Police Technology in the USA
Request for police services are generally transmitted to headquarters by telephone and then by radio to officers in the field.Police have long operated on the theory that fast response time results in more arrests and less risk or injury to victims. The current trend is toward handling calls by priority, with emergency response reserved for cases involving an injured party or those in which a reasonable chance exists to prevent a crime or make an arrest at the scene.Modern computer-assisted dispatching systems permit automatic selection of the nearest officer in service. In some cities, officers can receive messages displayed on computer terminals in their cars, without voice communication from headquarters. An officer, for example, can key in the license number of a suspect car and receive an immediate response from the computer as to the status of the car and owner’s identity.
An increasing number of agencies are now using computers to link crime patterns with certain suspects.Fingerprints found at crime scenes can be electronically compared with fingerprint files.
In recent years technological advances have been made in such areas as voice identification, use of the scanning electron microscope, and blood testing which is an important tool because only 2 persons in 70,000 have identical blood characteristics. Some of the new laboratory techniques, although highly effective, are extremely expensive, so their use is limited to the most challenging cases.
2. Answer the following questions:
What are the current trends in police work in the USA?
What cases are handled by priority under the new approach?
How do computers assist in police work?
What technological advances have been made in law-and-order
campaign?
Why is blood testing an important tool in crime detection?
3. Find in the text above the English equivalents for the following words and expressions:
- пострадавшая сторона
- предотвратить преступление
- осуществить арест на месте происшествия
- отпечатки пальцев
- быстрое реагирование
- печатать, вводить с клавиатуры
- технический прогресс
4. Render the following text into English paying attention to the words and
expressions given in bold type:
Большое число расследований уголовных преступлений,ведущихся американскими правоохранительными органами,вынудило ФБР приступить к созданию новой криминалистической лаборатории. Лаборатория будет оснащена новейшим оборудованием для баллистической, химической, судебно-медицинскойи других видов экспертизы, необходимых для расследования различных преступлений.
Лаборатория ФБР, которая находится в Вашингтоне, на протяжении многих лет остается крупнейшей и лучшей в стране. Однако в последнее время она не справляется с огромным потоком заданий, поступающих не только от головного ведомства, но и из других правоохранительных органов.
Необходимость создания новой лаборатории продиктована так же тем, что ФБР все чаще приходится заниматься расследованием сложнейших дел,связанных с международным терроризмом, организованной преступностью и контрабандой наркотиков.
Руководство ФБР планирует созданиеединой компьютерной базы данных всех правоохранительных органов США, которая будет содержать информацию о преступниках и их сообщниках и вещественных доказательствах, собранных в ходе расследований.
Text №4
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History of FBI
In 1886, the Supreme Court, in Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway Company v. Illinois, found that the states had no power to regulate interstate commerce. The resulting Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 created a Federal responsibility for interstate law enforcement. The Justice Department made little effort to relieve its staff shortage until the turn of the century, when Attorney GeneralCharles Joseph Bonaparte reached out to other agencies, including the Secret Service, for investigators. But the Congress forbade this use of Treasury employees by Justice, passing a law to that effect in 1908. So the Attorney General moved to organize a formal Bureau of Investigation (BOI or BI), complete with its own staff of special agents. The Secret Service provided the Department of Justice 12 Special Agents and these agents became the first Agents in the new BOI. Thus, the first FBI agents were actually Secret Service agents. Its jurisdiction derived from the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The FBI grew out of this force of special agents created on July 26, 1908 during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. The first Chief (the title has since been changed to Director) was Stanley W. Finch. Its first official task was visiting and making surveys of the houses of prostitution in preparation for enforcing the "White Slave Traffic Act," or Mann Act, passed on June 25, 1910. In 1932, it was renamed the United States Bureau of Investigation. The following year it was linked to the Bureau of Prohibition and rechristened the Division of Investigation (DOI) before finally becoming an independent service within the Department of Justice in 1935. In the same year, its name was officially changed from the Division of Investigation to the present-day Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI.