Institutions of Privacy in the Determination of Police Administrative Practice

Abstract

Legal institutions in modern societies define private and public places and define appropriate police activity differently for crimes occurring in private and public places. Since urban and rural areas differ in the distribution of private and public places, with denser public places in cities, police practice in urban and rural areas is different. And crimes of different types are systematically distributed; some, like murder, are almost entirely committed in private places, and others, such as traffic offenses, entirely in public. Statistics on arrest and conviction rates for different types of crime show the influence of the social location of the types of crime on the differential character of police practice. Too, the structural characteristics of subsections of police departments are derived from the social location of the type of crime the subsection deals with. Hypotheses on the effects of introducing new crimes into the responsibilities of different subsections of police department are outlined for future research.