Criminal justice agency policy decisions

You are a training officer with your local law enforcement agency. You are responsible for developing training materials and training opportunities for the officers in your agency.

Your superior has assigned you an unusual task in anticipation of an in-house training and development program. This task is focused on civil rights, but you have been asked to play devil’s advocate for a day. Your task is to present a memo that will be distributed to everyone at the training as required reading.

Your memo will be on the topic of how the criminal justice system might look and function if civil rights and civil liberties were not valued.

Your answer to the following question can assist you in developing your memo:

• If the criminal justice system employed a true public-order approach to fighting crime, what would agencies do differently right now?

Assignment Guidelines

Use your course materials, the library, and relevant Internet research options to research major Supreme Court cases that have impacted criminal justice agency policy decisions. For example, Miranda v. Arizona and its progeny changed custodial interrogations, and Terry v. Ohio changed stop-and-frisk situations.

Address the following in 750–1,000 words:

• What landmark U.S. Supreme Court case have you chosen, and what criminal justice policy changed as a result of that case? Explain.
  • This is the starting point for this assignment. Once you understand how that case changed policy, then you can start to work on identifying how the criminal justice system might change its function if the rule of law established in that case was no longer a requirement.
• Do the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court impact criminal justice policy decisions? Why or why not? Explain in detail.
• How might the affected criminal justice agencies perform differently if the rule of law in your chosen U.S. Supreme Court case was no longer a requirement? Explain in detail.

Be sure to reference all sources using APA style.