Why People Obey the Law

377 Words2 Pages
Law enforcement: what do the police do? Some of important works of police are patrolling, criminal investigation, traffic and others. Modern police perform two major functions are authoritative intervention and symbolic justice. Patrol and traffic officers are primarily responsible for authoritative intervention, the realm of detectives and traffic officers are symbolic justice. Interestingly, traffic police participate in both functions, although are regarded as peripheral to most police forces. About sixty percent of police officers do patrol work. In Patrolling, patrol officers are the nearest force with populace. They do everything that the public asks them to do (almost through dispatch in cities). Just little of work patrol officer do has to do with crime and often not especially serious, sometime there could be some serious incidents and patrol officers also have to prepare for that. Essentially, their main works are restoring order and providing general assistance. They rarely use the criminal law to restore calm and order as making arrests. The next biggest job after patrolling in policing is criminal investigation. Criminal investigations are usually responsible for the collection of information about crime potentials. Detectives who investigate crime will talk to people- victims, suspects, witnesses- then they have to identify the nature of cases and collect sufficiently evidence to arrest and prosecute suspects with reasonable likelihood of conviction. Detectives also deal with a lot of paperwork. The third big job that police undertake is the regulation of motor-vehicle traffic. The traffic police accounts for about 10% of officers. They generally work in marked cars, patrolling major road for the purpose of preventing motor-vehicle accidents. They also find out the causes of motor-vehicle accidents. There are some operational units are instituted
Open Document