Law
A police department with 500 officers is considered as a large police department; whereas a police department with 50 officers is considered as a small sized police department. According to the National Research Council (2004), large police departments tend to have higher arrest rates. At the same time, due to the big size of the department, it has the ability to respond to more cases and employs police officers who are more aggressive and less selective in using their formal enforcement powers and to resort to force more frequently. As opposed to a smaller police department, the officers who are employed in this agency are more familiar with the individual citizens in the community. They are also familiar with the organizations in the neighborhood and can easily provide assistance to members of the community since they are only few. Hence, there is a greater tendency that cases reported with the agency will be resolved within a shorter period of time since there will be more follow-ups to the crime reports of citizen (National Research Council, 2004).
Based on the report of the National Research Council (2004), the impact of agency size on enforcement levels can be gauged by the arrest rates on the basis of the type of offense committed. Smaller-sized agencies are more responsive to the priorities of the citizens inside neighborhoods which find the breaches of peace very troublesome. In fact, these smaller agencies have fewer alternatives to arrests.
As opposed to agencies which are larger in size, they are more buffered from the preferences of the community and they have more non-arrest alternatives to choose from. In case of thefts in the community, larger police departments are more focused on the pacifying the outrage of the community for the wrong doing that was committed rather than to rectify the losses of the victims. The bigger and more specialized the police department becomes, they have an advantage when it comes to solving crimes and arresting the criminals, in comparison of smaller agencies.
In terms of work load, smaller police agencies have less intensive work load when compared to bigger police departments. This can be illustrated when the small departments exercise more initiative and less discretion when it comes to the enforcement of drunk-driving laws when compared to larger police departments. As a result, officers working for smaller agencies have more time to spend in initiating Driving Under the Influence (DUI) stops since the smaller communities consider drunk-driving enforcement to be an issue that is of higher priority. The report of the National Research Council, (2004) revealed that those agencies having one to five sworn officers had a per-officer DUI arrest rate that is thrice the number of times of arrests when compared to a large police department which has 100 sworn officers. In large police departments, they do not consider drunk driving as one of their high priority cases, which is the reverse among smaller agencies. In terms of law enforcement prowess, small departments have lesser number of serious crimes for they have lesser resources that are allocated to such kinds of specialist structure for the purpose of increasing the competence of the department. On the other hand, bigger sized agencies have various methods to demonstrate their proficiency in law enforcement by creating specialist units that will attend to more serious crimes (Pollack, 2011).
References:
National Research Council. (2004). Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing. Washington:
The National Press Academy.
Pollack, J. M. (2011). Crime and Justice in America: An Introduction to Criminal
Justice, 2nd ed. Waltham, MA: Elsevier.
