The Rapid Deployment Unit (RDU)

The Rapid Deployment Unit (RDU) is portrayed by other police officers as the “Dirty Harrys” or “very serious bad-ass individuals” (Chambliss, pg. 177). The RDU is a force not to reckon with; These police officers will do whatever it takes to remove illegal weapons and drugs from the hands of criminals. This elite unit mainly patrols poor African American areas, where crime rates are significantly higher. The RDU deals with crime control in three distinct ways: going undercover to bust drug dealers, vehicular stops, and serving warrants. Crime control allows the RDU to play an important role in policing. However, these officers and their methods can create tension between the communities/juveniles and they respond to moral panics. At times,

In certain cases, the police officers would speak disrespectfully towards juvenile criminals where at other times, point their weapons in the face of the criminal’s relatives. When the RDU raided a home without a search warrant to arrest a 16-year-old boy for dealing crack cocaine, the officer replied: “the supreme court has little regard for little shit like busting in on someone who just committed a crime involving drugs. . . Who will argue for the juvenile in this? No one can and no one will” (Chambliss, pg. 178). It may seem like the cops were disrespectfully treating this juvenile, where in reality, they were treating him like an adult criminal. By the age of 13, you can be tried as an adult for serious crimes. If a juvenile delinquent, is going to commit a serious crime, the RDU has no problem treating them as an

To their surprise, instead of becoming popular, chaos emerged, creating a moral panic. Concern is a major factor with moral panic. “There must be a heightened level of concern over the behavior (or supposed behavior) of a certain group or category and the consequences that that behavior presumably causes for the rest of society” (Ben-Yehuda and Goode, pg. 156). Throughout the 80’s and 90’s, drugs were a major problem so the media was heavily relied on to project this issue to the public, resulting in a moral panic. Chambliss (1994), stated that it was easier to arrest a poor black male rather than a white middle class male for illegal narcotics. The RDU is basically like a response team to the “war on drugs” and will arrest all the