Greatest Challenge Facing Law Enforcement Agencies - Essay Example

These crimes include crimes related to exploitation, cyber-stalking, and obscenity, which have exposed the unpreparedness of law enforcement agencies in handling emerging crimes. In addition, law enforcement agencies face a challenge related to turf wars and jurisdiction when investigating cybercrimes. This expose investigates the challenges faced by law enforcement agencies while investigating exploitation, cyber-stalking, and obscenity. Moreover, they expose goes to the extent of proposing solutions to the challenges faced by law enforcement agencies.

First, cybercrimes have caught the attention of the world with President Obama declaring cybercrimes and threats as the “most serious economic and national security challenges” faced by America in the 21st century (National Security Council, 2009). Nonetheless, experts identify the implementation of policies that eliminated challenges faced by law enforcers as the first step towards eliminating cybercrimes and threats in cyberspace. In this regard, experts agree that law enforcers face challenges regarding the investigation of cyber-stalking, exploitation, and obscenity. In line with this, the National Center for Victims of Crime (2004) noted that law enforcers faced challenges while investigating cyber-stalkers since stalking consists of repeated individual conduct that may not constitute a crime. In addition, law enforcers faced a challenge while investigating cyber-stalkers due to the challenging nature of identifying cyber-stalkers who will become violent. In this regard, law enforcers will face a challenge in profiling cyber-stalkers since there lacks a legal definition of cyber-stalkers and profiling them remains a challenge to date.

A Congress report of 2001 identified several challenges that law enforcement agencies faced when investigating obscenity and exploitation. In this case, the report indicated that law enforcement agencies were ill-equipped to deal with crimes of this nature since criminals were sophisticated and they used advanced technology to commit these crimes. Hence, the identification of these criminals was a challenge. Moreover, the report noted that the criminal might be in a different jurisdiction and their identification did not guarantee further investigation by law enforcers. On the other hand, the report identified the challenge faced by law enforcers who investigated obscenity and exploitation by noting that the process of extracting data to investigate and prosecute obscenity and exploitation criminals remained a challenge.

States, nations, and different localities draw jurisdictional boundaries between them within which various law enforcement agencies are responsible for the administration of justice. Significantly, laws are only effective within the territorial boundaries of a particular jurisdiction, which is a weakness cybercriminal nonidentified and exploit In the US, jurisdictional issues challenge the investigation of cybercrimes two aspects. First, there is an underlying jurisdictional overlap between state laws and federal laws regarding the investigation of cybercrimes. In this case, Brenner and Koops (2004) noted that some state laws might not classify some aspects of a crime as meeting the threshold of cybercrimes in comparison to the federal laws. Nonetheless, states and nations can work with each other to ensure that they investigated cybercrimes regardless of their jurisdiction. In this regard, nations and states should always find a common ground on the jurisdiction to follow when investigating cybercrimes since continued turf wars result in criminals taking advantage and exploiting this gap to commit more crimes. On the other hand, jurisdictional overlaps may appear in instances whereby several law enforcement agencies have an overlap in their jurisdiction and mission in the crimes they may investigate. In this case, Brenner and Koops (2004) noted that this presented a challenge on determining the law enforcement agency that had jurisdiction to prosecute and investigate a crime that involves cyberspace.

Briefly, cybercrimes will always be a part of contemporary society insofar as the internet remains and continues to play a significant role in contemporary society. In effect, it is important to find solutions to these challenges faced by law enforcers while investigating cybercrimes. First, governments should ensure the effective and efficient training of law enforcers to handle sophisticated cybercrimes such as cyber-stalking, obscenity, and exploitation. In this case, it is evident that these crimes are evolving, and law enforcers were ill-equipped to carry out successful investigations. On the other hand, states and nations should enact laws that guided law enforcers to investigate cybercrimes effectively and efficiently.