Understanding community policing

Purpose The purpose of the paper is to explore, in broad terms, how policing needs to be developed in communities today. Approach The approach is normative and analytical, considering the meaning of policing in general, and community policing in particular, and specifying the criteria that such policing has to satisfy in order to be fair and effective in contemporary society. Findings A concept of public self-policing is developed and community policing is then evaluated in the light of this concept. Police officers are understood as street-level bureaucrats, with multiple accountabilities. The ideal relationship between police and public is characterised as a structural coupling between two types of self-organising system. Implications The paper has implications for how policing organisations and governments might develop improved policing strategies in the future. Value of the paper The paper provides a clear, logical summary of thinking about the role of policing, particularly community policing, in today’s society. It offers a novel concept of public self-policing, leading to a new approach to the evaluation of the work of policing organisations

Evolution of Community Policing in New York City

This study examines the various community policing initiatives, or lack of community policing initiatives, within the New York City Police Department (NYPD) from 1984 to present. Community policing is a policing model that is currently in the forefront of the criminal justice field due to strained relationships between many communities and the police. The community policing initiatives examined in this study are organized as follows: the Community Patrol Officer Program (C-POP) under Police Commissioner Ward (1984-1989); the Safe Streets, Safe City Program under Police Commissioner Brown (1989-1992), which established community policing as the dominant operational philosophy in the NYPD; Broken Windows data-driven policing under Police Commissioner Bratton (1994-1996), which ended community policing as the dominant operational philosophy; the Lack of Emphasis on Community Policing under Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly (2002-2014); the Re-emergence of Community Policing under Police Commissioner Bratton’s second term (2014-2016); and currently the Neighborhood Coordination Officer Program (NCO) under Police Commissioner O\u27Neill (2016-present). These initiatives were analyzed as an evolutionary process in order to determine how community policing models have changed in the NYPD as well as attempt to identify the factors driving the change in policing styles. This study includes research of prior community policing initiatives as well as first hand observations of current community policing initiatives within the NYPD. It was ultimately determined that numerous factors influenced the various community policing initiatives. Surprisingly, even though addressing the needs of the community is often cited as the sole or even primary goal of community policing programs, it was determined that this was not necessarily the case across NYPD policing initiatives examined in this study. This research only examines the evolution of community policing initiatives in the NYPD, and perhaps can act as a springboard for future studies on the effectiveness of NYPD community policing practices in terms of community satisfaction

Predictive policing management: a brief history of patrol automation

Predictive policing has attracted considerably scholarly attention. Extending the promise of being able to interdict crime prior to its commission, it seemingly promised forms of anticipatory policing that had previously existed only in the realms of science fiction. The aesthetic futurism that attended predictive policing did, however, obscure the important historical vectors from which it emerged. The adulation of technology as a tool for achieving efficiencies in policing was evident from the 1920s in the United States, reaching sustained momentum in the 1960s as the methods of Systems Analysis were applied to policing. Underpinning these efforts resided an imaginary of automated patrol facilitated by computerised command and control systems. The desire to automate police work has extended into the present, and is evident in an emergent platform policing – cloud-based technological architectures that increasingly enfold police work. Policing is consequently datafied, commodified and integrated into the circuits of contemporary digital capitalism

How Japan’s Cultural Norms Affect Policing: A Side-By-Side Comparison with the United States

The ways of policing have been critiqued throughout the years—some have advocated for a direct approach while others value diplomatic techniques. Consideration is emphasized by how culture affects policing in the United States and Japan. In the United States, the customs of policing involve violence, individualism, pragmatism, social mobility, and low power distance, whereas Japan encourages non-violence, face-saving, conservatism, and high power distance. The difference in these cultural norms reflects how policing is conducted in these two countries. To understand how policing in these two countries are different, this paper examines the difference of cultural norms and its impact on both police and community

