Explain the concerns with the use of language in policing in general, and the tendency to use new labels and to create new eras of policing in specific

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Today, some would believe that we are now in a new era of policing, which is intelligence-led or predictive policing. Still others say that we are in an "information era." There is a historical tendency to label everything anew, not talk straight, and use clichés to a fault, and to consider what constitutes – or does not constitute – a new era in policing. Policing can ill afford to give the public (and itself) the impression that it is at sea in attempting to define what it is, what it does, where it is in terms of its place in history. As Chris Braiden commented (in Chapter 1), this is cliché policing. We use clichés to describe a multitude of disconnected functions. The time has come to seriously question this use of clichés and tendency to label things anew, and why this happens at all. Indeed, a long-standing criticism of policing has been its tendency to put new labels on different strategies and tactics (the "flavor of the month"). This criticism has even been lodged against COPPS because some agencies failed to properly articulate, grasp, train for, and implement the strategy – too often creating a peripheral "unit" or, say, simply assigning an officer to bicycle or foot patrol and then anointing theirs as a "community policing" organization.