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to serve visitors with integrity, effectiveness, courtesy and diplomacy.

All incidents requiring the need for law enforcement service are immediately assigned and investigated thoroughly and expeditiously by the unit or office having responsibility for action.

Visitors are made aware that they have a personal obligation to provide some measure of protection for their property.

Visitors and park and concession employees give their support in reporting unlawful conduct.

Park employees and concessionaires have been made aware of methods of strengthening the physical security of their property and buildings.

A plan has been implemented for the release of all public law enforcement information.

Each law enforcement officer is able to provide, or direct a
visitor to information concerning:

-

Surrounding attractions and points of interest;
Main highway routes;

Locations of hospitals, churches, gas, food, and lodging
accommodations.

The basic intent of the seemingly endless list of both national and NPS law enforcement standards is to demonstrate the point to the Corps of Engineers that the provision of capable, and effective law enforcement services cannot be viewed as either a simple task or as a minor ancillary function of Corps rangers. Such services require unique types of individuals to provide them and an extraordinary amount of administrative and overhead functions (training, equipment, communications, etc.) to support them.

D.

Conclusions on the Historical Review of Methods of Establishing
Law Enforcement Manpower Requirements and Standards of Service

A variety of methods for analyzing law enforcement manpower requirements have been reviewed. As noted, none can be considered to be truly objective and all suffer from one or another methodological deficiencies.

Similarly, a review was conducted of standards of law enforcement service. Such standards are found to be based primarily on professional judgment and are almost exclusively aimed at full-time police agencies. These standards indicate that full-scale law enforcement activities can best be conducted only by well-trained, well-managed, and well-organized, independent police agencies. They clearly indicate that full-scale law enforcement should not be a part-time function because of the complicated constitutional, ethical, and operational knowledge requirements imposed by the nature of the law enforcement mission.

Given these findings, it is clear that the problem of law enforcement and visitor protection at Corps of Engineers lakes cannot be addressed by use of a simplistic formula approach. The next section will elaborate on the proposed PRC/PMS method of addressing the visitor protection issue and will then develop what we regard as basic standards.

E.

At

Proposed Goals for the Corps of Engineers Visitor Protection Program Earlier in this chapter we stated that a reference point or baseline must be developed in order to determine what is meant by "adequate." Basically, the only sound way of attacking this question is to establish goals that describe a set of desirable conditions that must be attained before visitor protection can be considered acceptable or adequate. this point, it is necessary to introduce the concept of a visitor protection program. In this context the term "program" refers to all activity or group of activities undertaken by Government to provide a service to the public. The Visitor Protection Program at Corps of Engineers lakes. is not, at this time, defined in specific programmatic terms. Instead, it consists of a wide array of activities performed by Corps employees and other federal, state and local agencies that as an aggregate constitute "visitor protection" at such lakes.

Before proceeding with this line of thought, it will be useful here to illustrate what we mean by goal statements. Goals can be developed in a variety of ways but in the main they are based on political and

moral values. For example, one municipality (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania)

has established a set of goals to describe just what they expect in terms of police protection. These goals are presented below:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Harrisburg residents should be able to expect an adequate patrol of the residential areas as well as the business community, either by patrolmen walking the beat, by motor patrol, or otherwise.

They should be able to feel secure in their homes and businesses knowing that police protection is available on the shortest possible notice, 24 hours-a-day, through the use of the most modern communications equipment available.

They should feel that their children going to and from school are protected by a police presence which, in many instances, is supplied by school crossing guards.

They should be able to attend evening meetings or activities or shop in the evenings with the assurance that police patrols are in full operation, especially after dark and between the hours of 7 p.m. and 11 p.m.

They should be made to feel secure that if a crime is committed, the police department, through its members, has sufficient training and equipment to apprehend the guilty person and assist in the prosecution.

They should know that in the event of an emergency that trained police in sufficient numbers are available to protect them.

They should know that there are persons in the police department who have had adequate training in riot control and are otherwise able to handle civil disturbances.

They should feel that adequate and accurate records are maintained as to crime statistics so that an adequate assessment can be made of the crime situation in the community.

Citizens should have the right to all of these services on
a 24 hours-a-day, 365 days-a-year basis.

Once these goal statements are established, the next step is to define precise and measureable objectives. To illustrate, goal statement number 2 requires the police agency to provide protection at the "shortest possible notice." A police agency could then set an objective that reads

as follows:

The Police Department will maintain a force level of sufficient
strength to allow at least one patrol car to respond to all
serious calls within five minutes of police notification in
at least 95 percent of all such calls for service received by
the agency.
In no event shall response time to any serious call
exceed 15 minutes.

Given this objective, the department would then identify all system components essential to achieve the objective. For example, the departmental radio communications system must be analyzed to determine what procedures must be instituted to (1) identify "serious" calls; (2) eliminate delay time in dispatching an officer; and (3) documenting this process to facilitate later analysis of how successful the agency is in achieving the objective. Similarly, the Patrol Division must review its allocation, distribution, and deployment of manpower to assure that an appropriate number of officers are available to meet the objective. In turn, each component of the department will be analyzed to determine its contribution to this objective. Finally, all activities and resources devoted to this objective will be aggregated into a "program." The cost of these program activities will then be determined and judgments can be made as to the cost/effectiveness of police performance in satisfying the objective.

The standards must be tailored to apply to diverse and individual locales. Depending on the nature of its jurisdiction and available resources, another police agency, a rural one, for example, might set the quantitative standard in its objective statement at 15 minutes response time in 85 percent of all serious calls received by the agency.

This type of objective standard provides the public as well as legislative and executive bodies with the information needed to determine what they are paying for in terms of police service and whether additional expenses are required to enable the agency to attain the established standards.

How

As noted, these types of goal statements provide a reference point against which the adequacy of visitor protection can be determined. ever,

in any formulation of this type it must be clearly understood that value judgements must be made. There is no totally objective "formula" being utilized by any police agency in the nation for determining exactly how many officers are necessary to "adequately" police a jurisdiction.

Another relevant question in determining "adequacy" of visitor protection concerns the nature of the causal relationship between program activities and the effects. For example, most police agencies in evaluating the effectiveness of their activities divide crime into "suppress able" and "non-suppressable" criminal events. More specifically, a purse snatch occurring on a lighted street would be considered a suppressable crime. A domestic homicide, occurring in a private dwelling place, on the other hand, would be considered non-suppressable. A similar situation would prevail in the utilization of police officers to control criminal or other unauthorized activity at Corps of Engineers recreation lakes. Obviously, certain events are beyond the capability of any police force to prevent at such lakes. Thus, in addition to reliance on a police capability to provide visitor protection, it is also necessary to consider other means to provide such protection. For example, design of developed areas at the projects could incorporate considerations of "defensible space," communications devices for public use, closing off of unused access roads, physical security devices to prevent vandalism, crime prevention programs in schools near the project, and so forth.

Another issue requiring serious consideration relates to the question of appropriate jurisdiction of law enforcement agencies in and around Corps of Engineer lakes. For example, at some specific lakes as many as ten municipal and county police agencies may provide some form of service, including State Police and Highway Patrols, Fish and Game Enforcement Agencies, Boating Law Enforcement Agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Corps Rangers, and others in the provision of protective services. As can be expected, this jurisdictional ommium-gatherum degrades the quality of service.

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