NCJ Number
105529
Journal
Police Journal Volume: 60 Issue: 1 Dated: (January-March 1987) Pages: 48-57
Date Published
1987
Length
10 pages
Annotation
The recent growth of private security and community crime prevention programs has changed some of the fundamental duties of police organizations and produced major changes in the overall administration of crime control.
Abstract
In the early years of police professionalization, private security was denigrated by public police agencies. As private security has upgraded its training and carved out a useful crime control function, public police agencies have accepted private police as a valuable tool in crime control. Public and private police continue to negotiate over territory, regulation, and control issues, but more as companions than adversaries in crime control. Citizen crime prevention groups may well represent the largest number of persons involved in crime control. In an effort to guide this crime control effort, police agencies have reorganized and set new priorities. A primary change has been the emergence of the police community crime prevention specialist, who both motivates citizens to undertake self-protection measures and ensures that the public police retain ownership of the crime problem. An appropriate theoretical perspective of the relationships among the public police, private police, and citizen crime prevention efforts is the public administration concepts of either privatization or coproduction. Privatization is the use of private resources to accomplish public goals, and coproduction is the use of a number of components to produce various elements of a single product. 15 references.