ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the history of law enforcement and policing in America, the law enforcement perspective on disasters and terrorism, and the role that police officers fulfill in emergency management. It reviews the actual roles and responsibilities that police officers play in emergency management. The profession and discipline of emergency management emerged as the interdisciplinary offspring of sociology, geography, public administration, criminal justice, and psychology. Policing in the United States and the colonies that preceded the country's founding has evolved over a time period spanning roughly four centuries. The evolution involved moving from informal methods of maintaining social control where church congregations, neighbors, and small communities played important roles in enforcing social mores, community standards, and laws to highly bureaucratized and professional police departments and related law enforcement agencies.
