Human Diversity in Law Enforcement



Abstract

Law Enforcement is a system of law that is predominantly created by, and designed to govern the actions of, states. Public Law Enforcement, the subject of this entry, can be distinguished from private Law Enforcement, which addresses aspects of private legal relationships that span national borders. Law Enforcement is a horizontal system of law in which states, at least in legal theory, enjoy sovereign equality. Lacking a legislative body or a law enforcement agency, Law Enforcement functions very differently than a system of law in a modern liberal democracy.

In this paper, we try to focus on the Human Diversity in Law Enforcement.Introduction

The 1980s and 1990s marked a transition from a traditional policing model to a community policing model based on the ineffectiveness of the former strategy to address the riots and protests that were becoming a regular part of American life in the 1970s and early 1980s. Traditional policing was described as more reactive to incidents, limiting dialogue with community and reducing expectation for creative problem solving by officers. In contrast, the community policing model is viewed as an interactive process between the police and community to mutually identify and resolve community problems.

This philosophy emphasizes results through problem solving methods and values community involvement in pertinent law enforcement matters. It stresses officer understanding of what is important in each neighborhood and empowers officers to initiate creative responses to neighborhood problems (Lasley, 1994; Skolnich & Bayley, 1988; U.S. Department of Justice, 1993). To make the transition from the traditional to the community policing model, law enforcement personnel must receive training so that they are prepared for new demands of this interactive process model. The tools and rules that worked before may not work now (Hennessy, 1993). One area of training that is crucial for an effective transition is cultural awareness and diversity training that exposes officers to the influences of culture—those shared patterns for living—and facilitates their acquisition of knowledge and skills to communicate with those from different cultural backgrounds. The law enforcement literature often refers to this training as multicultural law enforcement training (Shusta, Levine, Harris, & Wong, 1995).



Discussion

American law enforcement deals with human diversity Issues

In human diversity issues culture is one of the main issues between individuals who are living in a country. Culture is a term whose precise meaning has not been agreed upon by social scientists. We like Hall's (1976) conception that culture is defined by communication content and practice. Hall distinguished high-context cultures from low-context cultures in terms of amount of information and the directness of the messages employed in communication. Thus, communicators in low-context cultures (such as the United States and Germany) tend to use explicit, direct messages (Hall, 1976, p. 70), whereas their counterparts in high-context cultures (e.g., China and Japan) use more indirect, ambiguous messages that derive their meanings from the situation and internalized understandings among the communicators (Hall, 1976, p. 79). In a sense, this notion says that a culture is defined by what its members ...