PROFESSIONAL POLICING MODEL

The Professional Policing Model

Professional Policing Model

Introduction

The vestiges of the Professional Model of policing are rooted in virtually every police department in the United States. First constructed as a means to control corruption and misconduct (byproducts of an earlier era of policing known as the Political Era), the Professional Model aimed to alleviate the domination of political influences over police operations. The Professional Model afforded tighter supervision over personnel and centered on responding to incidents of crime while providing service to the public (Greenspan, & Willis, 2003).

Rapid response to crimes and calls for service highlight the aim of efficiency intrinsic to the Professional Model. For the uniform patrol officer, responding to incidents, reporting on them, and then resuming random patrol to respond again consume much of their time. The public, conditioned with this style of policing, equates response time and patrol visibility with professional policing. There are examples in which the police can credit the prevention of crimes and saved lives with a rapid response time. To some it may seem the Professional Model of policing is an effective model for crime prevention. However, a closer look reveals the model concentrates too much nonreactive measures. A crime or incident must take place before the bureaucratic muscle can flex itself and respond accordingly. Since the goal today is prevention, the Professional Model is already at odds with achieving this objective. Organizations that primarily adopt the Professional Model will find that, regardless of its application in patrol, investigation, or emergency management functions, the strategies will favor reaction

Roots of Professional Policing

The roots of professional policing can be found in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, when police leaders and academics began to focus on police race relations. Greenspan, & Willis (2003) argued that improvements in race relations, especially with the police, required a closer examination of prejudice itself, as well as thinking more broadly about police and community relations. Racial communities had been long segregated in American society, and by 1960 these communities often became the places in which urban riots erupted, typically following some overt police action (Yang, 2004).

Radelet and his successors argued that the police needed to build bridges with communities, especially communities that were racially and economically segregated from mainstream American society. This conception of police and community interaction, and indeed the overlapping social control roles of these groups, comported well with ideas introduced by Sir Robert Peel a century earlier during the formation of the Metropolitan Police of London in 1827. These included the statement that “the police are the public and the public the police,” meaning that the police in Britain were rooted in a rather homogeneous society where the police and public accepted the legitimacy of law and government policing in practice (Braga, & Bond, 2008).

From their inception in the mid-1800s in cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, among others, the police struggled with public acceptance. The role of the U.S. police in enforcing slavery and property rights, and in dealing with ...