| During the past few decades, the use of community policing has proliferated throughout American policing. Despite numerous case studies there is little empirical evidence as to the determinants of the variation in community policing implementation. Using open-systems theories (i.e., contingency and institutional theories), I develop and test a structural model that not only assesses the individual and relative effects of the organizational context, organizational structure, and organizational commitment on community policing implementation, but also explores the relationships among these various determinants. I assess this model via structural equation modeling. This research also utilizes confirmatory factor analyses to improve the measurement of many of the constructs of interest, including community policing implementation.;To form and test the measurement and structural models, I compiled data from the 1997 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics survey, 1990 U.S. Decennial Census, organizational surveys conducted Edward Maguire and William King, and Office of Community-Oriented Policing Services. Merging this data created a sample of 401 large, municipal police organizations that comprises approximately 83 percent of the total number of such agencies in the U.S. The standardized effects of the structural model illustrate that organizational commitment has the largest influence on community policing implementation, followed by formalization, geographic region, income heterogeneity of the community, the number of functional units in the police organization, police chief turnover, population mobility, centralization within the police organization, and funding incentive (several other elements of the organizational context and organizational structure had no direct statistical relationship with the implementation of community policing). These determinants explain about 28 percent of the variation in community policing implementation. Several of the determinants also exhibit indirect relationships with community policing implementation. The existence of these various relationships implies that the specification of direct or total effects only in a model of community policing implementation oversimplifies the complexity of the determinants in terms of their interrelatedness and ignores their indirect effect on community policing implementation. Overall, the results suggest that both the task and institutional environments are important for understanding the form of function of large, municipal police organizations. |
