Law enforcement is a challenging and necessary social undertaking. Moreover, the political language of the western world has become increasingly polarized. As “us against them” becomes prevalent in public discourse, it reintroduces the west to phrases such as; ‘the war on...’ President Richard Nixon used war language in June 1971 when he introduced the ‘war on drugs’ [1]. Nevertheless, policing...

From a police chief's perspective, the drug problem presents distinguishable threats to community security. Most pressing is the violence associated with street-level drug dealingThis is one in a series of reports originally developed with some of the leading figures in American policing during their periodic meetings at Hanard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. The reports are ...

R oanoke, Virginia is a city with a population of approximately 99,000 and a police force of 248 sworn officers at full staffing. In 1991, the Roanoke Police Department began its community policing effort with a small specialized unit, COPE (Community Oriented Policing Effort). This program began with eight officers and one sergeant and was partially funded by the Roanoke Redevelopment and Hous...

Policing, like all professions, learns from experience. It follows, then, that as modem police executives search for more effective strategies of policing, they will be guided by the lessons of police history. The difficulty is that police history is incoherent, its lessons hard to read. After all, that history was produced by thousands of local departments pursuing their own visions and respon...

Effective policing in a democratic society must balance the sometime conflicting objectives of public safety and community trust. This paper uses a formal model of optimal policing to explore how society might reasonably resolve the tension between these two objectives as well as evaluate disparate racial impacts. We do so by considering the social benefits and costs of confrontational types of...

There have been calls for research evidence to be drawn into police practice. We examine evidence-based practice in the policing and crime reduction agenda, drawing on the experience of implementing problem-oriented policing in the UK and beyond. We suggest that that the development of such an agenda has been hampered by certain factors. Evidence is not routinely used by police officers (or par...

Whether viewed from the desk of a police chief, a city mayor, or a citizen in a deprived, high-crime community, maintaining the balance between police effectiveness and fair policing is complicated and difficult to achieve, let alone to sustain over the long term. However, it is at the heart of good policing, for when policing goes out of that balance—as happened in Brixton, London in the 1970s...

This paper examines the influence of officers' and supervisors' attitudes and priorities toward community policing and problem solving over the time officers spend conducting problem-solving activities. Analyzing data collected for the Project on Policing Neighborhoods, a multi-method study of police patrol in two police departments, results show that officers' perceptions of their supervisors'...

In insect societies, worker policing controls genetic conflicts between individuals and increases colony efficiency. However, disentangling relatedness from colony-level effects is usually impossible. We studied policing in the parthenogenetic ant Cerapachys biroi, where genetic conflicts are absent due to clonality and reproduction is synchronized through stereotyped colony cycles. We show tha...

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 commu...