responses

According to Dempsey “Entrapment is the luring by law enforcement agent of of a person into committing a crime”. Entrapment can happen any where at any given time. For example: There could be an undercover cop at a college party blending in with the rest of the adolescent students. The cop can ask for drugs from the students if he desires with no penalty from the law. With that being said, if a student decides to hand the drugs over to the agent; then the agent can arrest him using a entrapment technique, but that example is not likely to happen. This next example is an entrapment i feel officers abuse. An officer pulls over an African American man speeding on a highway. The officer walks up to the car to tell the gentleman his faults. After the officer explains his faults he notices a smell of marijuana, so the officer continues with with his complaints adding on his recent discovery along with the speeding violation. The officer then asks the man if he have marijuana on him. The man begins to show nervous behaviors with no response, so the officer dicides to butter him up by saying, if you hand it over, I will let you go. Then with the pedestrian believing the cop he decides to hand over the small amount that he had. After he hands it over the cop immediately tells the guy to get out of the car. You are under arrest. And the most messed up thing about the situation is that this is a legal act. It is legal for a cop to lie to a pedestrian. This is the most messed up thing ever invented by an officer. I mean every one tells everyone not to lie to a cop because it is whats best for you, but cops can lie to us regular citizens. This affects our legal system with a bad reputation from me because its not right that a cop can lie.

Taylor Osborne

Entrapment is defined as, “inducing an individual to violate a criminal statute he or she did not contemplate violating, for the sole purpose of arrest and criminal prosecution.” (Dempsey, 2016, p.324.) One example of entrapment provided in the book discuses a police officer sitting on the sidewalk, appearing to be intoxicated with money hanging loosely out of his pocket. Which resulted in the person taking the money, even though they had no intentions of committing any crimes prior or after. (p.324) Another example of entrapment can be an officer going undercover and posing as a party guest and look to purchase illegal drugs. I think this has affected our legal system but I think it can be a very slippery slope to go down, and if officers chose to do so, it needs to be done precisely because the accused can the officers made them do it, which can result in a court case. The book discusses one Supreme Court case, Jacobson v. United States. In February 1984, a farmer in Nevada lawfully ordered and received from an adult bookstore, two magazines that contained photographs of nude teenage boys…This resulted in the Child Protection Act of 1984, which made it illegal to receive that type of illicit material through the mail. The U.S. Postal service obtained the defendants name from a mailing list seized from the bookstore and in January of 1985, began an undercover operation targeting him…In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court held that law enforcement officers, “may not originate a criminal design, implant in an innocent person’s mind, the disposition to commit a criminal act, and then induce commission of the crime so that the government may prosecute.” (Dempsey, 2016, p.324.) Another Supreme Court case, United States v. Russell regarding drug crimes, Russell argued that an undercover agent gave him the items he needed to continue his operation, however Russel’s drug operation was in place before law enforcement stepped in, so it was evident that he had criminal intentions. (Oyez, 2018.

Danielle Rabon

SARA is not a girls name in this instance, but a policing strategy that help officers take in information, analyze it, and come up with a plan of action basically. SARA stands for scanning, analysis, response, and assessment. During the scanning process the officer is to start by , “identifying the neighborhood crime and disorder problems.” From there he or she is to go on to “understanding the conditions that cause the problem to occur.” After that they are to develop and implement solutions, and finally determine the impact of those solutions (Dempsey and Forst 2016).