The National Institute of Justice

Paper Summary:

This paper provides a complete overview of The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) - a federal agency that provides research and assistance on law enforcement issues to a wide variety of law enforcement and crime prevention units across the United States. The paper explains how this organization conducts research in different communities, through police departments and by other means in order to ascertain what crime problems a community may face and how that community can address those problems before they become too difficult to handle. The paper analyzes several of the guides which the NIJ puts out on all subjects and in all fields, such as "Crime, Criminal Justice and Criminology in Post-Soviet Ukraine," "Flammable and Combustible Liquid Spill/Burn Patterns" and "Early Warning Systems: Responding to the Problem Police Officer."

From the Paper:

"In order to assure that this search for and preservation of evidence is conducted in an effective manner, procedures have to be put in place so all personnel know what steps to follow and so everyone knows how the evidence has been preserved. This also helps preserve the chain of evidence that can be so important in court. Electronic evidence is latent evidence stored on a computer, and this makes it the same sort of evidence as fingerprints or DNA. It is also fragile because it can be altered or destroyed if it is not handled properly. This means that special precautions must be implemented to document, collect, preserve, and examine this kind of evidence, and the NIJ guide covers these topics to help protect the integrity of the evidence.

The guide emphasizes that this is all the more important because this kind of evidence poses special challenges to be admitted in court, and the procedures to protect the evidence for court are also covered."

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• Term Paper # 108257 : "Slavery and the Civil War"

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