Greatest challenge facing law enforcement agencies in investigating, Essay

Greatest challenge facing law enforcement agencies in investigating, exploitation, cyberstalking, and obscenity - 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, the expose goes to the extent of proposing the solutions to the challenges faced by law enforcement agencies. First, cybercrimes have caught the attention of the world with President Obama declaring cyber crimes and threats as the â€Å"most serious economic and national security challenges† faced by America in the 21st century (National Security Council, 2009). Nonetheless, experts identify implementation of policies that eliminated challenges faced by law enforcers as the first step towards eliminating cybercrimes and threats in c yber space. 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 a number of 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 sin ce 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 administration of justice. Significantly, laws are only effective within the territorial boundaries of a particular jurisdiction, which is a weakness that cyber criminals identified and exploited. In the US, jurisdictional issues challenge the investigation of cyber crime s in 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