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Watchman Style Of Policing Essay

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Watchman Style Of Policing Essay
In the watchman style of policing, agencies are essentially concerned with the order and maintenance aspect of policing. This particular style, as Wilson explains, is concerned with maintaining social control by stifling illegal activities which ultimately mitigates disruptive behavior. “Because the watchman style emphasis is order maintenance, it makes distributive justice the standard for handling disorderly situations. Just as all patrolman find themselves preoccupied with order maintenance to some degree they also inevitably judge a person by what they deserve.”(Wilson, 1978). This style of policing uses discretion in addition to arrest powers to threaten, persuade and discourage potential offenders. On the other hand, no matter how small …show more content…
The quantitative study of police behavior has been largely focused on decisions to take crime reports from a complainant, and decisions to stop and question someone. Smith builds and expands off of Wilson’s thesis that states organizational characteristics such as professionalism and bureaucratization ultimately influence the collective values and attitudes of police officers. Following and building off of Wilson’s research in the 1970’s Smith (1984) classifies policing agencies as militaristic, fraternal, service, and legalistic. Smith explains that service agencies are concerned with service for the community, militaristic agencies are focused on empahzig law enforcement, fraternernal agencies which are also non-bueracratic agencies act as a happy medium (they express all styles accordingly), and legalistic which like militarisitic agencies focus on invoking the law. Essentially, if an organization is geared toward problem solving, problem oriented, or community oriented policing strategies the attitudes of the police officers will be proactive, reactive or slightly more aggressive depending upon the situation. On the other hand, if the organizational style is geared toward the community they might have a different attitude due to investment within the community that they
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