Recruitment, Training, and Police Socialization

The biggest challenge that is preventing police recruiters from having a viable applicant pool is that the pool for the selection is shallow. The main reasons contributing to this scenario include the public perception of the occupation’s prestige, working conditions and the general economy. The police career is highly regarded or honored but one that a lot of people would not like as their lifetime career. The citizens have consistently ranked this job in the lower half of all occupations. This is made worse by the recent coverage by the media of the law enforcement being involved in incidents such as racial profiling. This coverage has done nothing in enhancing the profession’s prestige. In addition, the working conditions make a lot of young recruits to suffer cultural shock upon taking on their duties which involves heinous crimes such as drug peddling and murder. The economy provides jobs with better working conditions and salaries which make people to shun law enforcement career.

The patrol scripts would be used where there is little chances of crime occurring. An example is the maintenance of security at a given university where the possibility of crime occurring is very low. In such a scenario, there would be no need for using random patrol since this mean that a lot of unassigned time would go unutilized (Rivero, 2010). The only thing needed is to mark the areas where crime is likely to happen within the compound and direct patrol effort in it. A major disadvantage of script patrol is lack of visible presence of police officers since this method is reactive. This means that there is a lack of deterrent effect of criminal activities (Rivero and Pepper, 2010).

References

Rivero,D.,(2010).Proactive Patrolling through the Use of Patrol Scripts. Retrieved from:

 Rivero, D.,and Pepper,J.(2010). "Proactive Patrolling through the Use of Patrol Scripts,"

The Police Chief77 (September 2010): 66–68,

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/naylor/CPIM0910/index.php#/