What have been the biggest challenges faced by the police in recent years and how is this likely to develop or change in coming years?

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Dear writer please see university assignment requirements.

What have been the biggest challenges faced by the police in recent years and how is this likely to develop or change in coming years?

Police dealing with terrorism and the emergence of high-tech crime

Discusse how police are dealing with cyber crime terrorism that endangered lives in past,present and future

Your response should be in the form of a written report of between 1500 – 2000 words

The learning outcomes for this assignment are:

Understand previous policing challenges and how these have influenced policing
Describe and evaluate a relevant police issue and its future development
Appreciate past, current and future policing methods and issues.

Good structure of assignment and a lots of book references

Lesson 6: Ovid and Apuleius
“I would suggest that we, as we reflect on the European tradition of metamorphosis, are like Ovid’s … Narcissus. For even if we gaze at our own reflection when we bow low over the pool of our literary past, that gazing is a mark of who we are, and who we are is, in part, what we have been. … [Stories] are a significant component of what we think with. Hence our self-reflexivity, our tendency to study ourselves, is a mark of the self we carry with us as we bend over the pool. Our concern with how we can change yet be the same thing — our fascination with the question of identity in all its varieties — is inherited from our traditions. The identity we carry with us questions — and by questioning confirms — itself. In this sense, we are all Narcissus, as we are also the werewolf, a constantly new thing that is nonetheless the same.”
– Caroline Walker Bynum, from Metamorphosis and Identity (2001), 188-189
Introduction
In this lesson, we read a story from the Metamorphoses, by the Roman poet Ovid, Echo and Narcissus. Popularly, this story has found its way into our language and ideas via the notion of “narcissism,” a term applied to those who are vain, conceited, self-centered. But the story has deeper meanings that this. Ovid died in the year 17 C.E. Standing at the onset of the Christian era, Ovid distilled the genius of Greek mythology, leaving a lasting record of the stories and myths that constituted the Hellenic imagination. Ovid was widely read in his day, but as Christian culture ascended, the Greek mythic imagination went into decline, awaiting rediscovery. In the 11th century, Ovid became standard reading in the cathedral schools of medieval Europe, initiating a renewed interest in classical Greece and Rome, which would come to full fruition in the Renaissance and again in German and English Romanticism. The culture of the west, for the last thousand years, has been reared on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
And the relevance of these stories to our understanding of the sacred? Ovid bequeathed to us the stories of the Greek gods, nymphs, satyrs, and heroes. The central theme of the book is metamorphosis or transformation, “bodies changed into other forms,” as Ovid puts it. The stories recounted and developed by Ovid deal with a range of themes desire, sexual passion, love (licit and illicit), the seeking of wisdom, and employ comedy, parody, irony, metaphor, symbol—a diverse set of stories and literary techniques wed together around the central theme of transformation, a powerful religious theme. In Ovid’s day, tales of transformation were a well-known genre, stories of humans or deities changed into plants, animals, or differently looking and behaving beings. The underlying perspective is that the world is constantly undergoing changes, and the underlying philosophic or religious question is whether there is continuity in the midst of change. In addition, the themes of reflection, imaging, self-knowledge, the gaze, identity are, as the quote above from Caroline Walker Bynum suggests, prominent in the religious, philosophic and ethical traditions of the west. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the story of Narcissus in particular, has been a touchstone for thinking about the questions of self-reflection and knowledge.
Lesson Objectives
By the end of the lesson, you should be able to:
1. Explain in your own words why Ovid was exiled from Rome in the reign of Augustus.
2. Summarize the story of Echo and Narcissus.
3. Identify the many doublings in the story, and reflect on the relationship between the theme of self-knowledge and motifs of reflection (mirroring, echoing, reflecting).
4. Explain in your own words how Ovid’s work marks a transition between pagan and Christian culture.
5. Describe or identify descriptions of the following terms: pre-egoic self; mirror stage; narcissism.

