NCJ Number
201830
Date Published
2004
Length
27 pages
Annotation
This chapter discusses a survey on trends in police agencies’ implementation of community policing for the period of 1995 to 2000.
Abstract
A sequence of telephone surveys was conducted in the fall of 1996 and repeated in the summers of 1998 and 2000 with a probability sample of municipal and county law enforcement agencies. The sample was stratified to over-represent large agencies serving jurisdictions with populations of 50,000 or more and to under-represent small agencies serving jurisdictions with smaller populations. One module of the survey was a tactics checklist that asked respondents about the implementation status of each of the following objectives: tactics for partnership building, problem-oriented policing, crime prevention, and organizational mechanisms set up to support these goals. Results of the survey show that the average percentages of community policing practices in use by large agencies increased by statistically significant amounts between the pre-1995 period and 1998, the first 4 years of the Community Oriented Policing (COPS) program. The small agencies were using smaller percentages of all four tactics in 1995. Between 1995 and 1998, the small agencies showed statistically significant increases in their use of tactics for only two of the objectives – partnership building and supportive organizational changes. For both, the increases were smaller than for the large agencies. Although community meetings and Neighborhood Watch-type programs remained the mainstays of partnership building, two-way communication opportunities expanded through such programs as resident surveys, citizen advisory boards, and citizen police academies. There is ample evidence that the police field has accepted the viability of partnership-based problem solving and prevention strategies as relevant and useful to crime fighting. 44 citations