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Abstract
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Background
The problem, condition or issue
In late 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama established the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing to respond to national concerns about police-community relations. The Task Force's report examined policing strategies to maximize both effective crime prevention and public trust and confidence in the police (President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, 2015). Community-oriented policing (COP) features heavily throughout the report as one such strategy to promote community engagement in public safety and collaborative approaches to crime prevention and crisis management. However, while organizations like the International Association of Chiefs of Police have focused on developing strategies to help local police departments implement the Task Force's recommendations,1 the priorities of the new Trump administration have so far signalled a shift away from community relations and collaborative reform toward a “law and order” approach.
The challenges that led to the creation of the President's Task Force, the emphasis on COP as a potential response, and shifting political orientations toward policing communities recall an earlier crisis in American policing. During the 1960s and 1970s, rising crime and challenges to the effectiveness and legitimacy of a broad range of criminal justice practices (e.g. Martinson, 1974; President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, 1967) led to criticisms of the “standard model” of policing, which consists of generic, reactive, short-term strategies to prevent or respond to crime that rely heavily on traditional law enforcement powers (Weisburd & Eck, 2004). Around the same time, several high-profile research studies suggested that two key elements of the standard model—preventive patrol and rapid response—had little impact on crime rates (Kelling, Pate, Dieckman, & Brown, 1974; Spelman & Brown, 1984; see also Weisburd & Braga, 2006). Much as Martinson's (1974) findings about the limitations of research on rehabilitation famously led to the conclusion that “nothing works” becoming the defining characteristic of the entire field, these studies raised questions about the effectiveness of the police in general. By the early 1990s, many scholars believed that the police could do little to impact crime (e.g. Bayley, 1994; Goldstein, 1990; Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990).
This dissatisfaction with the standard model provided the foundation for community-oriented policing, which recognized what both scholars and police practitioners had begun to observe—that much of the police role involved order maintenance, service provision, fear reduction, and conflict resolution rather than crime fighting (Kelling & Moore, 1988; Reiss Jr., 1971; Skogan & Frydl, 2004; Skogan & Hartnett, 1997; Weisburd & Braga, 2006). Thus, the emergence of community policing in the 1970s and 1980s provided an opportunity to reemphasize these “forgotten” police roles, reorient police priorities with the community at the center, and reconnect with disillusioned citizens (Scheider, Chapman, & Schapiro, 2009; Skolnick & Bayley, 1988). In the United States, the first Harvard Executive Session on Policing,2 which ran from 1985 to 1991 and brought together leading police executives and researchers, was instrumental in bringing many of these ideas to the forefront, and the creation in 1994 of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) as a branch of the U.S. Department of Justice undoubtedly contributed to the widespread adoption of community-oriented policing across the country (see also Skogan, 2006; Skogan & Frydl, 2004; Weisburd & Eck, 2004; Zhao, Lovrich, & Thurman, 1999). Since its inception, the COPS Office has provided more than $14 billion in hiring, research and development, and training and technical assistance funding to a majority of U.S. police departments (Scheider et al., 2009).3 In a 1997 Police Foundation survey 85 percent of all responding departments (and 100 percent of departments serving municipalities with populations of 100,000 or more) reported that they used or planned to adopt community-oriented policing (Skogan, 2004, see also Hickman & Reaves, 2001; Mastrofski, Willis, & Kochel, 2007).
Community policing is also a popular approach in other countries around the world, including Australia, France, Hong Kong, Japan, and the United Kingdom (e.g. Bennett, 1994; Fielding, 1995; Lo & Cheuk, 2004; Putt, 2010; Roché, 2005; Skolnick & Bayley, 1988). As in the United States, there is no consensus across countries on the exact definition of the approach, but the fundamental ideas of community engagement and partnerships, proactive approaches to crime prevention, and organizational transformation/decentralization are typically consistent (albeit to varying degrees; Donnelly, 2013). In the United Kingdom (specifically England and Wales) the concept of “neighbourhood policing” emerged in the early 1980s, inspired by both the rise in popularity of community policing in the United States and a period of civil unrest and racial tension at home (Longstaff, Willer, Chapman, Czarnomski, & Graham, 2015). This led to the development of the National Reassurance Policing Programme, and subsequently the Neighbourhood Policing Program, in the early- to mid-2000s. These programs focused primarily on targeted foot patrol and high visibility policing to enhance public trust and confidence, with a focus on “signal crimes”—issues that may not be the most serious criminal offenses but can greatly impact the public's feelings of safety, including anti-social behaviour and disorder (e.g. Tuffin, Morris, & Poole, 2006). In other Western European and Scandinavian countries the idea of “proximity” of police to citizens informs community policing efforts—citizens do not necessarily participate directly in crime prevention activities, but the police are expected to be a visible presence, use discretion in their interactions with the public, and collaborate with local authorities and crime prevention agencies (Donnelly, 2013) ...
Language: en |