Lesson 6: Ovid and Apuleius
Historical Context
1. Ovid was born in 43 B.C.E., and died around 17 C.E., in exile.
a. He lived in a very turbulent period in Roman history, born as he was a year after the assassination of Julius Caesar.
b. Ovid first came into prominence in Rome as a writer of erotic poetry. His great work Metamorphoses, was written around 4 C.E.
c. The broad thematic subject of the Metamorphoses is the transformation of bodies from one form to another.
d. It was likely Ovid’s persistence in weaving together stories of the gods and erotic material that got him into trouble with political powers in Rome. In 8 A.D., Ovid was exiled from Rome, likely because his works did not fit well with the moral and social reforms of the Emperor Augustus, who was a rather conservative when it came to matters of adultery and marriage. Ovid, in contrast, wrote about love affairs, adultery, seduction, passion; as adultery was a criminal offense, the enthusiastic writing about it was seen as morally offensive.
e. But it was more than Ovid’s eroticism that got him into trouble with authorities and those who upheld the status quo and Roman imperialism. Much of his work is veiled and not so veiled political critique. In one section of Ovid’s work Amores (Loves), he writes of “the curse of money.” ” Does anyone admire the noble arts these days, or think that talent’s displayed in tender verse? Once genius was rated more than gold: but now to have nothing shows plain stupidity.” Ovid was, in short, a radical, as these verses from the Amores reveal; some things, it seems, never change:
Yet when ancient Saturn ruled the heavens,
Earth covered all her wealth in deep darkness.
She stored the copper and silver, gold and heavy iron,
among the shades, there were no ingots then.
She gave better things — crops without curved ploughs,
and fruits, and honey found in the hollow oaks.
No one scarred the earth with a strong blade,
no measurer of the ground marked out limits.
no dipping oars swept the churning waves:
then the longest human journey ended at the shore.
Human nature, you’ve been skilful, against yourself,
and ingenious, in excess, to your own harm.
What use to you are towns encircled with turreted walls?
What use to you to add the discord of arms, at hand?
When was the sea yours — land should have contented you!
Why not seek out a third region then in the sky?
Though you honour the sky too — Romulus,
Bacchus, Hercules, Caesar now have temples.
We dig the earth for solid gold not food.
Soldiers possess the wealth they get by blood.
The Senate’s shut to the poor — money buys honours:
here a grave judge, there a sober knight!
— Amores, Book III
f. It is the combination of Ovid’s eroticism, political radicalism, and mythic sensibilities (there are gods in all things) that made him a central figure of the Italian Renaissance.
2. Metamorphoses
a. The Metamorphoses is the book through which many of the most important Greek myths were preserved and handed down to European culture.
b. Most of Ovid’s stories are mythic material, though some are drawn from folklore.
c. Formally, the book is an epic, in that the story begins at the beginning, with creation, and works through to Ovid’s present. The opening sentence of the book reads: “I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms. You, gods, since you are the ones who alter these, and all other things, inspire my attempt, and spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world’s first origins to my own time” (Kline’s translation).
d. The final story includes a speech of Pythagoras, in which he describes the transmigration of souls and the transformations of all physical entities into others. Transformation is thus conceived in the work as part of the natural order of things, though the theme has a supernatural quality to it.
e. In its very last lines, Ovid announces that his own fame will live forever. ” And now the work is done, that Jupiter’s anger, fire or sword cannot erase, nor the gnawing tooth of time. Let that day, that only has power over my body, end, when it will, my uncertain span of years: yet the best part of me will be borne, immortal, beyond the distant stars. Wherever Rome’s influence extends, over the lands it has civilised, I will be spoken, on people’s lips: and, famous through all the ages, if there is truth in poet’s prophecies, — vivam — I shall live.”
f. The story of Echo and Narcissus is one of the most well known of Ovid’s tales.
3 The End of Paganism
a. An important context in which to situate Ovid’s work is that it marks the beginning of the slow transition from a Hellenistic dominated to a Christian dominated European world.
