Understanding Municipal Law Enforcement

Municipal law is the law enacted by a municipality; that is, the government of a city, town, or other municipality. A comprehensive approach to municipal law enforcement takes part in municipal law enforcement with the authority to enforce the largest area of laws, i.e., all municipal ordinances and local criminal codes. The duties of a police force in the United States primarily include maintaining public order and safety and enforcing the law, however, documented duties are outlined in organizational policies, procedures, orders, and other directives.

Municipal law enforcement officers execute the ordinances of the City or Town, cited at the discretion of the Municipal enforcement department, within the scope of establishing penalties for violations of those ordinances, arresting violators of ordinances, and securing the appearance of those arrested. An increasing number of cities hire licensed municipal law enforcement officers to enforce local ordinances. At the same time, in light of research indicating that systematic enforcement of municipal ordinances can both generate significant revenue and be effective in securing community compliance with ordinance provisions intended to protect the public health, safety and general welfare, police departments are investing in advance of citation issuance via comprehensive studies of the effectiveness of municipal ordinance provisions and targeted ordinance enforcement efforts.

There is a need for municipal compliance policing and community policing following the model established by police departments, which could include shifting the emphasis of proactive patrols from criminal activity to ordinance violations, such as building violations, etc. It is likely that this trend will continue, thus it is important to understand how systematic enforcement of municipal ordinances generates significant revenue and effectively secures community compliance with ordinance provisions intended to protect the public health, safety and general welfare.

So, as a practical matter, many law enforcement professionals are conducting their own research that tends to directly correlate to effective policing of local communities. In addition, academic research in recent years has begun to show that policing can be informed by school-related studies conducted by researchers. For these reasons, it is important for professionals working in the field of municipal law enforcement to work directly with researchers and research teams to provide real-world data regarding community policing, enforceable ordinances, and the evolution of policing crime and delivering justice to those victimized and affected by crime.

The importance of developing a research-informed evidential governance approach to policing, which would be competent to assess and account for the general public’s relationship to the municipal police organization, should underscore the need to extend the present mission of the municipal police organization to include communicating and defending municipal policing in terms of evidential accountability. The current need for a research-informed evidential governance approach to policing is the result of the municipal police organization’s inability up to this point to consistently collect the evidential accounts of those victimized and affected by crime which can be utilized by the political community to assess and account for crime in the city, town, or other municipality policed.

In addition, the evidential accounts of those victimized and affected by crime would provide the basis for evaluating policing performance in terms of policing sagas, which could be used by the political community to evaluate the overall quality of the previously “invisible” deliverable service. As can be seen from the above, the scientific and research-oriented approach to a municipal law enforcement officer’s duties, roles, and obligations can only save taxes, while also assigning responsibility and significance to an area of law enforcement work that is poorly understood by the academic community and the public-at-large, but nonetheless has a significant impact on the entire municipal police organization.