How does the greater emphasis on community-oriented policing impact traditional police training?

The era of community and problem-oriented policing arose from what had become a consistently negative critique of traditional policing. Traditional policing was seen as flawed; preventive patrol didn’t work, follow-up criminal investigations lacked impact, crime, especially violent crime, was rising, and the police were estranged from their social communities. Policing was in crisis—it lacked efficiency, effectiveness, and context.

Community policing arose from the perceived need to balance the role of the police in pursuit of a broader range of community-based outcomes. Common ”core” elements of community policing programs include a redefinition of the police role to increase crime prevention activities, greater reciprocity in police and community relations, area decentralization of police services and command, and some form of civilianization (Skolnick and Bayley 1986).

In adopting community policing the police have increasingly focused on a broad array of outcomes, including issues such as public safety, crime, fear of crime, and community quality of life. Moreover, whereas under traditional norms of policing the police were singularly responsible for crime control, under community and later problem-oriented policing (POP), communities and other public and private organizations came to be viewed as significant participants in shaping police objectives and interventions.

Ideas such as building and sustaining community partnerships to work with the police on matters of neighborhood crime and disorder underlie much of the community policing agenda. Building community-based capacities for crime prevention and victim assistance while reconnecting the police with their communities, particularly minority communities, required that the police become ”invested” in neighborhoods (Mastrofski, Worden, and Snipes 1995). Partnerships between the police and external others were also a dominant value in the community-oriented policing (COP) movement (see Skolnick and Bayley 1986). To be effective, the police and the community must coproduce safety in neighborhoods, according to this view.

Community policing philosophies and programs also emphasized an ”environmental openness,” linking informal (community-based) and formal (police-based) social control. To do all of this, of course, requires a very different set of police officer skills, most especially communication, conflict resolution, and interaction skills.

From the perspective of the police organization and service delivery system, community policing was seen as a way of making police agencies less bureaucratic, specialized, and hierarchical, and police officers are seen as generalists, not specialists. Decentralized management and service delivery were cornerstones of the community policing movement, suggesting that the structure of traditional policing greatly inhibited the capacity of the police to deliver effective and efficient services to the public.

Allied to community policing, problem-oriented policing first and foremost sought to provide the police with better methodologies for addressing crime and disorder problems (Goldstein 1990). Applying a version of the scientific method—scanning the environment for problems, analyzing the nature and source of the problem, developing and implementing policy and community interventions to address the problem, and then evaluating the impact of the programs implemented—formed the basis of problem solving. Under the norms of problem-oriented policing, the police were to shift from their reactive mode of responding to calls for service to once emphasizing a proactive, analytic approach. Whereas community-oriented policing provided a broader vision of the police role in society, problem solving provided a set of “tools” to work with in that broader context.

Community and Problem-Oriented Policing Interventions

To understand what was intended of community and problem-oriented policing, it is important to see these efforts as a series of interventions that affect different things. In theory, these interventions occur at several levels. They impact communities, police organizations, and the nature of police work, including police officer attachment to community and crime prevention values and to a broader set of community service ideals.

At the environmental level, community and problem-oriented policing interventions sought to engage the police and the community in the coproduction of public safety. The police were to create linkages with external groups and organizations, and they were expected to focus on community capacity building and crime prevention. By mobilizing communities and focusing on discrete and identifiable crime, disorder, and fear problems, it was anticipated that communities could become more crime resistant. The police efforts were aimed at stabilizing neighborhoods, increasing neighborhood bonds and communication, increasing the capacity of the neighborhood to mediate in conflict situations, and ultimately strengthening neighborhood cohesion. Under problem solving, the police, with community partners, were to address visible and persistent crime and disorder problems occurring in neighborhoods.

At the organizational level, community and problem-oriented policing interventions were seen as affecting several police department issues. First, these interventions were to change the way in which the department converts inputs to outputs. This includes how (or if) the department currently defines and solves problems and how it values what it produces. Community policing interventions are also associated with affecting the department’s structure, culture, and human resource systems including the mechanisms for selecting, training, rewarding, and socializing police officers. At the work group level, community and problem-oriented policing were meant to improve interpersonal communications and information sharing within and outside the agency while at the same time clarifying new and more analytic tasks for police officers and investigators.

At the individual level, changes implied by community and problem-oriented policing were often focused on police officer effectiveness, primarily through the mechanism of problem solving. Police officer performance, job satisfaction, and job attachment were thought to increase, given that officers were given more to do and more control over what they did. Lastly, the role of the police officer was to broaden under community and problem-oriented policing. Such changes anticipated in the police role included greater officer autonomy in decision making, job enrichment and job enlargement, increased feedback to officers regarding their community and problem-focused activities, and increases in the depth and range of skills officers are trained for and employ as part of their community and problem-oriented policing methodology.

