). Moreover, service and enforcement of warrants, deterrence and detention of suspected criminals with pending cases are the function of the policel.
Functions of law enforcement personnel
Law enforcement function
When a crime is committed or laws are violated, the criminal has to be identified, located and arrested. Whenever crime is committed, the police are informed and often police in patrol are the first to arrive on the scene of crime. However, if the case or crime is serious, a detective is involved who collects any evidence and hands them over to the prosecution officer and a case is opened. A search may be conducted if the offender is identified but his location is not known. On the other hand, if both the offender and his location are not known, the detective analyzes the clues that may lead to the information of the offender’s location and identity.
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Enforcing a law may sometimes not be effective enough to the society. The offender and his location may not be clearly known due to the delay of the victims to report a crime. Delay of reporting a crime may happen in different circumstances such as robbery, assault and burglaries.
Order maintenance function
Order maintenance is the intervention and stifling of behavior that tends to destroy public peace, threatens to be offensive or originates from individuals or groups arguing in public. As a role of the law enforcement personnel, they are expected to intervene when there is public peace disturbance since it is the right of the citizens to have protection from the government. In other words, the citizens of United States demands protection as it is the government role to protect them. The role of maintaining law and order given to the police empowers them to enforce a solution to a problem or incident which it is judged necessary by the personnel. Even so, the empowerment given to them by the order maintenance role sometimes leads to the division of the community as they are going against an individual in the process of intervening disturbances or community conflicts. The division of the community may be determined on how the police perform this role, what kind of groups of people draw attention to them and the legal basis of their action.
The law enforcement personnel are required to act in a wise way when intervening in problems and situation causing public disturbances. Judgments are required to be made when maintaining law and order in the society. The personnel are expected to decide whether a law has been undermined, if an action has to be taken and if so who is responsible for the public disturbance. Moreover, the personnel are expected to offer help to people who are in trouble, control masses, and supervise numerous kinds of services as well as helping individual who are not fully answerable for what they do. Therefore, the police should conduct the order maintenance activity in a wise manner to avoid complexity of the situation.
Service function
Besides law enforcement and maintaining order, the police have a wide variety of services the offer to the citizens of United States. The services offered by the law enforcement personnel are given to the citizens who are free of crime. First aid services to citizens who are injured through either an accident or other circumstances leading to injuries are given by the law enforcement personnel. Basically, they do their best to ensure that every individual in the society is in a safe state. Moreover, rescuing of animals and helping the disoriented people in the society are other services offered to the society ( Lamin , Teboh and Chamberlain , 2016) . The police also engage themselves in educating the society about law and order helping them takes a step to crime prevention. Through educating the society, the police build the trust of the citizens thus this makes it easy for the police to prevent crime hence maintaining order and law enforcement becomes easy.
Deterrence function
Deterrence is actually the idea or theory that the threat of punishment given by the police will prevent persons from committing a criminality. The threat of punishment of crimes may prevent an offender from committing such a crime in the future. Additionally, the threat of punishment of a crime prevents the society from committing a similar crime in future. The threat on an individual or the offender is known as specific deterrence. On the other hand, the threat of punishment to prevent the society from committing the crime is known as general deterrence. Criminal deterrence is meant to prevent crimes from happening in the future and its primary role is to reduce the level of offending in the society. However, the functions of criminal deterrence may not always be fulfilled as it may result to increase of crimes in the society rather than reducing them. This may be true if actual punishment on the offenders is not given but rather the threat of punishment given. In this case, the offender may find the threat of punishment being lighter on him leading to him committing the crime again and not afraid of being caught. However, if the offender finds the threat of punishment heavy on him, the chances of repeating the crime will be lowered.
In conclusion, the law enforcement personnel have variety of functions to carry out besides the four main discussed above. The police are responsible of investigations of criminals, detecting criminals with pending cases among others.
References
Lamin S.A, Teboh C., & Chamberlain J.M. (2016). Police social work and community policing. Cogent Social Sciences, 2 (1)
Whetstone T., Kelling G.L., Walsh W.F., Banton M.P., & Brodeur J.P. (2019). Police: law enforcement . Encyclopedia Britannica . Retrieved on 5 July 2019 , from https://www.britannica.com/topic/police