b. The Roman historian Plutarch (d. 125) wrote a treatise titled “On the Failure (or Obsolescence) of Oracles.” The work deals with the theme of the decline of traditional forms of religion in the ancient world, in particular the decline in the value and use of oracles and other sites associated with rites involving healing, divination, and worship. The discussion is quite wide ranging, and considers tensions between religion and science, the nature of demi-gods, whether there are multiple worlds or a single world. In this work, Plutarch recounts a tale about the death of the god Pan, one of the principal figures of Greek myth. The story comes in the context of whether demigods can die. Here is what Plutarch wrote:
i. “As for death among such beings, I have heard the words of a man who was not a fool nor an impostor. The father of Aemilianus the orator, to whom some of you have listened, was Epitherses, who lived in our town and was my teacher in grammar. He said that once upon a time in making a voyage to Italy he embarked on a ship carrying freight and many passengers. It was already evening when, near the Echinades Islands, the wind dropped, and the ship drifted near Paxi. Almost everybody was awake, and a good many had not finished their after-dinner wine. Suddenly from the island of Paxi was heard the voice of someone loudly calling Thamus, so that all were amazed. Thamus was an Egyptian pilot, not known by name even to many on board. Twice he was called and made no reply, but the third time he answered; and the caller, raising his voice, said, ‘When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead.’ On hearing this, all, said Epitherses, were astounded and reasoned among themselves whether it were better to carry out the order or to refuse to meddle and let the matter go. Under the circumstances Thamus made up his mind that if there should be a breeze, he would sail past and keep quiet, but with no wind and a smooth sea about the place he would announce what he had heard. So, when he came opposite Palodes, and there was neither wind nor wave, Thamus from the stern, looking toward the land, said the words as he had heard them: ‘Great Pan is dead.’ Even before he had finished there was a great cry of lamentation, not of one person, but of many, mingled with exclamations of amazement. As many persons were on the vessel, the story was soon spread abroad in Rome, and Thamus was sent for by Tiberius Caesar. Tiberius became so convinced of the truth of the story that he caused an inquiry and investigation to be made about Pan; and the scholars, who were numerous at his court, conjectured that he was the son born of Hermes and Penelopê.”
c. Plutarch lived and wrote in the same era that the Christian Gospels were being written. Christian writers would later pick up on this story of Pan’s death, using it to mark the end of the pagan world and its supersession by Christianity. As pagan rites and practices were replaced by Christian liturgy and worship, the gods and demigods in the pantheon of Greek myth retreated, as it were, and took up home in the stories of their deeds memorialized in literature.
d. In Ovid’s work as well we find the question of the existence of the gods, and how they are to be understood. For Ovid, the gods are real, but not literally so; Ovid praised the reality of the fictive, the poetic, the metaphorical and mythical.
e. “There was a time,” writes Roberto Calasso in Literature and the Gods, “when the [Greek] gods were not just a literary cliché, but an event, a sudden apparition…” Calasso notes that already in ancient Greek literature we find the theme that it is difficult for people to see and encounter the gods. “Every primordial age is one in which it is said that the gods have almost disappeared” (4-5). We encounter their traces, suggests Calasso, in literature. The forgotten gods, those for whom ritual, cult, and worship is either barred or a vague, distant memory, appear in books; “all the powers of the cult of the gods have migrated into a single, immobile and solitary act: that of reading.” “The gods,” suggests Calasso, “manifest themselves intermittingly along with the flow and ebb of what Aby Warburg referred to as the ‘mnemonic wave.’ This expression… alludes to those successive surges of memory that a civilization experiences in relation to its past, in this case that part of the West’s past which is inhabited by the Greek gods. This wave has been a constant throughout European history, sometimes rolling in, sometimes trickling out…” (Roberto Callasso, Literature and the Gods. New York, Vintage, 2002, p. 27).
f. To read the stories of Ovid is to encounter the source of this wave.