The Impacts of Change

Environmental or Community Effects

Community policing has sought from its beginning to engage the community in matters of public safety while building and strengthening the capacity of communities to resist crime. For example, the Department of Justice’s Weed and Seed Program focused on creating a visible and active police presence to impact distressed neighborhoods (weeding), as well as capacity building (seeding) in these same neighborhoods to sustain gains once they were achieved (see Roehl et al. 1995). More limited or focused crime interventions, such as the Boston Gun Project (see Kennedy 1998), also pursued dual strategies. In the case of the Boston project, the first strategy sought to identify youth who were likely to use guns to resolve disputes while also mobilizing government and community social institutions to address this serious and lethal community problem on several different fronts and in a coordinated and systematic manner. Programs such as Town Watch are also seen as community capacity building efforts, often linked to increasing surveillance over public places (Rosen-baum 1986, 1988; Rosenbaum, Lurigio, and Davis 1998).

In an assessment of the community impacts of community and problem-oriented policing, Cordner (1998) suggests that the evidence is generally mixed. Some studies suggest declines in crime, fear, disorder, and calls for service. However, given design and research limitations identified more than a decade ago by Taylor (1988), much of the research remains difficult to interpret and generalize. There are, however, some promising findings upon which more rigorous assessments can be made in the future.

The cumulative findings of the fear reduction and foot patrol programs of the early 1980s suggested that changes in police strategy might have had different effects on communities. In the Houston and Newark studies, for example, there were indeed modest crime effects, although these programs appeared to influence community perceptions and fear of crime more than they did crime itself.

Neighborhood impacts associated with community and problem-oriented policing are varied and complex. They included resident perceptions of safety, fear of crime, use of public places, actual victimization, calls for service to the police, reported crime, self-protection measures, and community cohesion, to name a few. Given the range and complexity of outcome measures associated with community policing, it is often difficult to make comparisons across sites.

Skogan (1994), in an assessment of community policing impacts on neighborhood residents, examined six programs, conducted in Oakland, California; Birmingham, Alabama; Baltimore, Maryland; Madison, Wisconsin; Houston, Texas; and Newark, New Jersey. In assessing these programs Skogan (1994) assessed their effects on fear of crime, disorder, victimization, the quality of police services, and drug availability. His findings suggest that fear of crime was most affected by these interventions, and that it generally went down in five of the six sites. Disorder, by contrast, declined in three of the six sites, while victimization went down in half of the sites as well.

In 1993, the Chicago Police Department launched a community policing program called CAPS—Chicago’s Alternative Policing Strategy. The program has been assessed by Skogan and his colleagues for several years (see Skogan et al. 1995 and Skogan and Hartnett 1997). A recent assessment of community policing impacts on neighborhoods in Chicago conducted by Skogan and Hartnett (1997) suggested that these efforts indeed had a significant impact on community problems and the quality of community life.

Police Organization Effects

One of the promises of community policing is that it would make police agencies kinder and gentler, both to their constituents and to their employees. Criticisms of the police bureaucracy, particularly under the traditional model of policing, are that it has alienated both the producers and consumers of police services. Such alienation creates great tension between the police and those policed.

On the philosophical level it is clear that many police agencies have adopted the language and symbolism of community and problem-oriented policing. In a study of the broadening of the police domain Zhao, Thurman, and Lovrich (1995) found that police organizations across America have been broadening their role over several years. In addition, they found that police agencies implementing community policing had also broadened the technologies they used, the populations they served, and the range of services they provided.

Police agencies throughout the United States have been adopting models of organization and training that bode well for community and problem-oriented policing. Zhao and his colleagues (1995) identified three factors around which organizational reform in policing is occurring. The first factor is focused on improving police officer performance skills. The second factor seeks to improve middle management within police agencies. And the third factor is associated with implementing COP programs in culturally diverse communities with the intent of improving police and citizen interaction and community relations.

The reform of police agencies along the lines of community and problem-oriented policing has not been obstacle free. Zhao and his colleagues (1995) identified several impediments to organizational change under the norms of community and problem-oriented policing. They include resistance from middle managers and line officers, internal confusion as to the operational definition of COP, concerns that COP might be “soft on crime,” lack of police officer training, and resistance from police unions.

Similarly, problems exist in the external environment’s adoption of COP as an operating strategy for the police. Impediments identified by Zhao and his colleagues (1995) include community concerns about “fighting” crime, pressure for immediate results, and lack of support from other government agencies. Finally, transition problems in moving from traditional to community policing are largely centered on the need to balance community policing patrol strategies (foot and bike patrols, community ministations, and ”park and walk” programs) with rapid response, particularly to potentially violent crime. These tensions continue to plague the adoption of community and problem-oriented policing in American police departments, although they are not insurmountable.

