Policing: The Different Types Of Aggressive Patrol

An important part of policing is patrolling, which is often referred to as the "backbone of policing". With the dangers at hand, officers on patrol are the face of the police department to the public and shape police-community relations with its citizens. This lead to the Police Service Study, a study of how police officers from 24 departments spent their time and their interactions with citizens in 60 residential neighborhoods, with findings that approximately two-thirds of an officer’s shift was “unassigned.” Most of the officer’s time is spent on patrolling the beat and engaging in officers-initiated contacts with citizens, mostly traffic stop situations. In order to measure an officer’s effectiveness, it depends on the response time the

Most common is routine patrol, in which officers assigned to a specific area are asked to move around in an “unsystematic” way (usually by motor vehicle) in order to detect crimes in progress and deter crimes through presence. Random patrol is the same as routine patrol and are incident driven, meaning that officers respond to the crime after it occurred. Direct patrol is the deployment of patrol to a specific location and/or time on the basis of a review of crime patterns and trends in that area. Similar to direct, proactive patrol attempts to target problems rather than simply respond to them. Aggressive patrol involves the targeting of specific locations, times, and offenders. Saturation patrol which is placing extremely high levels of patrol within a narrowly defined geographic area. Lastly, integrated patrol is combining both automobile and foot patrol operations. As mentioned, automobile and foot patrol are examples of patrol methods with automobile being the most common patrol method used and foot patrol the second most common. There's also motorcycle and bicycle, horse, and water and helicopter

There's some officers who have rotating shifts, rotation of officers across either different working hours or different divisions within the department, while others have assigned shifts, where officers are assigned to the same shift and/or area for an extended period of time. In terms of shift hours, the most common is the eight-hour shift structure (work five days a week for eight hours). There's the twelve- hour plan, work three 12-hour days, and two-two-three plan, 12-hour shifts where the officer works two days on, two off, and then three on, three off. With all this shift hours, it causes fatigue among the officers. All the rotating shifts an officer deals with, it could lower their health, unable to manage stress, and do daily functions. Depending on the shift, it can also cause sleep deprivation. The most undervalue division within law enforcement is traffic enforcement. Traffic enforcement officers not only seen as helping reduce crimes, but they also help improve community relations as well. In achieving their goal to keep the street and highways safe for the public, traffic enforcement officers check for seatbelt, remove drunk drivers of the streets or highway, and lower people from speeding among other traffic violations. The dangers of traffic stops are a major concern for police officers as its