Criminal Justice in the Community week 6 only 300 words. Week 6: Week Six - Individual Work Instructional Objectives for this activity: Compare and contrast the ideologies, ethics, and moral behavior...

Criminal Justice in the Community week 6 only 300 words.
Week 6: Week Six - Individual Work

Chapter 8, "Self-Image of the Police Officer," pages 177-202.
Come out Book
The Morale Problem:
What is commonly referred to as the “morale problem” of the police is as variously defined as is police professionalism, with a tendency to settle for rather superficial explanation; for example, that the police morale problem is largely a matter of money. Accordingly, improved police salaries and pension benefits are seen as the answer. There is certainly no opposition here to improvement of the financial security of police officers, but the problem is not that simple. This is increasingly evident as police salaries have become very competitive with the private sector over the past decade.

The Socialization process in childhood:
A brief review of elementary childhood psychology is helpful here. Socialization begins with birth. The helpless infant identifies with surrounding adults for satisfaction of basic needs. In time, child begins to see him -self or her-self through the eyes of adults. Through their behavior, the child develops self- confidents and self-respect, or the opposite. The child’s actions are strongly affected by the picture of self thus formulated. As Oberlin College sociologist J. Milton Yinger put it:
Occupational Socialization:
Occupational socialization is a product of communications and social relationships within the organizations. Bombardment of terms, concepts, and belief systems that are part and parcel of the organizational environment begins to shape attitudes and beliefs. If given free rein, recruiters would probably tend to identify potential police officers who matched their own personal characteristics. Indeed, there is good evidence that this occurred. Even today with affirmative action and good faith attempts to increase the diversity of U.S. POLICE FORCES, NEW RECITS TEND TO affect the dominant attitudes and beliefs of the police organization. This not unique to policing.
Multiple roles, multiples selves:
All of us belong to many groups, and each group judges us by different standards. The average adult plays a number of social roles in the course of a day, each involving a pattern of conduct that a person occupying a specific position in society is expected to follow. Being a parent, for example, is a social role. A person may be a spouse, a parent, a police officer, a student or teacher, a pta OFFICER, AND YOUTH GROUP LEADER AND BE ACTIVE IN SUNDRY RELIGIOUS OR CIVIC ORGANIZATIONS.
Multiple social roles mean, in effect, multiple selves. Thus, from adolescence onward, a person faces the problem of integrating the several different selves required by different and somewhat with what has gone before and with whom we have been dealing, as well as the immediate situation.
The police officer’s self- image:
With the above as a cursory review of some relevant general considerations pertaining to the self- image, our specific interest is in the self-image of the police officer. It should be added that 90 percent of the same officers answered yes to the question; do you plan to make law enforcement your life career? And 66 percent said that the dangerous aspects of police work seldom worried them. Only 55 percent believed that the police should be concerned with social problems, such as education, jobs, and housing discrimination. But 90 percent asserted that the police should be involved in recreation programs for youth.

Why become a police officer?
Looking back, research by IACP in 1969 found that a little over one-half of the police officers surveyed came into police work almost by accident: they had tried several jobs and finally settle on policing.
Securing qualified personnel for police work:
As noted earlier, there are those who say that nothing is to be gained by securing “qualified personnel (whatever that may mean) for police work be-cause, after a few years of experience in the field, they become like all the rest of them. This is to say, the role shapes the self, as opposed to the position that a relatively immutable self shapes the role. Those taking the latter position n would argue that personnel who are initially selected high quality would substantially improve police service. The highest caliber people must be recruited into law enforcement.
Barriers of Effective Recruiting:
Law enforcement typically user the approach of hiring, not recruiting Potential applicants either go to the police department or stop by a college recruiting table and say, I’d like a job. The hiring officer then say, okay, let’s sees if you qualify. There is little selling of the department and even fewer attempts to overtly identify the best possible candidates. Instead, the department tends to simply make them available and respond to inquiries.
Recruiting Plans:
If recruiting is to mean more than simple “hiring,” the police agency must develop a goal- oriented policy to meet this end. To secure the best people for police work, a three-phased recruiting plan may be desirable:
The subculture of the police:
Occupational socialization creates occupational subcultures. For our purpose, subculture may be defined as the meaning, values, and behavior patterns that are unique to a particular group in society. In larger police organizations, there will likely be several “sub- subcultures, so to speak: one at the line level, an-other at the superverisory and middle management level, and another at the upper administrative level. Some attitude and values will be common to all levels, some will differ and even conflict, as we have observed.
Personality type and policing:
Researchers have interested in the questions of why a person would want to be police officer and whether there is an identifiable type of personality that gravitates to police work. It appears that stereotypic assumptions of yesteryear, such as that there is such a thing as a police type, are coming under careful scrutiny. Early research of this kind, reflecting a typical interpretation, propose that certain personality traits established early in life were clues to whether a person would be able to stand the pressures of a police career.
More BOUT Police Values:
Studies dealing with contrasts occupational value systems are fairly common in contemporary literature. One study of this kind probed the question of whether there noteworthy differences between the values of police officers and those of representative samples of other African American police officers and white Americans. The finding disclosed a somewhat larger value gap, on the whole, but the gap was considerable in both cases. The police officers tested ranked high such values as a sense of accomplishment, capability, intellect, and logic. They devalued such modes of behavior as being broad-tellect, and logic. They devalued such modes of behavior as being broad-minded, forgiving, helpful, and cheerful. They ranked equality significantly lower than a national sampling of whites and far lower than a national sampling of African Americans. This ranking of equality was interpreted as an indicator of conservatism.

Change:
We have had a panoramic and somewhat rudimentary look at a number of interesting facets of the self- image of the police. In some respects, this is the most fundamental aspects of the study of police and community relations. Surely it is one of the most important considerations if one is to understand the social- psychological dynamics of police- citizen interaction.
The subject of police self-image has broad implications. It is often regarded as marshy ground by the student because so much about it remains inconclusive. But research is increasingly concentrating on it and promises the dividends of scholarship.
Michael Brown has astutely analyzed the uncertainties of police work as mainly explanatory of the values and beliefs that exercise of police discretion and what he calls the ethos of line police officers. The values tended to reinforce organizational discipline and bureaucracy. But these values clash thus creating a bifurcated system of internal control one derived from professionalism (bureaucratic model) and the other from the police subculture.
Some final thoughts:
Self- image is important because it relates to esteem and feelings if self- worth. Essentially, if officers feel their role is important, they are respected for their professionalism, and their work is appreciated by the public and police administrators alike they will perform better. Their attitude toward work will be more positive and consequently, their efforts more predictive. Officers with a strong self-image are more likely to have a higher level of job satisfaction, quality of life in the workplace. Police leaders must remember that their employees constitute an occupational community, as well as external to the department.

Reference
Carter, D. L., Radalet, L.A. (2002).
Police and the Community (7^th
ed). Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall.