Overview Of Some Underestimated Aspects Of Policing

Criminal justice, and any Introduction to Criminal Justice class, generally breaks down into three sections: policing, law, and the courts. Introduction to Policing teaches the police section, but more in-depth than would be covered in an Intro to Criminal Justice course.

Miranda Rights are usually not read to people arrested. Because of TV and movies, most students — and no matter how often I try to counter the misconception — think reading Miranda Rights is a constitutional requirement every time a person is arrested. It is not. Miranda is read only when a suspect is questioned in custody (and even then, only if the answers will be used on courts). The key words are “custodial interrogation.” For the vast majority of arrests, when the cuffs go on, the questioning is already done.

Miranda Rights need not and are not read to most people who are arrested. The importance of “producing stats” in modern-day big-city policing cannot be over-emphasized. In New York City, CompStat does indeed rule the roost. While the nature of CompStat is discussed in police textbooks, how this system affects the entire organization is usually given short shrift. The pressure to produce stats — quantity over quality — is a useful way to understand the police department as a whole and the behavior of individual officers. Another extremely important determiner of discretionary action is the simple desire for overtime pay (“collars for dollars” is the NYPD term).

The crime drop of the 1990s is probably the most exciting development in policing — and the study of policing — in the past century. Though the causes of this crime drop are much debated among academics, a policing class should focus on the police-related issues, which include CompStat, Broken Windows as opposed to Zero Tolerance, greater precinct-level accountability, and a belief, simply, that police can play a role in crime prevention (as opposed to a more traditional focus on sociological “root causes” of crime).

“Probable cause” and “reasonable suspicion” are the most important legal concepts in policing, bar none. They routinely come into play in almost all interactions between the police and the public. They are also rarely understood by most criminal justice students (and admittedly, a few police officers). “Probable cause” is needed every time a police officer searches or arrests a suspect. It comes from the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. “Reasonable suspicion” is a lesser legal standard that derives from Terry v. Ohio (1968), which allows an officer to stop or frisk a suspect based on concern for the officer’s safety. Officers may not frisk for drugs. But “probable cause” for a search can derive from a frisk based on reasonable suspicion. One important and New York–specific legal standard comes from People v. Diaz (1993). This was a New York Court of Appeals (the highest court in the state) decision and as such applies only in New York State. Because of that, it won’t be covered in any textbook but is essential to understanding policing controversies in New York City surrounding Stop and Frisk and misdemeanor marijuana arrests. People v. Diaz very explicitly states that probable cause for a search may not be derived from the “plain feel” of drugs discovered during a frisk for weapons.

One aspect of policing that tends to be underestimated by outsiders is simply the amount of routine work and boredom in any given shift. Also, people rarely consider the fact that police do not deal with a random cross-section of society in whatever community they police. Not only do police deal with the most unpleasant and difficult parts of any community (which greatly affects their worldview and belief that non-police simply “don’t get it”), but police also deal with a vast amount of non-police-related activity. The average patrol shift does not involve zooming from one shooting to another or the arrest of professional jewel thieves, but rather parents who cannot raise their children, drunken and drug-fueled squabbles over seemingly unimportant issues, and extinguishing brush fires in the futile and never-ending war on drugs.