The Challenges of Implementing Community Policing in the United States

Abstract

Community policing is the most popular policing reform in the United States, and is very popular abroad, but little attention has been paid to just how challenging it has been to implement. Using a national mail survey of large municipal and county police agencies conducted in 2006, this paper attends to that lacuna. It investigates the views of the leaders of America's local police agencies on what has been more or less challenging in implementing community policing and to what extent these challenges have been overcome. Our findings suggest that overall most leaders see themselves as enjoying a fair measure of success in meeting the challenges of community policing implementation, but that the traditional impediments to organizational change, scarce resources and a resistant police culture, continue to persist. The agencies reporting the greatest success in overcoming challenges are those that are nationally accredited and those that have been at community policing implementation the longest.

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