ABSTRACT
Police organizations have historically established special units to deal with certain crimes and special groups of people. Special investigative units have been established to deal with homicide, vice, organized crime, and gang activity; membership within these crime-fighting units is prestigious (Cole and Smith, 1999). However, those units do not carry equal value within the police organization in part because they are not consistent with the police values of what crime fighting is or they require too drastic a change in the current approaches to crime prevention and control (Crank and Langworthy, 1999; Lurigio and Skogan, 2000; Rosenbaum, 2000; Walker and Katz, 2002).