Lesson 6: Ovid and Apuleius
Echo and Narcissus
1. A summary: This is a very short version, and is absolutely no replacement for reading and listening to the entire story!
a. Echo – a nymph who is favorite of the goddess Artemis (whose haunts are woods and wilderness); Hera, the wife of Zeus, takes a malicious interest in her. Hera curses her: Echo will always have the last word, but never be able to speak first.
b. Narcissus – son of the nymph Liriope; the seer Tiresias predicts he will have a long, happy life, unless he comes to know himself. Narcissus is beauty incarnate, but he is aloof, full of himself, and vain.
c. He rebuffs Echo’s advances, who then retreats to a cave, where she wastes away to a shadow, with only her echoing voice remaining.
d. Narcissus, unknowingly contemplating his reflection in pool, falls in love with himself and, in an effort to possess his image, drowns.
e. The scorned nymphs try to find the body in order to give a proper burial, but all they find is a flower growing at the spot where he died – a Narcissus.

2. Interpretations
a. The “moral of the story.”
i. We might be tempted by a rather moralistic reading of this story.
ii. On one level, Ovid does seem to simply be telling us, in story form, something like: avoid excess, beware of appearance, beware of what you wish for, and do not shun the advances of others out of pride.
iii. But story is not simply about Narcissus flaming love for his own image, but self-awareness, longing, and our relationship to the world and others around us.
b. The depths of Echo and Narcissus
i. In her book Sexual Subversions (1989) Elizabeth Grosz writes that “Greek mythology articulates our shared cultural narratives. Yet, given their rich ambiguity and openness to re-interpretation, they are always capable of being read otherwise” (Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Allen & Unwin, 1991, p. 163).
ii. The story of Echo and Narcissus is one of these richly ambiguous stories with seemingly endless interpretive possibilities. Historically, this story has been visited repeatedly by artists, theologians, scholars, poets–a testament to the story’s power to transcend its historical horizon and speak to diverse cultural situations.
iii. The story’s key themes—desire, self-knowledge, pride, prophecy—and the cluster of powerful images of reflection—the echoing voice, the mirror-like pond, the doubling of desire, the reflecting on oneself—give the story enormous interpretive range. In the past century alone, psychoanalytic, feminist, deconstructive, queer, postmodernist, and postcolonial theorists have each taken a crack at interpreting this story. To attempt to summarize this history of interpretation is beyond the scope of this course. Here, I can but make a few observations and pose a few questions for reflection.
c. Doublings and Dualities
i. One important feature of the story, already alluded to, is the number of doublings or dualities in the tale.
ii. A doubling in a story is when one character has qualities often considered to be opposites or contraries, or when two characters, through their relationship, bring together oppositional qualities – like fire and water, for example.
iii. Tiresias, we learn, was both man and woman. Narcissus has a mixed background, both human and divine. Narcissus is born of water; Echo of air. Narcissus is first “deceived” or “seduced” by the reflection/echoing of the voice; later, by the reflection of his image. And so on.
iv. Try and brainstorm or identify other doublings and dualities in the story. It is these doublings that make the story so rich.
d. “To know oneself.”
i. This story has a prophetic element: the seer Tiresias is asked about the future of Narcissus. And his reply links the young child’s future to the matter of self-knowledge. “Being consulted as to whether the child would live a long life, to a ripe old age, the seer with prophetic vision replied ‘If he does not discover himself’.” There is a reflexive verb used here: to know oneself (translated by Kline as “to discover oneself”).
ii. Narcissus does, in a manner of speaking, come to know himself, but clearly not in the manner Tiresias has suggested. Or does he? As an allegory of psychic/spiritual life, the emerging of self-knowledge or self-awareness ends the eternal innocence of the pre-egoic self. (Note: “Pre-egoic self” – a term from psychoanalysis that refers to the period before human beings acquire self-awareness. Most of Freud’s analytical concepts, when translated into English, were given Latin names, which has had the effect of medicalization Freud’s more down-to-earth, everyday formulations. The Latin “ego” is a rather poor translation of Freud’s use of the German “das Ich,” which means, very simply, “the I.” The pre-egoic stage of psychological development means the period before we have a sense of “I.”)
