Community Policing: Broken Windows, Community Building, and Satisfaction with the Police

The concept of community policing dominates the law enforcement profession today. One would be hard pressed to find an advertisement for a police chief’s position that does not require a thorough understanding of this method of policing. Like the Kansas City preventive patrol experiment and the Rand report on the criminal investigation process, the call for community policing has led to dramatic changes in the way that police carry out their responsibilities. In spite of its popularity, there have been a number of challenges to community policing from social scientists who are particularly concerned about the ‘broken windows’ model of policing. These challenges have not been received well by the law enforcement community, which argues that sociologists are wedded to the idea that crime is caused by the structural features of capitalist society, including economic injustice, racism, and poverty. The purpose of this article is to bridge the gap between these two positions. Yes, there is a place for community policing, and, yes, social problems do contribute to crime. The article starts by reviewing the development of community policing in the United States. An analysis of the theoretical constructs that support community policing then follows. Finally, we argue that there is sound theoretical evidence to support community policing, particularly those programmes that improve citizen satisfaction with the manner in which police carry out their responsibilities

A view through a window: Social relations, material objects and locality

In this article the authors ask what it would mean to think sociologically about the window as a specific material and symbolic object. Drawing on qualitative analysis of a series of comparative interviews with residents in three different streets in a diverse local area of Glasgow, they explore what the use and experience of windows tells us about their respondents’ very different relationships to the places where they live. On the one hand, the window, as a material feature of the home, helps us grasp the lived reality of class inequality and how such inequality shapes people’s day-to-day experience. On the other hand, windows are symbolically charged objects, existing at the border of the domestic and public world. For this reason, they feature in important ways in local debates over the appearance, ownership and conservation of the built environment. The article explores these struggles, and shows what they reveal about the construction of belonging in the neighbourhood, a process which is both classed and racialised at one and the same time.ESR

Twitter Watch: Leveraging Social Media to Monitor and Predict Collective-Efficacy of Neighborhoods

Sociologists associate the spatial variation of crime within an urban setting, with the concept of collective efficacy. The collective efficacy of a neighborhood is defined as social cohesion among neighbors combined with their willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good. Sociologists measure collective efficacy by conducting survey studies designed to measure individuals' perception of their community. In this work, we employ the curated data from a survey study (ground truth) and examine the effectiveness of substituting costly survey questionnaires with proxies derived from social media. We enrich a corpus of tweets mentioning a local venue with several linguistic and topological features. We then propose a pairwise learning to rank model with the goal of identifying a ranking of neighborhoods that is similar to the ranking obtained from the ground truth collective efficacy values. In our experiments, we find that our generated ranking of neighborhoods achieves 0.77 Kendall tau-x ranking agreement with the ground truth ranking. Overall, our results are up to 37% better than traditional baselines.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Fear of crime on the rail networks: Perceptions of the UK public and British Transport Police

Counter-terrorism on the rail network is vital to the security of the United Kingdom. The British Transport Police (BTP) employ covert and overt security measures to prevent crime, which includes: closed circuit television, armed police, unarmed polisce, police community support officers, police dogs, stops and searches and awareness campaigns. All security measures aim to deter crime while importantly reassuring the public. We surveyed both members of the public and BTP officers about the perceived effectiveness of current security measures, specifically with regards to fear of terrorism. Feelings of reassurance and the perceived effectiveness of security measures were positively related. The most effective and reassuring security measure was the use of armed police; whereas the least effective and reassuring was the use of awareness campaigns. However, interestingly, qualitative analyses suggested that an increase in armed police without informed awareness campaigns would have a negative impact on public reassurance by increasing fear

