NCJ Number
99266
Date Published
1985
Length
8 pages
Annotation
This paper suggests a strategy for improving American policing, shows how the current dysfunctions of police executives inhibit the attainment of this strategy, and notes the uses and limits of the professionalization of police executives.
Abstract
The author's diagnosis of American policing is based on the assumptions that (1) more can be gained by preventive than reactive intervention, (2) police must address communitywide needs and not just service calls, (3) an understanding of social and relational dynamics is essential to policing, and (4) police actions must be governed by a scientific body of knowledge. Based on these assumptions, current police management fails by focusing on service calls and making little effort to collect data on the communitites served. The author's proposed police strategy emphasizes proactive policing that involves frequent contact with citizens and business to provide crime-prevention information and obtain information from citizens on crime-control problems. Police executives generally continue traditional policing strategies, because the public continues to measure effective policing by rapid response to service calls and crime clearance rates rather than by crime prevention. This conservative police management is not likely to change except under nationwide peer pressure that measures the professional effectiveness of police executives by their ability to move a department and a community toward a proactive policing strategy. Such a management style, however, depends on the art of statesmanship, which requires police chiefs to lead communities into new ways of thinking about policing rather than simply complying with existing public stereotypes of policing. Two notes are provided.