I watched the 2004 movie Crash the other night and it remind me of a question I’ve been wondering about for some time. Is it standard practice in American for uniformed officers to have one designated partner that they work and patrol with all the time? I can see that causing problems if it the two individuals have incompatible personalities.
Is this the case? How are partners chosen? How difficult is it to change partners and do you have any choice in working with a certain person? Is gender considered a factor, ie: are male/male crews, female/female or male/female crews preferred? What about single-officer patrols, are females sent out to patrol by themselves? (I don’t doubt the competence of female officers for a moment but I am thinking about the physical aspects of the job)
And another question that I wondered about from a different work of fiction I read once, in it a serious public order situation is in progress and civilians are delegated by police officers to assist them in containing it. Is that possible? I can’t see it happening for a whole number of reasons.
I think it will vary wildly from agency to agency; city to city.
To your second question, yes it is possible. In Florida, a police officer can empower citizens to assist. It doesn’t necessarily obligate the person to help. However, it relieves the summoned individual of any requirement to retreat and gives him/her the authority to use any necessary force to effect the arrest, including the use of deadly force in certain situations not limited to self-defense.
The answer to this could be anything depending on location. It varies by state, city/town, and department. Most police officers including females patrol on their own. Sex probably is some consideration for patrols in certain places but female officers seemed to just fine by themselves even in the more violent cities like Washington D.C. and New Orleans from what I have seen. The partner system is mainly in certain cities and is greatly overused as a plot device in movies giving the idea it is done that way everywhere when it isn’t. Patrolling separately is the most efficient use of officers in most places. I don’t know much about the buddy system and how it works with different officer personalities. I have never lived in a place that used a lot of semi-permanent partners.
That really does happen. Any citizen can take on law enforcement powers of their own when dealing with a felony to make a citizen’s arrest. It is mainly used by security guards and the like but anyone can do it. You just have to be careful you are correct in the assessment of the situation. There are also citizens that deputized temporarily or permanently by the local Sheriff to act in an emergency. They can even have badges but the specifics depend on the state.
From no experience whatsoever but reading books written by former police officers, both fiction and non-fiction, it seems that partners are more common in cities (two books I remember reading discussed Los Angeles and Philadelphia’s systems).
These books were written before female officers were common, but one point was clear: officers were allowed a certain undefined number of “personality conflict” reassignment requests. As it was described, these requests were quickly addressed and never questioned by HR, and that vague title covered a multitude of issues that probably didn’t need to be dragged into the scrutiny of the department.
Of course, an officer who had to be reassigned multiple times would definitely end up on some short list, but it was clear that the departments cared about not having partners who hate each other working together.
Just seems to be asking for a world of trouble, what if the deputized person gets injured? Or if they injure someone else? After all they aren’t trained law-enforcement officers. But I guess I have to reassess my opinion of the author, I thought it was just something they’d made up for the book!
I am aware of the citizens power of arrest, it works that way here (Northern Ireland) as well but I believe Joe or Jane Bloggs can only effect an arrest if an offence is currently taking place, a police officer can effect an arrest if they have grounds for believing an offence is going to take place or conduct an arrest after the fact. Also I believe the citizen can only detain the person at the scene until a police officer arrives and takes them off their hands. A person got in trouble in England recently for marching a suspected thief to the local police station.
Another consideration though is that even for two people who do get on together it might wear thin to be out working with just the other person all the time, we all know how in any relationship minor disagreements and personality quirks can get blown out of all proportion over time.
Thanks for the answers everyone, looks like Hollywood is lying to me again…
Whether or not an agency uses the partner system depends largely on the geography of the jurisdiction and what kind of assignment the officer in question is on. In rural or suburban departments, (as well as most State Police/Highway Patrol units, depending on location), it is a far more efficient use of, say, 5 officers on duty to have them each driving a patrol car, and have 5 units available to each respond to a situation, run radar, have a police presence in a certain area of the town, etc. However, in a large city like Los Angeles or Boston, it may be a better use of 30 officers to have 15 patrol cars around, each able to respond to calls, etc., but if they do respond to a dangerous call, have 2 officers on scene immediately, for both a faster handling of a given situation and for improved officer safety (with someone to watch the other’s back).
