Police Responses to Community Policing

good deal of analysis has been done on organisational change within police bureaucracies and on operational changes in the streets. The link between these two processes of change in the transition to a community policing model needs to be better understood. Of course, management style and work culture are notoriously difficult to measure. It seems a reasonable assumption, however, that if community policing depends for its success on an increased flow of information between police and the rest of the community, then an increased flow of information among police is also necessary. Some interesting and important evidence of this need for more information is provided by serving police officers studying at tertiary level. This paper analyses a set of assignments on the topic of community policing. All of them were written by police undertaking their second year of part-time study for a Bachelor of Social Science (Policing Studies) Degree offered as part of the external studies program from the Riverina Campus of Charles Sturt University (CSU). They reveal complex attitudes to the theory of community policing and its practice in Australia. On the other hand there is a general consensus that the level of communication about the goals and objectives of community policing needs to be improved within their police organisation. Indeed this apparent lack of communication may be one of the reasons why many of the essays submitted for this particular assignment have a confessional tone. Police are keen to talk with a relatively disinterested third party, someone outside either their organisation or their immediate community, about their personal initiatives and the broader goals of policing. The assignment in question was the last of three for a subject entitled 'Government and Police', one of the politics subjects in the Policing Studies Course. Like a number of other such courses being offered by Australian tertiary institutions, CSU's course concentrates on sociology, psychology and politics, the three areas identified in documents such as the Lusher Report as essential to police education (Bradley & Cioccarelli 1989). 'Government and Police', as the second subject in the public policy strand of the course, combines a study of individual and organisational ethics with analysis of the role of police in the broader political process. Its concerns are thus best described as political sociology. Students of the subject generally take the opportunity to illustrate particular points with their own experiences. Not surprisingly, these provide ample evidence …