Abstract
Little is known about law enforcement agencies with responsibility for fish, wildlife, and natural resource protection. Traditional conceptions of fish and wildlife police associate these officers almost entirely with fishing and hunting activities. The relative scarcity of academic literature regarding fish and wildlife police agencies results in a lack of understanding about their role in the criminal justice system in general. The current study seeks to contribute to the limited existing literature by examining conservation policing in Florida, a state not yet studied in this context, by analyzing some 2,910 field events. Findings indicate that officers devote a considerable portion of their attention to traditional law enforcement activities in addition to the type of enforcement customarily associated with fish and wildlife law enforcement.
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Notes
Conservation officers are also known as fish and wildlife officers, wildlife management officers, game wardens, park rangers, natural resources police, etc. (See Falcone 2004)
An augmented role does not suggest that traditional crime fighting tasks will exceed those of specialized activities traditionally associated with conservation forms of policing but that conservation officers may be involved in these tasks more than one might expect.
In some instances, the reports were vague when describing the issuance of citations. For example, an entry might indicate that “citations were issued.” In these instances, when multiple citations were indicated but it was impossible to determine the exact number of the multiple citations, the researchers chose to use the most conservative interpretation of “citations” by recording this as two citations.
Special duties most often involved some sort of fish & wildlife issue, but also included boating-related issues.
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The authors would like to acknowledge Richard Hughes and Ashley Meek for their research assistance and thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this article.
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O’Connor Shelley, T., Crow, M.S. The Nature and Extent of Conservation Policing: Law Enforcement Generalists or Conservation Specialists?. Am J Crim Just 34, 9–27 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-008-9057-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-008-9057-8