Technology in policing: Experiences,obstacles and police needs

Increasing efforts are made by police forces all over the world to optimize the use of technology in policing and remove any obstacles as new and existing technologies provide new opportunities for law enforcement, criminal investigation and prosecution. This contribution describes results of research on which technologies are currently used at police forces and other criminal investigation organizations in the Netherlands, their experiences with these technologies and their needs and preferences in this regard. For existing opportunities the prevalence and satisfaction of several technologies in policing, including wiretapping, fingerprints, DNA research, database coupling, data mining and profiling, camera surveillance and network analyses were investigated. For new opportunities the most promising technologies (i.e., promising according to the police forces) were mapped. Furthermore, an inventory was made of the legal, technological and organizational obstacles police forces encounter when using different technologies for purposes like law enforcement, criminal investigation and prosecution.     

Linking confidence in the police with the performance of the police: Community policing can make a difference

The existing literature of community policing was silent on the linkage between police performance and confidence in the police. This study argued that broader measures of police performance were an inevitable result of the shift from the traditional model of police to community policing. Consequently, confidence in the police could be used profitably by police management as one alternative measure of officers’ effectiveness. Data from a northwest city were used to find out the sources of confidence in the police. The results indicated that volunteers involved in community crime prevention programs showed higher confidence in the police and informal collective security bred confidence in the police. Furthermore, victimization and traffic tickets reduced confidence in the police. These results and their implications for police management are discussed within the limitation of data.     

Context manipulation in police interviews: a field experiment

Journal of Experimental Criminology - Recent writing and research on interrogation has highlighted the potential importance of the physical context in which the interview takes place. Whereas...     

Community policing,loose coupling,and sensemaking in American police agencies

This study examines the community policing movement in the United States using two concepts from organization theory—loose coupling and sensemaking—to frame the analysis and discussion. In particular, we focus on the degree of coupling between police agencies' general and specific community policing claims. Because community policing may be considered a fairly ambiguous (or broad) reform movement, police agencies must engage in interpretive processes to define, make sense of, and enact it at the local level. While we did not observe these interpretive processes, our analyses enable us to observe the products of these processes.     

The police and crime control: Effectiveness,community policing,and legal change

Conclusion Current research on the level of police resources, patrol and investigation strategies, community policing, and the likely impact of changes in the legal framework confirms the simple truth that the police capacity to influence crime has always been vastly overstated. Unfortunately, the preventive police forces that emerged in Anglo-American jurisdictions in the wake of Sir Robert Peel's new police were linked directly and for the first time to the crime rate. While there was little that they could actually do about the crime rate per se, questions of police effectiveness, resource allocation, and the adequacy of police powers have tended to be answered on the basis of such data ever since. The need now is to find different ways of measuring and evaluating police work. It may be that the major contribution of community policing is to highlight precisely this issue by shifting the focus of policing away from the crime rate and by forcing police departments, politicians, and academics to confront the real capabilities of the police and to devise methods of evaluating them and promoting them to an increasingly skeptical world.This is a revised version of a paper given at the third conference of the Society for the Reform of Criminal Law, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, March 19–23, 1989.LL.M., University of London 1968; LL.B., University of London 1967.     

Police culture,individualism, and community policing: Evidence from two police departments

According to the conventional wisdom, the police culture consists of a set of values, attitudes, and norms that are widely shared among officers, who find in the culture a way to cope with the strains of their working environment. Some research implies that the conventional wisdom is overdrawn, and recent research has begun to question it more directly. Changes in the composition (i.e., the race, sex, and education) of police personnel, as well as philosophical and organizational changes associated with community policing, could be expected to further fragment police culture and to shift the distribution of police attitudes. Here we examine variation in outlooks that, according to conventional wisdom, are part of the police culture, using survey data collected in two police departments. We also examine the relationships between these outlooks and characteristics of officers—sex, race, education, length of service, community-policing training, and community-policing specialist assignment—that are associated with the changes in policing. We find that officers' outlooks do not conform to the pattern that we would expect on the basis of conventional wisdom. We also find that the variation in officers' occupational attitudes is not patterned to a great extent by their characteristics. We conclude with directions for future research on police attitudes.     

An impact of community policing: Reported stressors, social support, and strain among police officers in a changing police department

Community-based policing requires a radically different philosophical and organizational approach from the more traditional approach to policing. Stress may be experienced during organizational change as areas of responsibility and roles are altered. This study had three primary objectives: to identify (1) the areas officers and their immediate supervisors actually consider stressful, (2) the officers' and supervisors' responses to stress, and (3) the influence of their social support systems on these responses. Data were collected from community coordinators, radio response officers, and sergeants of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina. The officers and sergeants report specific physiological responses, lack of job involvement, and propensity to leave law enforcement; all responses that are considered by the literature to be related to stress. Stressors that are both common in law enforcement in general and stressors unique to a department implementing community policing are found to be significant. Work social support does appear to affect the level of job involvement of the officers. The finding that sergeants do not appear to feel that they have work social support may be working to the detriment of their ability to cope with stress and their willingness to be involved with their job.     

Fairness, job frustration, and moral dilemmas in policing that impact police effectiveness

Issues facing police officers in their daily role as highly visible agents of the justice system include moral dilemmas, challenges, and the frustrations associated with them. They are identified and discussed. Five recommendations are offered to counteract and ameliorate these pressures.     

Civilising the police: reconceptualising the role of the state in theories of American policing

The three eras in American policing – political, reform, and community – has become the default theoretical framework within the study of criminal justice, explicitly and implicitly shaping the discourse of police studies. Despite historically informed criticisms of this three-era model, no alternative theory has been proffered as a way of critically thinking about the police. This paper draws on Norbert Elias’ civilising thesis and the role of the state as an alternative theoretical framework to explain the evolution of American policing. We argue that changes in policing are more cogently explained by assuming a long-term view of change and that the intrusion and the retreat of the state from society better captures the evolution of the police through time.     

Permanent beat assignments in association with community policing: Assessing the impact on police officers' field activity

Although the permanent assignment of police officers to their beats has long been an important goal in community policing, its utility has not been assessed empirically. Using a multiple time-series quasi-experimental design, the present study reports on an impact assessment of permanent beat assignment in conjunction with a community policing program implemented in the Philadelphia Housing Authority Police Department. Permanent beat assignment in the treatment sites led to increases in officer-initiated investigative activity (indicating greater responsibility for beats), while no such changes were observed in the comparison sites. Implications for public policy and for conducting police research in public housing are discussed; future research directions are suggested.