Policing in a Global Society.

Society is becoming increasingly global. Today, we can travel faster, more easily, more often, and for less money than ever before. Communications technology, from cellular telephones to the Internet, allows us to make worldwide connections from virtually any location. Many of us commute everyday through sprawling, multicounty, even multistate metropolitan areas. Some of us even fly to and from distant cities in the same day.

These capabilities also can present challenges to law enforcement. First, a mobile society may generate greater opportunities for crime by putting strangers together in unfamiliar surroundings. The resulting alienation and anonymity weakens social restraints on behavior. Second, offenders, victims, and witnesses of crimes may return or move to another jurisdiction, complicating cases for investigators and prosecutors. Extraditing a fugitive, whether from another country or another state, can prove a complex, drawn out, and expensive process.

The ease of international travel and the conflicts in national sovereignty have been factors in highprofile cases from drug smuggling and terrorism to traveling serial killers and sexual predators. Now, computers and the Internet create new varieties of criminals, from high-tech criminals to online pedophiles, who cross jurisdictional lines in seconds. These jurisdictional problems can occur in any community, regardless of its population or geographical size, but areas with multicultural demographics and economies oriented toward international commerce remain particularly vulnerable. In the United States, an example of such areas would include New York City and Washington, DC, as well as communities along the Pacific Coast and in the Sunbelt.

TERRITORIAL JURISDICTION 

The system of justice in the United States, which focuses on territorial jurisdiction, hampers the ability to police in a global society. Unlike citizens of most other countries, Americans consider law enforcement primarily a local concern. While criminal statutes apply throughout a state, sheriffs have enforcement powers only within the geographic boundaries of their respective counties, and city police officers can conduct investigations and make arrests only for crimes that occur within their particular municipal limits.

Through the end of the 19th century, local sheriffs and police served adequately because the predominant focus was to maintain order. Constables on patrol chased away undesirables and only arrested the disorderly individuals or burglars they happened upon. In rural areas, sheriffs only occasionally left their courthouses and jails to form posses to track outlaws. State police, with the power to cross county lines, did not exist. The U.S. marshals presiding over western territories represented the only federal law enforcement agency with the authority to cross state lines.

The need for state constabularies and federal investigators did not arise until after World War I, when the automobile gave criminals easy transportation from one community, county, or state to another-- effectively putting them beyond the reach of the local foot patrol officer and the sheriff's posse. Soon, the bootleggers of Prohibition and the bank robbers of the Great Depression sped across local boundaries with alarming regularity. For the first time, the limits of local jurisdictions became a major public concern in the provision of effective and efficient police services.

In response, law enforcement substantially changed the way it operated. Police departments adopted the automobile, telephone, teletype, two-way radio, and computer to track the mobile offender. Latent fingerprints and other trace evidence became accepted as positive proof of a crime, linking an unknown suspect to a distant crime scene (as DNA may become in the next century).

State lawmakers created new police organizations with statewide enforcement powers. Some provided a full range of police services, such as patrolling, conducting investigations, and operating forensic laboratories. However, either law or custom restricted many state agencies to investigating only specific types of violations. State highway patrols investigated only violations of traffic laws; wildlife officers handled only violations of hunting and fishing regulations.

Similarly, Congress created new federal law enforcement agencies. The FBI, DEA, ATF, and U.S. Secret Service all have nationwide authority, which has developed and expanded over the decades to address new menaces, from bootlegging and counterfeiting to drug smuggling and terrorism. However, each agency still specializes only in investigations of certain crimes. Thus, the traditional American concern over the limitation of government police authority remains manifested in either broad powers in limited geographic areas or limited powers in broad geographic areas.

To further address criminal activity that crosses jurisdictional lines, law enforcement then formed multiagency task forces. Members of today's task forces likely include representatives from one or more federal, state, county, and local agencies from a particular geographic region. Similar to the state and federal agencies created earlier in the century, while their combined territorial jurisdiction remains broad, their investigative focus tends to be narrow, limited by a mutual agreement to a particular crime or class of crime.

