Can Community Policing Help the Truly Disadvantaged?

Abstract

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.

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