CCJ 5105

Reading Assignment – Week 6

Directions:  Answer the following questions.  Be sure to cite the appropriate authors and think carefully about your responses and the arguments that you develop.  Be prepared to discuss this information in depth during the in-class sessions. 

1. Based on your knowledge, experiences, and information acquired from the course readings, identify and explain in detail the basic functions of police in a modern society.

2. Carefully examine the empirical research and identify what it is that the police do. Specifically, locate at least two empirical pieces of research dealing with the functions of the police, and discuss what that empirical research tells us about police officers duties on the street.

3. The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment (KCPP) challenged the conventional methods to doing police work. What is the backbone of policing? How did the KCPP experiment challenge the foundation of modern police work? Identify the criticisms leveled against the KCPP project. Identify the benefits of this research endeavor.

4. What did we learn from the Rand Study of Police Detectives. Thoroughly describe the research questions the study was designed to answer, the findings, and the policy implications of the research by Chaiken et al., 1977 in K & M 1991).

5. Police response times have always been a heated topic of debate among, the police, the public, and police scholars. What are the traditional beliefs behind the significance of police responses to calls for service? Does the empirical research support or conflict with traditional beliefs? Explain. Present the findings from the Response Time study conducted by Spelman and Brown, 1981 in K & M 1991). Based on this research, would you agree with the statement, “Rapid response to citizen calls for service increases the likelihood of clearing crimes.”

6. The compilation of these studies (KCPP, RAND detective study, and the Exploration of Police Response Times) had significant impacts on the field of policing. Identify these various impacts and explain what they have meant to both the theory of policing and the practice of policing.