Policing in a Global Society

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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 …