iii. On the other hand, self-infatuation and self-knowledge are very different. The reader knows Narcissus is falling in love with himself (at one point, a rather authorative narrative voice comments on the vices of Narcissus) but Narcissus doesn’t know this—he sees only a “beautiful face.” It is the unconscious kind of knowing that leads to his demise. “‘We are only kept apart by a little water! Whenever I extend my lips to the clear liquid, he tries to raise his lips to me. He desires to be held. You would think he could be touched: it is such a small thing that prevents our love. Whoever you are come out to me! Why do you disappoint me, you extraordinary boy? Where do you vanish when I reach for you? Surely my form and years are not what you flee from, and I am one that the nymphs have loved! You offer me some unknown hope with your friendly look, and when I stretch my arms out to you, you stretch out yours. When I smile, you smile back. And I have often seen your tears when I weep tears. You return the gesture of my head with a nod, and, from the movements of your lovely mouth, I guess that you reply with words that do not reach my ears!”
iv. It is such passage that psychoanalytic theory points to in developing the notion of the “mirror stage” in psychological development—the moment of the child’s magical discovery of themselves through an emerging recognition of their own face in the mirror.
e. The Mirror Stage
i. Jacques Lacan wrote a famous (and quite difficult) essay titled “The Mirror Stage,” developing Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the Narcissus story.
1. For a brief description of Lacan’s idea, visit the Critical Link website: The Mirror Stage
ii. In this mirror stage, the boundaries between reality and make-believe are blurred, as the child takes great delight in a kind of omnipotent power in the correspondences between their own movements and the movements in the mirror. Lacan highlighted the strange world of the mirror, a play of projecting and reflecting where things exchange places and pass in and out of each other without mediation; you can somehow put yourself in the very place from which you are being observed, seeing yourself at the same time from both inside and outside.
iii. As St. Paul noted in an oft quoted passage from the New Testament, a mirror is something in or through which we see darkly: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood (1 Corinthians, 3:12). That is, we can be so enraptured with our own image that a false identification takes place; the mirror image produces a shadowy or partial kind of knowledge. The image may reflect or point back to me, but it is not me. In the mirror, the signifier and the signified coalesce into the same thing.
iv. In other words, a subject that coincides with itself is no subject at all; the story of Narcissus is about the lack of intersubjectivity; there is no third position from which he can triangulate an opposition between self and image, or see and comprehend difference and otherness.
v. And the story suggests, to finish this very brief psychoanalytic interpretation, that this mirror stage is not something we can ever completely outgrow. Rather, it is a core of the ego, a fundamental dimension of all human experience. The Narcissus in us lives on in all our libidinal investments, in which we identify with the sorts of things, objects, values, and images that offer some reassuring resemblance to ourselves. “It is around the wandering shadow of its own ego,” writes Lacan, “that will be structured all the objects of the human world” (Quoted in Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration (London, 1987, p. 59). (Note: The term libido, in the psychoanalytic tradition, refers in a narrow sense to the sexual drive and in a broader sense to human desire in general. A libidinal investment is thus a strong, intense, emotional attachment or posture (either positive or negative) towards a person, an object, an idea. The Narcissus story suggests that this kind of emotional investment is generally tied-up in our sense of self. )
vi. The desire that drives this wandering is, for Lacan and the psychoanalytic tradition in general, a kind of affliction that defines the human condition. Narcissus’ possessive desire for himself is, on one hand, a kind of invasion from without (since it the “beautiful face” that stimulates his desire) and yet, this very desire is lodged deep within his very being.
vii. Narcissus does eventually recognize himself, in line 463, when he says, “‘I am he. I sense it and I am not deceived by my own image. I am burning with love for myself. I move and bear the flames. What shall I do? Surely not court and be courted? Why court then? What I want I have. My riches make me poor. O I wish I could leave my own body!”
viii. Now he sees himself split; he desires more than the image, he desires that which produces the image, he desires desire, hence the call to leave his own body. He desires to get outside of himself, in order to see himself; alas, we can but see with out own eyes. This is the paradox and condition of our being, a being characterized by language and self-awareness.
f. The Mirror
i. Water is likely the first “mirror.” But reflections in water are different from those in mirrors. Mirrors, especially modern, high-tech ones, approach near perfect verisimilitudes. But our interpretations and understandings are shaped by the material forms and technology. The theme of the mirror, and associated notions—reflection, reality vs. image, self-recognition, awareness, self and other—is a pervasive theme of western religion, philosophy, art, and ethics. The Narcissus-Echo story is one of the earliest articulations of these themes.
