Centenial Celebration

Transaction Search Form: please type in any of the fields below.

Date: April 29, 2024 Mon

Time: 9:44 pm

Results for police-media relations

2 results found

Author: Bolick, Clint

Title: Mission Unaccomplished: The Misplaced Priorities of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office

Summary: The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is responsible for vitally important law-enforcement functions in one of the largest counties in the nation. It defines its core missions as law-enforcement services, support services, and detention. MCSO falls seriously short of fulfilling its mission in all three areas. Although MCSO is adept at self-promotion and is an unquestionably “tough” law-enforcement agency, under its watch violent crime rates recently have soared, both in absolute terms and relative to other jurisdictions. It has diverted resources away from basic law-enforcement functions to highly publicized immigration sweeps, which are ineffective in policing illegal immigration and in reducing crime generally, and to extensive trips by MCSO officials to Honduras for purposes that are nebulous at best. Profligate spending on those diversions helped produce a financial crisis in late 2007 that forced MCSO to curtail or reduce important law-enforcement functions. In terms of support services, MCSO has allowed a huge backlog of outstanding warrants to accumulate, and has seriously disadvantaged local police departments by closing satellite booking facilities. MCSO’s detention facilities are subject to costly lawsuits for excessive use of force and inadequate medical services. Compounding the substantive problems are chronically poor record-keeping and reporting of statistics, coupled with resistance to public disclosure. Our focus in this paper is exclusively on effective law-enforcement. We find that MCSO’s effectiveness has been compromised for the past several years by misplaced priorities that have diverted it from its mission. We recommend several reforms that will increase the effectiveness of MCSO specifically as well as law-enforcement agencies throughout Arizona.

Details: Phoenix, AZ: Goldwater Institute, 2008. 22p.

Source: Internet Resource: Policy Report No. 229: Accessed March 8, 2011 at: http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/Common/Img/Mission%20Unaccomplished.pdf

Year: 2008

Country: United States

URL: http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/Common/Img/Mission%20Unaccomplished.pdf

Shelf Number: 120896

Keywords:
Law Enforcement
Police Administration (Arizona)
Police-Media Relations
Sheriff's Department (Arizona)

Author: Bartlett, Jamie

Title: Policing in an Information Age

Summary: Policing is an information intensive business. This means that changes in the way people create, share and use information present new challenges to the task of policing a democratic society. The widespread adoption of social media is one such change. Social media allows the police to engage and include the public in law enforcement in new, potentially transformative ways. But it also makes these engagements more difficult to control, and open to misuse and reputational damage. It allows the police to gather powerful, recent and possibly decisive intelligence – social media intelligence or ‘SOCMINT’ - in the interests of public safety. But there is a risk that this will be done in a way that is unsound, unsafe, and radically undermining of public trust. Social media is a new source of evidence for enforcement purposes, but also a new theatre of crime. For at least the last five years, dealing with these opportunities and challenges has become increasingly important to police forces. The initial doubts which many may have had about the relevance of social media platforms to police work were largely dispelled by the August 2011 riots. Since then, police interest in and use of social media has increased rapidly against a background of greater pressure on police budgets and the beginnings of a decline in police numbers. All forces in the UK have some presence on Twitter, with accounts for senior police officers, central communications, neighbourhood, helicopter, road and football policing teams. Some police officers tweet in a private capacity. West Midlands Police for example has accounts for individual officers, force football teams and even the police dog. Other social media platforms – Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Pinterest, Google +, Audiobook – are also used, often linked to Twitter accounts. Most forces have formal social media policies and strategies, and most use social media as a basis for investigation or as evidence. In this short paper, we summarise the key opportunities and difficulties social media presents for engagement, intelligence and enforcement. It is far from comprehensive and offers only an overview of each. Nevertheless, it seems to us that the police will now certainly need to use social media to engage with the public, collect intelligence, and investigate crime, both on- and offline. This needs new settlements – in doctrine, resource allocation, operation, capability, regulation and strategy – that allow it to be done in accordance with the principles at the heart of the British model of policing: legitimacy, accountability, visibility, compliance with the rule of law, proportionality, the minimal use of force and engagement with the public.

Details: London: Demos, 2013. 42p.

Source: Internet Resource: Accessed March 30, 2013 at: http://www.demos.co.uk/files/DEMOS_Policing_in_an_Information_Age_v1.pdf

Year: 2013

Country: United Kingdom

URL: http://www.demos.co.uk/files/DEMOS_Policing_in_an_Information_Age_v1.pdf

Shelf Number: 128164

Keywords:
Information Technology
Police-Media Relations
Policing (U.K.)
Social Media