Community Policing Practices Research Articles

Can Community Policing Help the Truly Disadvantaged?

Community policing advocates argue that reforms designed to break down barriers between police and citizens can produce favorable outcomes. The authors test a series of related hypotheses in a multivariate context by using four independent data sources— community surveys, patrol officer interviews, Census Bureau, and police crime records— to estimate hierarchical linear models. The results show that citizens who perceive police partnerships favorably report fewer problems related to incivilities and also express higher levels of safety. Findings from models including cross-level interaction terms indicate that the positive outcomes associated with police partnerships are not restricted to citizens residing in affluent neighborhoods. In our ecological analysis, we find that police-community collaboration is associated with higher aggregate quality of life assessments and that community policing as a form of public social control mediates the adverse effects of concentrated disadvantage. The findings support social-psychological and ecological theories on which community policing practices are partially based.

Community policing in Hong Kong

This paper is an in‐depth analysis of community policing in Hong Kong. It includes an outline of the evolution of community policing in Hong Kong, identifies the structural arrangements for the practice of community policing, examines major community‐based programs that have been launched, evaluates the performance of this strategy, and considers constraints on these policy initiatives. It shows that this community effort has already gone beyond the confines of promoting community relations in Hong Kong. The results have been encouraging. They include a significant improvement in the quality of police‐public interactions, the engagement of the public and their increased support in crime control and prevention, and the beginning of the conversion of traditional police enforcement to that of police services. However, the Force's use of community policing schemes predominantly for the pragmatic purpose of crime control has accounted for the lack of breakthroughs in forging a strategic partnership with the public to promote a secure and harmonious environment.

Re-Mediating the Spaces of Reality Television: America's Most Wanted and the Case of Vancouver's Missing Women

In this paper I speak to debates amongst geographers and media scholars about the communities that television constructs in both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ spaces. My point of departure is Morley's work on global television audiences, which, in focusing on the fears of white suburban viewers and the social exclusions they enact, neglects the images and narratives of television itself. The focus is a new North American television genre that addresses fears of urban crime, the ‘reality cop show’. In examining the genre's codes and practices and the ‘reality’ it creates, I try to specify the representational work which this kind of television performs. Analysis turns to a 1999 episode of Fox TV's America's Most Wanted that featured the mysterious disappearances of thirty-one women, all of whom were/are identified with the sex trade in Vancouver, Canada. As a morality tale of sex crimes and sexual dangers in the city, targeted at white North American suburban viewers, central details of the case were missing, including the fact that most of the disappeared were/are native women. The imposition of a Jack-the-Ripper “media template” displaced local and highly politicized explanations related to prostitution laws, community policing practices, and dangerous urban spaces.

THE POLITICS AND PRACTICE OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN BOSTON

Community policing has been critiqued as a triumph of style over substance—that is, as a rhetorical strategy engaged by beleaguered urban police forces to recoup public support in the wake of a crisis of legitimacy brought about by well publicized cases of abuse, corruption, and apparent incompetence. This paper extends that critique. In it, I argue that there are concrete practices attached to the verbal rhetoric of community policing, but that even those practices are first and foremost rhetorical. By rhetorical, I mean that the practice of community policing is primarily concerned with producing certain appearances that, police hope will win back the political support of selected communities among other things. This paper critiques the rhetoric of Boston's highly regarded Neighborhood Policing Program, including the verbal bombast surrounding its introduction, plans developed to attract federal funding, and the actual practice of community policing by Boston police officers. I conclude that community policing serves an ideological function: it masks relations of power while serving as a primary means by which urban police are able to implement and maintain their power.

Tension on the thin blue line: Police officer resistance to community-oriented policing

While over 60% of police agencies in the United States are either implementing or planning for community policing (Annan, 1995), actual implementation of community policing practices is disjointed and has produced more problems than solutions. One such problem is the resistance among officers to the philosophy itself. In a study of the orientations of noncommunity policing officers in the largest public safety department in the US, it is determined that elements of the organizational culture of the police agency are not significant predictors of support for the community policing philosophy. Rather, individual orientations toward citizen involvement in crime prevention and job involvement are predictors of officer support. Implications for police managers are discussed.

Policy promise: community policing and domestic violence victim satisfaction

Police policy regarding domestic violence has been severely altered over the last decade. The social control approach of pro‐arrest policies has coincided with a service approach promoted by community policing philosophy. But community policing practice has largely ignored the role of victim satisfaction. The evaluation of domestic violence victims must be considered in determining police accountability, because of both the likelihood that victims will seek police service more than once, and because they are intimately knowledgeable about the effect of police practice on offender behavior. Presents an exploratory study of victim satisfaction as an illustration of the situations, expectations and behaviors which shape the victim’s experience with the police. Finds that police helping behaviors were the best predictors of satisfaction, but helping behaviors were differentially distributed by victim characteristics. Suggests that police can actively improve community satisfaction in domestic violence cases by fully implementing policy and training directives which require them to provide information and concrete assistance equitably.

Violence and hyperviolence: The rhetoric and practice of community policing

The postmodernism perspective, used here to illuminate the rhetoric and practice of community policing, draws attention to the role of violence in sustaining social order and the increasing role of symbolic or representational violence in shaping interpersonal relations. When societies valorize violence in some public contexts, it can be suppressed or effaced in others. The media‐driven spectacle of violence uses representations of violence as a means to increase ratings, sell goods and services, and maintain its salience by diminishing it to cartoon‐parody status. Focus on symbolic violence distracts public attention from the grinding everyday violence and the infrequent excesses of governmental social control. The rhetoric of community policing is “postmodern” and displays “hyperviolence” (rhetoric that denies the role of violence, yet indicates its presence in practice) in that it suppresses the centrality of violence to the police mandate and displaces attention to a notional “community.” A case study of community policing in one western city, based on interviews, observations, and focus groups, reveals that although community policing rhetoric is used as public discourse, the practice of patrol officers is little changed, and the absence of a crime control emphasis creates ambiguity in the police role, raises morale questions, and alters public expectations. A quite different future is imagined, depending on the scenario one adopts: the spread of community policing, increasing punitive crime control and a rising prison population, multiple modes of “soft control” partially obscuring the dramatic rise in the incarcerated population, and the use of the death penalty or some dialectic between representational and hyperviolence and rising violence on the part of the excluded lower classes.

Nightsticks to knighthood

Community policing provides an opportunity to embrace a form of justice very different, and potentially more effective in controlling deviance, than our traditional concepts relating to crime control. Limiting community policing’s full potential is a lack of academic and practitioner articulation of the two divergent themes embedded in the concept, defined here as the compliance model and the internalization models of justice. Examples from the tenures of Anthony Bouza, August Vollmer and Lee P. Brown, and a case study of Oakland, California illustrate the lack of articulation. Appropriate responses capable of making internalization synonymous with community policing policy and practice receive discussion.

The Impact of Community Policing in Four Houston Neighborhoods

This research examined the impact of community-policing programs on calls for service, Part 1 crime, total crime, and narcotics cases infour Houston neighborhoods. The methodology used time-senes analysis and examined lagged and dynamic effects. The analysis produced mixed results, indicating that the community-policing programs had no significant impact on neighborhood crime. Police departments need to continue rigorous assessment of their efforts to accumulate knowledge about which community-policing practices are effective and which ones are not.