ii. In Carvaggio’s 16th century painting, the water adds depths, tones, and ambiguities absent from mirror reflections. Part of what we might imagine Narcissus falling for is the complexity of his watery reflection.
iii. Gaston Bachelard, in Water and Dreams, writes: “If we imagine Narcissus in front of a mirror, the resistance of glass and metal sets up a barrier to his ventures. His forehead and fists collide with it; if he goes around it, he finds nothing. A mirror imprisons within itself a second-world which escapes him, in which he sees himself without being able to touch himself, and which is separated from him by a false distance which he can shorten, but cannot cross over. On the other hand, a fountain [or pool] is an open road for him. The mirror a fountain provides… is the opportunity for open imagination…. He stretches out his arms, thrusts his hands down toward his own image” (Water and Dreams, Dallas Institute, 1999, p. 21). In Bachelard’s reading, Narcissus dives more deeply into a sense of selfhood, evoked as this is by the shadowy tones of watery reflection.
iv. In this vein, the Jungian-influenced psychologist James Hillman writes: “Narcissism does not account for Narcissus and even falsifies the story. Narcissus does not know that it is his own body he sees in the pool. He believes that he is looking at the beautiful form of another being. So it is not self-love of his own image (narcissism) but the love for a vision that is at once body, image, and reflection. Narcissus’ desire was fulfilled by the image of the body experienced in reflection.” In Hillman’s view, the dark, complex image that Narcissus sees is not the key to the story; rather, we see with images as much as we see images as representations of outer impressions; Narcissus desires to see more deeply. His reflection is not a case of false perception but an arresting, haunting image that draws him deeper. The image Narcissus sees is more akin to a dream image.
v. For Heraclitus, the psyche (or soul) has bottomless depth, a dimensionality different from extension in space. The reflection of Narcissus is, in Hillman’s view a glimpse of the soul, which is not a thing, but a process or operation of entering into the depths; surface visibilities are never enough for the soul, and the toned, haunting watery image suggests such depths to the self.
g. Echo
i. Juno’s (Hera’s) curse is that Echo can only echo. She has no voice of her own; she can but mimic others.
ii. This is indeed harsh punishment, as the power of speech/language is central to self definition and awareness. Echo cannot express herself; her words can never ring true. She is doomed to dependence on the words of others. She can merely “parrot” others.
iii. And yet Ovid’s handling of Echo is sensitive and suggestive. The story takes up the difficulties and necessities that surround proper listening. Narcissus hears, but he doesn’t listen.
iv. An echo is a resonance, a wave, involving repetition, return, and reversion. An echo is what comes back to us, returns to us, returns ourselves to us. The echo suggests the need to listen backwards, to retrace, and to revisit. There is a loyalty and a staying power to the echo. It does ring true, if only we listen to it as Narcissus is unable to listen.
v. Though Echo has, by the end, no body, there is still substance to her words. Understanding builds on our receptivity to echoes.
vi. Echoes can be both traumatic, an endless revisiting of past horrors on us through memory and dream. But they may also carry clues and hints to what ails us. In Narcissus’ case, “I am here”; what he seeks is closer to himself than his own skin. Echoes (whether auditory, visual, olfactory, etc.) are ambiguously uncanny. Smells, in fact, evoke some of our most powerful memory echoes. The return of a smell can relocate you in a flash. An echolocation, more than just a tool of bats and dolphins, is, suggests this story, central to the formation of self-awareness and knowledge. Lesson 6: Ovid and Apuleius This lesson marks the end of the first section of the course. In the next lesson, we turn the greatest poet of the English language, Shakespeare, skipping over nearly 16 centuries of stories: legends of the Holy Grail, courtly romances, the slaying of dragons, and chivalrous adventures, medieval passion plays, the tales of Boccaccio, the pilgrim stories of Chaucer—clearly, the medieval and early Renaissance periods produced stories a wealth of stories deserving of attention. But something has to give, and the transition from Ovid to Shakespeare is not as abrupt as it might first seem. Shakespeare was steeped in Ovid; in the Renaissance and early modern eras there was a hearkening back to the beginnings of western religion and culture, a renewed engagement with the foundational stories of the biblical and Hellenic traditions. In Hamlet, the story is propelled by a brother (Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle) killing a brother (Old Hamlet, Hamlet’s father); Cain and Abel, once again.