Overt Police Patrol Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Overt Police Patrol - Essay Example The most important task that a policeman does is Patrolling his specific sector. The purpose of patrolling is to observe, inspect and provide security to those people who are living under that jurisdiction. The patrol officer is responsible for his district and is held accountable for the actions taking place in his district. Patrolling is the most visible aspect of policing. It can be both overt and covert in nature. The overt patrolling involves visible cops in uniforms with all the basic items a "cop" carries. They have marked vehicles and are easily differentiable from the civilians because of their get-ups. The covert police patrol force use unmarked vehicles and inconspicuous garments which help them monitor and observe the people in a secretive manner. Patrol officers are the bridge which join the police agency with the common people as these officers are on the front ranks and know the people as they interact with them on their rounds. The officers are however the lowest paid and often receive less respect than their posts and important function deserve. Today, the four basic functions of patrolling are: Crime prevention (proactive deterrence), order maintenance (security), social services (community welfare) and of course law enforcement (reactive deterrence). 2 The effectiveness of patrolling has long been under dispute. Whether patrol officers have been able to reduce crimes in their locality and been able to apprehend criminals before the crime actually took place is a study which many police stations and law enforcement agencies wish to determine. The overall cost of patrolling is high as the fuel consumption and mental spare-time of the policemen are both wasted. A patrolling officer must fight boredom and must be fully aware of what is happening around him or else his purpose is useless. But this problem plagues many police officers and they have difficulty in applying their full 100% concentration on their duty. The effectiveness of overt patrolling can be observed comparing various studies conducted by the various legal departments over the world. The assignment will highlight various studies which took place to observe the effectiveness of overt patrolling and covert patrolling. A study was conducted in the state of Victoria. In the rural regions the occurrence of crashes of vehicles going over 100 km/hr was observed and a study was conducted by K. Diamantopoulou & M. Cameron 3 to observe the effect of overt and covert traffic patrolling and whether any specific style of patrolling would help in reducing the number of accidents in the region. Their study showed results that the best solution to the problem was to use covert style of patrolli