Answer

Police Theory and Practices.

Basing our focus on the current and the previous policing models, topics of controversy, and issues of major concern, there is a likelihood of the occurrence of controversial issues facing policing in the future with regards to law enforcement. The field of policing faces a lot of setbacks and some of these challenges have been seen to worsen in the future. Some of the challenges the field of policing is likely to face in the future range from the existence of a false narrative of law enforcement based on systematic racism, civil unrest, unavailability of enough budget allocation to support the required improvements in the field of policing. Therefore, this paper seeks to analyze the factors that are likely to affect policing in the future, describe how community relations can impact the challenges that police officers face, and the types of new technologies that can be used in policing in the future.

Societal unrest and globalization are at the forefront of the current emerging events. There has existed a lot of protests and riots in the world (Lambert et al., 2018). Police officers are always ill-prepared when it comes to handling such issues of unrest are presented to them. Therefore, there is a likelihood for the police to be faced with a lack of skills to handle such civil unrest in the future due to a lack of law enforcement agencies to address the training of police officers when it comes to crowd control.

Secondly, there is the likelihood of the development of false narratives of systematic racism in policing. There is a high likelihood of contact made by police officers in the future to disproportionally involve minority groups in an occurrence of a crime as crime reports are highest in the minority groups within the society. For instance, under the Obama administration, numbers that had no context were used by the Department of Justice to intervene in local agency operations, therefore, lack of proven strategies of criminal interdiction.

Another challenge that is likely to face policing in the future is the lack of credit for crime control. Crime control methods that have been considered to be successful have been considered to be a violation of civil liberty despite their ability to protect constitutional guidelines. For instance, the “stop and frisk” method has been perceived that police officers stop and search citizens randomly hence the critics of low rate in discovering weapons rather than carrying out an interpretation of statistics as a success of deterrence.

 Lack of emergency response technology is another challenge that is likely to face policing in the future. Taking into consideration the recent past, law enforcement agencies have been under subsequent attacks due to a lack of well-equipped technology deployed. Lastly, police officers experiencing trauma hence slow decision making due to post-traumatic stress disorder. Many police officers are likely to face post-traumatic stress disorder due to the kind of work they handle. For example, an officer who is highly involved in risky areas or frequently risks their lives while maintaining law and order, high adrenaline levels, and traumatizing situations have high chances of developing post-traumatic stress disorder.

Community relations have a higher chance of impacting the challenges that officers do experience. Increasing police-community relations has enabled police officers to improve their effectiveness to maintain the safety of the public, crime prevention, and provide support to police officers through giving out viable information. Good police-community relation has enabled police officers to get support from the community while executing their duty. Some of the support that the community provides includes information and leads towards a particular crime, hence ease in maintaining law and order.

Furthermore, community relations have improved the levels of interactions between the community and police hence the provision of rapid response strategies helping the police to reach crime scenes quickly. Besides that, community relations have helped in solving the challenge of budget cutbacks as it has helped to develop an environment of political support(Kearns, 2017). With the evidence of budget cutbacks, police officers need the support of the community as they have a higher chance of influencing the budget.

Good community relation has helped to reduce and at some instance prevent crime. Police always have limited access to crime prevention and control of crime such as burglary and larceny as they have a low clearance rate therefore, community policing can help curb such crimes as they emphasize preventing them.

With the rapid change in technological advancements latest innovations such as body-worn cameras, biometrics, drones, and virtual reality can be used by police officers in the future to realize comprehensive and effective maintenance of law and order. With the affordability of technological devices such as tablets, such gadgets can be added to patrol cars to enable police officers to do their work virtually anywhere and at the same time receive vital information and ease access to maps for situational awareness (Brayne, 2020).

Body-worn cameras are one of the technological devices that can be used in the future as can help in evidence collection, accountability, and transparency(Brayne, 2020). In the future, new technologies such as responder alert weapons drawn can be added to activate the camera whenever a gun is drawn from its holster.