The Implications of the Formal and Social Organization of Policing in the U.S and Israel: Some Concerns and Opportunities

Abstract

Policing around the world is organized at different levels of government, often with overlapping jurisdiction, function, and structure. As one surveys police systems across the world, the roles and functions of the police have similar overlapping, and at times, competing characteristics. Given complexity in the roles, functions, strategies, structures, and cultures of the police, modern-day policing has become even more complicated, being simultaneously focused on preventing and responding to “ordinary crime,” and now to responding to domestic and international terrorism. In the new millennium, policing throughout the world has increasingly taken on an expanded national security role, such that it might be expected that policing should be rapidly changing to meet its new challenges. This chapter considers the nature of such change in two very different countries – the United States and Israel, with particular concern with the evolving roles of each in the face of international and, at times, domestic terrorism. The chapter seeks to outline the structural, analytic, and personnel contours of policing in the two countries with the view that police entry into terrorism prevention, response, and mitigation roles is linked to, and has important implications for, the formal and social organization of the police.