9 May 2022

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Roles and Responsibilities of a Law Enforcement Agency

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Federal Bureau of Investigation was established in 1909 by the Attorney General George W. Wickersham as a Bureau of Investigation. In 1935, the Congress designated the current name, Federal Bureau of Investigation (Crime, 2013). The primary role of this department is to protect and defend the United States against terrorism and foreign intelligence threats. It also upholds and enforces criminal laws of the United States. Additionally, it provides leadership and criminal justice services to federal, state, municipal, and international agencies and partners. The bureau performs these responsibilities in a manner that is responsive to the needs of the public and is consistent with the Constitution of the United States. According to Crime (2013), The FBI carries out professional Investigations and allows the intelligence collection to point out and counter the ultimatum posed by local and international terrorists and their followers in the United States, and chase extraterritorial lawbreakers investigations to bring perpetrators to justice. This function is achieved through designs, developments, and implementation of counterterrorism actions which help FBI to reduce terrorist warning. 

Best Practices for Community Policing To Solve Social Behavior Change

The United States Department of Justice (2014) defines community policing as a philosophy whose focus is on the crime and social disorder through the provision of police services that involves aspects of traditional law enforcement, as well as prevention, solving problem, engaging the community and partnerships. The best practices in solving social behavior through community policing can be seen through models of community policing as briefly discussed below:

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Models of Community Policing

Crime Prevention and Peace Preservation Policing: In a case where the primary task of the police is to avert crimes and preserve peace, then the police should protect the active cooperation of the community (Brogden & Nijhar, 2013). It, therefore, requires the community to be involved in checking and managing activities of the police. 

Communications Policing: Community policing is well understood as the guarding of communications about threat and security in modern society (Brogden & Nijhar, 2013). In the past, police went through several levels and models. These included Militarism, Legalism, Professional and communitarians (community agents).In the communitarians, police become agents of the agreement by making communities cooperative and custodians of a sense of tradition. Being agents is achieved through interaction with members of the community so that they provide their security. 

Community Building Policing: Police should embrace social more other than legal action as a component of community policing. It requires police to enter into the heart of the community to develop a personal relationship. Flexibility is also needed because communities are organic and they change. Police should help put up communities and assist in designing community obligations. A typical good is always vital for a community; there is a need for multi-agency participation in social engineering is (Hancock, 2016).

In conclusion, community policing is essential for controlling social behavior. It becomes more effective when the police work closely with the people under positive relationship. Effective pursuit of models of community policing helps the police to facilitate a successful community policing structures.

Evolution of Law Enforcement since 9/11

Many law enforcement agencies seek to establish new information repositories to get data, such as tips and leads, an intelligence of organized crime, a data of counter-terrorism, and electronic and web-based open-source data in the aftermath of 9/11. There was steady aim on collecting new and previously unidentified information (Ferguson, 2017).

Introduction of The Big Initiatives: The FBI launched National Data Exchange (N-DEX), a criminal justice data sharing platform. N-Dex is a system that works nationally to enable law enforcement agencies to share information that is non-intelligent such as RMS information much more efficiently. This information sharing platform helps in tracking criminals in addition to recognizing trends and structures that can help curb crimes and terrorist attacks. Other than N-DEX, there has been the creation of the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative(NSI). This initiative helps law enforcement agencies at all levels to share Suspicious Activity Reports(SARs) to improve investigations and analysis. This action is similar to the FBI's eGuardian system that shares terrorism-related suspicious events ( Ferguson, 2017).

Tapping Open Source and Social Media: There has been a significant increase in the number of open source information available for law enforcement as compared to pre 9/11. This information is sourced from publicly available data that individuals post, for instance, tweets, blogs et cetera ( Stieglitz & Dang-Xuan, 2013) . Information sourced from these social platforms help investigator develops a picture of the suspect based on his/her posts. There is the use of new analytics technology that can penetrate through social media information to uncover system and analyze opinion. This technique helps analytics of the social media to continuously get information from public posts to identify themes and types. According to Stieglitz & Dang-Xuan (2013), t he data sourced can help law enforcement predict a criminal threat before it takes place and intercepts. 

Basically, law enforcement improvement is immensely better than it was before 9/11. The spine of law enforcement, The Beat Cop, has experienced phenomenal awareness in the industry. This success is presumed to improved mobile search technologies and ingress to analysis resources. Fundamental initiatives have put in place to help predict and intercede in crimes. However, this improvement does not mean that everything is perfect, but there are improvements.

US Patriot Act and Police State

A police state is a government that runs by controlling the activities of its citizens by the use of police force or military. Secrecy and suspect characterize the police state. These characteristics mean that the government suspects anyone and holds utmost confidentiality to its activities (Taylor, Fritsch & Liederbach, 2014).

After September 11, 2001, terrorist attack in New York and Washington, D.C., President George W. Bush requested enactment of an antiterrorist law. This law was enacted by the Congress in October 2001 and was signed by Bush. This bill is the Patriotic Act. This Act, however, has provisions that are conceivably unconstitutional, substantially violating the first and Fourth Amendments ( Aizpurua, et al., 2017) .

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech. However, the Patriotic Act prohibits the recipient of a search from sharing to others about the search. The Patriotic Act also can allow the FBI to investigate an American citizen for exercising freedom of speech. Freedom of speech here can even be writing an editorial or reading a specific book (The US Department of Justice, 2014).

The Fourth Amendment asserts that the government can only search if there is a warranty and probable cause. This privilege is prohibited when FBI are carrying out bulk data interception. Also, the FBI doesn't need to provide prior notice to the subject of a warrant before probing their property. Consequently, the Patriotic Act gave the law enforcement to much-uncontrolled power without judicial review. Targets of probe no longer required to be agents of external power, nor do they need probable cause. Judges are limited in intervention; therefore, they lack authority to reject applications for such inspections ( Aizpurua, et al., 2017).  

Effect of US Freedom Act on Patriotic Act

The Patriotic Act gives police force a lot of power to do anything that they feel is good for the country's security. These permissions meant that they could collect business records as long as they found it relevant to national security. However, the Freedom Act demands that the law enforcement must request the records of a company regarding an individual, account or device by proving that the subject has an affiliation with a foreign group (power or terrorism). The Freedom Act also demands that law enforcement agencies be more transparent about the information they are seeking (The US Department of Justice, 2014). Tech companies are free to inform their customers about their data and when it will be handed over to the agencies all because of the Freedom Act.

In conclusion, the patriotic Act gave police a lot of powers. These powers contributed a lot to formation of a police state in the United States. However, the Freedom Act has helped to contain some of these powers given to police by Patriot Act.

References

Aizpurua, E., Singer, A. J., Butler, L. F., Collier, N. L., & Gertz, M. G. (2017). 15 Years Later: Post 9/11 Support for Increased Security and Criminalizing Muslims. Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice , (just-accepted), 00-00.

Brogden, M., & Nijhar, P. (2013). Community policing . Routledge.

Crime, W. C. (2013). Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI Academy .

Ferguson, A. G. (2017). The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement . NYU Press.

Hancock, K. (2016). Community policing within campus law enforcement agencies. Police Practice and Research , 17 (5), 463-476.

Stieglitz, S., & Dang-Xuan, L. (2013). Social media and political communication: a social media analytics framework. Social Network Analysis and Mining , 3 (4), 1277-1291

Taylor, R. W., Fritsch, E. J., & Liederbach, J. (2014). Digital crime and digital terrorism . Prentice Hall Press.

United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Report, (2014). Crime in the United States.

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StudyBounty. (2023, September 15). Roles and Responsibilities of a Law Enforcement Agency.
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