Reassurance Policing and Signal Crimes

A reassurance function for policing was first considered by American psychologist Charles Bahn (1974: 338) as “feelings of safety that a citizen experiences when he knows that a police officer or patrol car is nearby.” This idea was taken forward in Britain by Martin Innes and colleagues in the early 2000s through the development of a signal crimes perspective. At this time, British policing implemented a National Reassurance Policing Programme (NRPP) where local policing priorities were decided through consultation with local communities. The impact of reassurance policing has since spread and the approach has also been considered in Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden. In this entry, the background to reassurance policing is considered with particular reference to the work of Charles Bahn and Martin Innes and colleagues. The development of a policy of reassurance policing in Britain is also examined. The successes and limitations of the approach are considered and three main issues identified: that reassurance needs to be a consideration for all policing; that increases in visible patrol need to be questioned (especially at a time of budget restraint); and that reassurance policing has the potential to be a model of democratic policing, but only if consultation is truly inclusive, for instance, including those that have been victimized and groups that have been targets of police activity such as young people, the homeless, and other minority and marginalized groups

An exploratory randomised controlled trial of a premises-level intervention to reduce alcohol-related harm including violence in the United Kingdom

<b>Background</b><p></p> To assess the feasibility of a randomised controlled trial of a licensed premises intervention to reduce severe intoxication and disorder; to establish effect sizes and identify appropriate approaches to the development and maintenance of a rigorous research design and intervention implementation.<p></p> <b>Methods</b><p></p> An exploratory two-armed parallel randomised controlled trial with a nested process evaluation. An audit of risk factors and a tailored action plan for high risk premises, with three month follow up audit and feedback. Thirty-two premises that had experienced at least one assault in the year prior to the intervention were recruited, match paired and randomly allocated to control or intervention group. Police violence data and data from a street survey of study premises’ customers, including measures of breath alcohol concentration and surveyor rated customer intoxication, were used to assess effect sizes for a future definitive trial. A nested process evaluation explored implementation barriers and the fidelity of the intervention with key stakeholders and senior staff in intervention premises using semi-structured interviews.<p></p> <b>Results</b><p></p> The process evaluation indicated implementation barriers and low fidelity, with a reluctance to implement the intervention and to submit to a formal risk audit. Power calculations suggest the intervention effect on violence and subjective intoxication would be raised to significance with a study size of 517 premises.<p></p> <b>Conclusions</b><p></p> It is methodologically feasible to conduct randomised controlled trials where licensed premises are the unit of allocation. However, lack of enthusiasm in senior premises staff indicates the need for intervention enforcement, rather than voluntary agreements, and on-going strategies to promote sustainability

A Dose-Dependent Relationship between Exposure to a Street-Based Drug Scene and Health-Related Harms among People Who Use Injection Drugs

While the community impacts of drug-related street disorder have been well described, lesser attention has been given to the potential health and social implications of drug scene exposure on street-involved people who use illicit drugs. Therefore, we sought to assess the impacts of exposure to a street-based drug scene among injection drug users (IDU) in a Canadian setting. Data were derived from a prospective cohort study known as the Vancouver Injection Drug Users Study. Four categories of drug scene exposure were defined based on the numbers of hours spent on the street each day. Three generalized estimating equation (GEE) logistic regression models were constructed to identify factors associated with varying levels of drug scene exposure (2–6, 6–15, over 15 hours) during the period of December 2005 to March 2009. Among our sample of 1,486 IDU, at baseline, a total of 314 (21%) fit the criteria for high drug scene exposure (>15 hours per day). In multivariate GEE analysis, factors significantly and independently associated with high exposure included: unstable housing (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = 9.50; 95% confidence interval [CI], 6.36–14.20); daily crack use (AOR = 2.70; 95% CI, 2.07–3.52); encounters with police (AOR = 2.11; 95% CI, 1.62–2.75); and being a victim of violence (AOR = 1.49; 95 % CI, 1.14–1.95). Regular employment (AOR = 0.50; 95% CI, 0.38–0.65), and engagement with addiction treatment (AOR = 0.58; 95% CI, 0.45–0.75) were negatively associated with high exposure. Our findings indicate that drug scene exposure is associated with markers of vulnerability and higher intensity addiction. Intensity of drug scene exposure was associated with indicators of vulnerability to harm in a dose-dependent fashion. These findings highlight opportunities for policy interventions to address exposure to street disorder in the areas of employment, housing, and addiction treatment