Order Maintenance Calls: Importance, Challenges, and Strategies

Maintenance Call: Police see themselves as crime fighters, view calls as garbage, social work, or bs. Experts see maintenance calls as more important than crime fighting.

Traffic Enforcement: The most common form of order maintenance, it involves low-level yet significant friction between police and the public. Police often think of it as distasteful, given the dangerous aspects of the job.

Domestic Disturbance: Involving two or more people in an intimate relationship. One-third of these calls involve some form of violence.

DD: A response may include arrest, mediation, split parties, or referral to a social service agency. Cases are often dismissed.

Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment: A test of what worked to deter domestic violence from reoccurring. Three different strategies for misdemeanor domestic violence were evaluated: arrest, mediation, and separation. Results suggested that arrest produced lower rates of repeat offenders, with rearrest occurring in 10% of arrest cases compared to 19% for mediation and 24% for separation.

Prostitution: A lucrative industry netting between 7.2 and 9 billion dollars a year. There are five different types of prostitutes: streetwalkers, bar girls, skeezers, brothel prostitutes, and call girls.

Homelessness: Another aspect of order maintenance, homelessness creates a number of challenges for the police. The typical response involves containment.

Mentally Ill: Likely to become victims of crime, mentally ill individuals can also be seen as a threat. Mercy booking occurs when they are arrested because mental health services are more readily available in jails.

HIV/AIDS: Police are at a higher risk for contracting the disease due to their heightened contact with this population. A study by the CDC found that 7 officers contracted HIV while on the job, but there was not a single case of work-related transmission.

Juveniles: Some favor strict law enforcement, while others advocate for crime prevention programs. Juveniles have a First Amendment right to assemble in public, but statistics show that black juveniles are arrested more frequently.

Crime Prevention Programs: Two programs aimed at preventing juvenile crime are DARE and GREAT. However, these programs have not been found to effectively reduce future offending.