The politics of the transformation of policing

The politics of policing transformation in Northern Ireland, the nature and timing of the Agreements that created the the atmosphere for such transformation, and the difficulty in reaching them, are clear evidence that policing powers and structures are an integral part of the constitutional framework of contested societies and not a lower-order matter that can be more easily divided up as ‘spoils of peace’. Each step in the process of change, from the 1998 Agreement, to the debate on the International Commission’s Report (Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland, A new beginning: policing in Northern Ireland. Report of the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland, often referred to as the Patten Report)., to the various inter-party talks and agreements, linked discussion on policing to other issues in the peace process, such as governmental power-sharing, North–South cooperative institutions, demilitarisation by the British Army, arms decommissioning by the IRA and other equality issues such as language rights. Both nationalists and unionists strongly linked police reform to the wider peace process, and progress on policing would have been impossible without agreement on an open-ended constitutional framework that required neither political community to abandon their longer-term political goals. Nationalists did not and would not have abandoned their political campaign for a united Ireland in return for policing reform. Unionists would not have accepted the transformation of policing without a balanced constitutional and political agreement and without the IRA ending its armed campaign. Without a transformation of Northern Ireland itself there would have been no transformation of policing. The transformation was explicitly linked to the consociational power-sharing model at the heart of the new political structures in Northern Ireland, and the interlinked institutions between the Northern Ireland executive and the government of the Republic of Ireland

The effect of sex-allocation biasing on the evolution of worker policing in hymenopteran societies

Mutual policing is thought to be important in conflict suppression at all levels of biological organization. In hymenopteran societies (bees, ants, and wasps), multiple mating by queens favors mutual policing of male production among workers (worker policing). However, worker policing of male production is proving to be more widespread than predicted by relatedness patterns, occurring in societies headed by single-mated queens in which, paradoxically, workers are more related to the workers' sons that they kill than the queen's sons that they spare. Here we develop an inclusive-fitness model to show that a second reproductive conflict, the conflict over sex allocation, can explain the evolution of worker policing contrary to relatedness predictions. Among ants, and probably other social Hymenoptera, workers kill males to favor their more related sisters. Importantly, males are killed at the larval stage, presumably because workers cannot determine the sex of queen-laid eggs. Sex-allocation biasing favors worker policing because policing removes some males (the workers' sons) at low cost at the egg stage rather than at higher cost at the larval stage. Our model reveals an important interaction between two reproductive conflicts in which the presence of one conflict (sex allocation) favors the suppression of the other (male production by workers)

Entrepreneurial Policing? International Policing Challenges

International police assistance is a global growth industry. Democratic police reform has become a cornerstone of security sector reform within peacebuilding and capacity building programmes. The UK provides police for a wide range of missions across the world. There are challenges in the provision of quality policing services resulting from the fragmented nature of UK police service provision and growing tension between state and corporate providers

Zero tolerance policing: new authoritarianism or new liberalism?

The notion of “zero tolerance” policing has been widely discussed in the media in recent years and has received considerable support from politicians right across the political spectrum both in the USA and the UK. Proponents of this apparently “get-tough” crime control style of policing have used widespread public enthusiasm for such initiatives to justify their implementation. Opponents observe this policing style to be invariably targeted at poor and excluded members of society and part of a growing tendency towards authoritarianism in social policy. This paper proposes that simply dismissing public support for zero tolerance-style policing strategies as being part of a reactionary backlash against social reformist developments in policing - and wider society in general - fails to address some very legitimate public concerns about law and order. Indeed, it is the central proposition that such policing initiatives should be seen in the context of an emerging new conceptualisation of liberalism that promotes the notion of citizen responsibility in equal measure to the traditional demand for rights. The paper examines the socio-political circumstances in which different variants of zero tolerance-style policing has been introduced in the USA and the UK and the very different attempts to sustain that approach in both constituencies

The effect of sex-allocation biasing on the evolution of worker policing in hymenopteran societies

Mutual policing is thought to be important in conflict suppression at all levels of biological organization. In hymenopteran societies (bees, ants, and wasps), multiple mating by queens favors mutual policing of male production among workers (worker policing). However, worker policing of male production is proving to be more widespread than predicted by relatedness patterns, occurring in societies headed by single-mated queens in which, paradoxically, workers are more related to the workers' sons that they kill than the queen's sons that they spare. Here we develop an inclusive-fitness model to show that a second reproductive conflict, the conflict over sex allocation, can explain the evolution of worker policing contrary to relatedness predictions. Among ants, and probably other social Hymenoptera, workers kill males to favor their more related sisters. Importantly, males are killed at the larval stage, presumably because workers cannot determine the sex of queen-laid eggs. Sex-allocation biasing favors worker policing because policing removes some males (the workers' sons) at low cost at the egg stage rather than at higher cost at the larval stage. Our model reveals an important interaction between two reproductive conflicts in which the presence of one conflict (sex allocation) favors the suppression of the other (male production by workers)