LAW ENFORCEMENT RESPONSE

Today, even the state and federal police agencies often find their jurisdictions too restrictive, while the multiagency task forces may have become as unwieldy as they are ubiquitous. Both were 20th century approaches; thus, law enforcement administrators must develop better solutions for the new millennium. New proposals must provide for effective, reasonably efficient law enforcement across jurisdictional lines and, yet, still preserve sufficient safeguards against the creation of a giant police state and maintain concern for local needs.

Extradition

To resolve international conflicts over fugitives, the U.S. State Department, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Justice, has moved away from the traditional extradition treaty and toward the broader mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT). The MLAT not only provides for the arrest and extradition of fugitives, but also sets procedures for gathering evidence at all stages of an investigation. [1]

Similarly, because individuals frequently travel across state lines, legislatures should streamline interstate extradition procedures with today's relatively uniform criminal and traffic laws and perhaps abolish the whole extradition process outright. Courts from one state should not intervene in a prosecution in the courts of another state.

Distance Justice

Modern telecommunications technology and travel arrangements might allow the process from investigation through trial in a single case to take place in more than one venue. For several years, distance-learning programs have used television, teleconferencing, and the Internet to bring the college classroom experience to students. Law enforcement should adopt a similar concept of "distance justice." In fact, many jurisdictions already use videoconferencing to hold preliminary court appearances for in-custody defendants, detention hearings for juveniles, and pretrial depositions for witnesses.

Although these proceedings normally take place just across the street, or perhaps across town, they easily could occur across the state, the country, or even the globe. Americans have grown accustomed to televised legal proceedings through regular exposure to national cable news and local government access channels. Some local governments now experiment with Internet sites that provide for electronic correspondence, inquiries, access to public records, and applications for licenses and permits. Some cities are considering the use of real-time, interactive formats to allow citizens to participate in town council meetings as if they were there in person.

One effort at multivenue proceedings occurred in Miami, when Italian and U.S. courts cooperated in the trial of an Italian citizen accused of murdering a Florida revenue agent. Because the defendant would have faced the death penalty in the United States, Italy refused to extradite him and instead tried him there under Italian law. However, because the victim's widow was too ill to travel overseas, the Italian judges heard her testimony from a federal courtroom in Miami. [2] Such cooperation seems even more feasible in the United States, where the states share basic legal and political traditions, and the use of video teleconferencing proves more convenient and cost effective.

CONCLUSION

More than 30 years ago, the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice lamented the inefficiencies imposed by ancient political and geographic boundaries. Its members called for better coordination, and even consolidation, of police services throughout the country but conceded to the overwhelming legal and political obstacles to true reform. [3] Since then, law enforcement has tried to work around geographic limits by creating new agencies, establishing joint task forces, revamping procedures, and applying new technology. Perhaps the time has arrived to move beyond these obstacles to create a transnational jurisdictional paradigm more suited to the world of today and tomorrow.

Creating such a paradigm for law enforcement may seem radical today. However, as this century progresses, we will see truly inter-national standards of conduct established because of global commerce and mass media. Law enforcement will have to operate more as an interstate, if not international, network of accredited professionals, sharing information, resources, and operations without regard to geopolitical boundaries. Police will have to make full use of transportation and telecommunications technology at all phases of an investigation and prosecution, yet still provide proper safeguards for civil rights and due consideration for local needs. The results, perhaps, would be a system of criminal justice more suited to the new millennium.

Captain Patterson serves with the Clearwater, Florida, Police Department.

Endnotes

(1.) For additional information on mutual legal assistance treaties, see Stephen P. Cutler, "Building International Cases: Tools for Successful International Investigations," FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, December 1999, 1-5.

(2.) "Italian Justice Transplanted to Miami for Murder Trial," St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, April 29, 1998 4(B).

(3.) The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967, 119-123.