Legalistic Style Of Police Departments

The structure of American police departments, and those in many other countries are easy to understand. The departments, like the ones here in this country, are organized in a para-military manner, following the principles of Sir Robert Peel (Bohm, 2010). As Peel stated, policemen should be able to command their tempers, and they should be of good moral character. That is the easy part, but as we know, police departments are made up of officers from many different backgrounds and cultures. How do we know how they will act in any given situation, or what type of officer they will be? Training is an obvious answer, but even with training, police officers are individuals, with their own ideas of right and wrong, and their own way of doing things. Political Scientist, …show more content…
The legalistic style was identified by Wilson as the officers who placed an emphasis on the violations of the law which occur. This style of officer is more prone to use arrest or the threat of arrest to solve problems. This style of policing finds its basis in the idea that the more arrest that are made, the safer a community will be (Bohm, 2010). This is the operational style that is more often found in larger cities, where the officers are just numbers, and they have very little personal connection to the citizens. When comparing this operational style to the four functions of a police department, it is easy to see that this operational style is most often used in drug enforcement. It has been my experience, as a former narcotics investigator, that during the war on drugs, we focused on making as many arrest as we could, to get the dealers and drugs off of the streets. Our focus was not on providing services to the citizens who used drugs, or the dealers. This type of work would seem to be more difficult for the officers who were more watchmen, or service