Building bridges: Is the architecture of community policing flawed? A policy impact analysis in 202 American cities

When thinking about the evolution of policing, it is important to consider the social, political, and organizational variables that bring about change in the law enforcement profession. The level of impact a particular major reform policy has and whether it meets the goals and objectives of intended change are of concern to legislators, planners, administrators, and citizens alike.;This dissertation will examine how police agencies have changed in lieu of the receipt of federal funds authorized by the 1994 Federal Crime Bill championed by the Clinton administration. In the first part of the dissertation an analysis of the recent history of federal funding aimed at improving law enforcement capabilities will be examined. Being the first major federal subsidy of law enforcement in recent history, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration funding program will be examined in some detail. Next, the community oriented policing (COP) movement will be analyzed by detailing the types of programs subsidized by the 1994 Crime Bill funding, their original intent, and how they were to be operationalized will be discussed. In the second section, a theoretical framework will be presented that will use empirical assessments of the number of community (or proactive) programs in place in each agency, degrees of organizational change noted in a three-year review of each department's structure as reported in the periodic Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey of police departments, the levels of economic inequality present in the jurisdictions that received COP funding, and the ethnic composition of these jurisdictions. The results reveal that many agencies that have adopted a community policing philosophy and implemented COP strategies are jurisdictions where those where income inequality is not great and racial and ethnic diversity is minimal, a result that falls far from the expressed intent of COP---namely, to improve upon the quality of life in municipalities that were experiencing high rates of crime and a decline of community cohesion over the past 20 years---factors which too often combined to cause distancing between police agencies and the communities they service.;As other scholars have found, the findings from this study suggest that change in law enforcement operations toward community policing goals is strongly related to levels of federal subsidy available, key community demographics such as the character of the distribution of income and ethnic composition, and the raw number of programs agencies characterize as being "community oriented" in philosophy. The findings reported here also suggest that continued change in policing toward community policing goals very likely will be more effectively facilitated by subsidies for more officers than by the advocacy of additional proactive policing programs.