NCJ Number
81147
Date Published
1980
Length
284 pages
Annotation
This book examines the theoretical and practical aspects of police work, such as police discretion, from the viewpoint of the sociological theory of law. It reports the results of a field study conducted in three cities and analyzes the social context in which police officers define incidents as crimes, make arrests, and handle disputes between people who know each other.
Abstract
The text uses the sociological theory of law to predict and explain police behavior in such settings as police patrol, investigations, and the handling of vice, juveniles, traffic, and rebellion. The text considers how cases come to the attention of police and other legal officials and indicates the implications of these patterns for social control through law. The field study was conducted in Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1966. Thirty-six observers with backgrounds in law, social science, and police administration systematically recorded routine encounters between uniformed patrol officers and citizens. The observers accompanied patrol officers on all work shifts everyday for 7 weeks in each city. (Evening shifts were given added weight because of their known higher rates of police activity.) From the total of 5,713 recorded incidents, subsamples were selected to determine how official crime rates are generated and how police handle disputes between such persons as husbands and wives, parents and children, and neighbors. This report and analysis discusses these findings along with more recent research. Although the text notes the growing demand for dispute settlement in the United States by police, it delineates techniques by which people are encouraged to handle their own conflicts instead of relying on those in authority. Strategies that ultimately encourage self-help include cutting back on police response to domestic and 'street corner' disputes, designing of physical space to maximize natural surveillance, and introducing electronic communication. Footnotes and tabular data are provided. Appendixes present a discussion of law as a problem in scientific measurement and also the observation forms used in the three-city study. Author and subject indexes and a list of almost 350 references are provided. (Author summary modified)