CriticCommunity policing: a skeptical view

Abstract

About two decades ago a few American police leaders caught the wave of community policing reform, and now just about everybody's going surfing. Early interest in this reform can be attributed to police anxieties about skyrocketing crime and urban violence, unmet rising expectations from the civil rights movement, and middle-class alienation from government authority (Fogelson 1977: ch. 11). Like a “perfect storm” these forces converged in the 1960s, stimulating intense criticism from blue ribbon commissions and a daily drumbeat of negative press for police. Calls for change were issued, some of them radical: community control of policing, deprofessionalization, and reassignment of some core police tasks to other government agencies and the private sector. Alarmed and intent on ending this crisis of legitimacy (LaFree 1998), progressive police and scholars began to experiment with ways to make American police both more effective and more democratic without losing many of the advances made in policing in the previous half century. The resulting “community policing” reforms were influenced by fashions in organization development intended to make them less bureaucratic, more responsive to the “customer,” and more results-oriented (Mastrofski 1998; Mastrofski and Ritti 2000). Unlike some reforms that narrow their focus over time, community policing has remained multifaceted and diverse. Some departments emphasize broken windows policing, others feature problem-oriented policing and still others stress policing that establishes stronger police–public partnerships (Mastrofski, Worden, and Snipes 1995: 540–541). Much of the reform literature suggests that all of these are desirable and compatible.

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