This also depends on assignment. I believe that different precincts of the LAPD use different systems, for the same reason discussed above- it may be better to have more individual cruisers in Bel-Air, while in Compton officer safety could be more of a concern. And of course, detectives, supervisors, Animal Control officers, etc. would each have their own modus operandi.
I remember reading somewhere that male/female pairings can be more effective because there is more of an emotional bond between the partners, but I have no cite for that.
For these reasons, it isn’t something that is or should be used often.
An officer may detain briefly if he believes a crime is about to take place. But he cannot arrest for this. This is the power to detain. If someone tries to walk away when they are lawfully detained, then it is resisting arrest. If they push away or get physical, it is resisting with violence.
Also, if the officer did not witness the crime, he cannot usually make a warrantless arrest unless the crime is a felony. There are a few misdemeanors in which an officer can make an arrest from probably cause alone, but not as many as you’d think.
A citizen does not have the power to detain. If a citizen attempts to detain another person, it automatically becomes a citizen’s arrest. If the “arrest” does not meet legal requirements, the “hero” can be in trouble himself for unlawful detention or possibly even kidnapping.
What are the requirements? Well it has to be a felony. The citizen has to witness the felony, and know that it is a felony. He can then arrest the criminal, which basically just means hold with reasonable force until the police arrive. The interesting thing is that if the criminal tries to walk away, or even fights his way free, it is not illegal. There is no “resisting citizen’s arrest” crime.
You have to remember that the idea of random citizens being tasked to help police is part of a tradition that predates any sort of trained law-enforcement officers. The origins are in the English common law practice of the hue and cry, which actually obliged all able-bodied adult men to turn out to help pursuit of felons. The related posse comitatus, also stemming from English common law, gave county sheriffs the authority to conscript any able-bodied adult male to assist keeping the peace or pursuing felons.
Even after independence, American common law retained most features of English common law, including the hue and cry and posse comitatus. Posses are, in fact, common features of stories set on the Western frontier and were long retained because they filled the same function there they did in medieval England. In the absence of professional law enforcement, they allowed the minimal local authorities to raise a sizable group quickly to maintain order. Posses are still technically part of U.S. law in any place statues have not eliminated them.
I remember seeing one of these cop video shows where an Alaska Highway Patrol officer pulled over a car in the middle of nowhere but the occupants refused to get out. Since he was alone, it was unsafe to approach the car to get the driver and passenger out.
After a bit of a standoff, a pickup truck approached and the officer flagged it down and asked the driver if he had a firearm. He had a shotgun so the cop told him that he was deputized and asked him to take up a position to cover the officer while he approached the vehicle. He could then make the arrest. That’s the only time I have heard about citizens actually being deputized but given the remote location, it probably made sense.
As noted earlier, the method of assigning partners will vary widely from department to department. When U.S. police forces began to be integrated, ISTR that more attention was paid to pairing black officers with white officers, so as not to alarm the white citizenry, but we’re pretty well past that now, thank God. There have been suggestions that female officers be paired with male officers, so that they’re less likely to be overwhelmed by big perps, but that’s largely gone by the boards now, too. Female cops can be just as tough and capable as their male counterparts.
Malcolm Gladwell in Blink cited a national study that solo officers are actually a little safer and less likely to get into trouble, because they’re more cautious and don’t take risks that a cop with a partner who’s got his back might take.
In upstate SC, (and I believe in the rest of the state also, but am not sure) routine traffic stops are done with two patrol cars now.
One officer will pull over the offending vehicle, and sit there until a second car arrives, and then the second car will pull in front of the car, bracketing it in. Only then will the officer from the first car get out and approach the person inside.
It’s very weird to see - at first I thought there were just a lot more drug busts, but it’s an actual change in policy for how they handle traffic stops.
It makes me wonder how often people were threatening or running away from a traffic stop that this is a useful and economic way of running the police force.