Private Changing Police Work

At both the organizational and individual levels, problem solving is said to be reshaping the intelligence of the police. This occurs in a process that involves scanning the environment and then defining problems, analyzing the causes and consequences of these problems, designing and implementing appropriate responses, and assessing the impact of interventions (Eck and Spelman 1987; Goldstein 1990).

Unfortunately, in a critique of problem solving, Clarke (1998, 315-27) suggested that much of what occurs under the label of problem solving is shallow, unanalytic, and largely ineffective. As Clarke suggests, the police fail in most of the problem-solving steps. During scanning, the police often fail to clearly specify the problem they seek to address. This creates considerable variance in what the police think they are addressing. Analysis of problems, according to Clarke (1998, 318), is also quite rudimentary: ”[D]uring an investigation of calls for service or crime reports, they rarely identify patterns about how often or when a crime is occurring, or about where the problem is concentrated. They also make few attempts to disaggregate statistics to determine the precise nature of the problem.”

When it comes to responses, Clarke suggests that much of what falls under the guise of community and problem-oriented policing is really traditional police tactics such as crackdowns, streets sweeps, and the use of arrest, often masked as community and/or problem-solving interventions. These tactics may be being applied to poorly defined and analyzed problems. Finally, Clarke argues that the most unused aspect of problem solving is the assessment of results.

Currently, many police departments across America have adopted a ”framework” for response that includes elements of problem solving, including COMPSTAT (Silverman 1995) and hot spot analysis (Sherman, Gartin, and Buer-ger 1989; Sherman and Weisburd 1995; Weisburd and Green 1995). This framework is yet evolving, and with support and cross communication among police agencies, the ”new technology” of policing will continue to emerge.

Impacts on Work Groups and Officers

Intended outcomes of community and problem-oriented policing are that police officers will (1) do their jobs differently,

(2) identify with role changes associated with these new styles of policing, and

(3) improve their attachment to work, the police profession, their departments, and one another—in short, improve job satisfaction.

In a few of the projects where there is community-focused data, such as the one conducted in Miami (Alpert and Dunham 1988), it is clear that police sensitivity to community norms and conversance with community expectations is both a longstanding complaint in minority communities and an occupational prerequisite if the police are to become truly ”community oriented.” In San Diego, a program to actively involve police officers in ”understanding” the communities they policed resulted in positive police officer attitudinal changes (Boydstun and Sherry 1975). In Baltimore County, a problem-oriented approach to policing resulted in improved police officer job satisfaction and strengthening of the officers’ orientation toward resolving community problems (Hayslip and Cordner 1987). In Philadelphia, a community-police educational program focused on communications and police-community problem solving demonstrated positive attitudinal results among participating police officers (Decker 1989).

In Houston and in Newark, research conducted through the Police Foundation (see Skogan 1990 and Skolnick and Bayley 1986) suggested that the community improved their evaluation of police performance, including the quality of interaction with the police, with the advent of programs that sought to bring the community and police closer together, after years of conflict and animosity. In Houston this was brought about by creating community stations where community response teams attempted to mobilize and engage the community on matters of crime and disorder. In Newark the police response was to employ more traditional police methods (saturation patrol and more aggressive street enforcement tactics), but to do so with the focus of improving community ”quality of life” by reducing the ”signs of crime” in neighborhoods—unruly behavior and abandoned property (typically automobiles).

In New York City a program called the Community Patrol Officer Program (CPOP) sought to introduce a form of community policing to that city. CPOP officers were given responsibility for a wide variety of community and problem-solving activities. They were to mobilize communities and to identify and solve community problems (see Farrell 1988 and Weisburd and McElroy 1988).

While the initial assessment of this program focused on field supervisors and the adjustments they had to make to oversee CPOP officers, subsequent analyses of the CPOP program (McElroy, Cosgrove, and Sadd 1993) suggested that there were significant changes in attitudes for CPOP officers participating in the program, particularly in those attitudes toward the community and toward being a police officer. Here, officers in the CPOP program expressed more favorable attitudes toward the community and toward their identity with their jobs following their participation in the program. Interestingly, these same officers grew more critical of their department during the same time period.

In an assessment of role adaptation and job satisfaction among police officers in Joliet, Illinois, Rosenbaum and his colleagues (1994, 331-42) compared officers in this department who were part of a neighborhood-oriented policing (NOP) program with officers from a neighboring community without such a program. NOP officers reported more favorable attitudes toward community policing, were more likely to report that their jobs had broadened, and perceived an increase in job autonomy. They also reported higher job satisfaction and reported higher confidence in their ability to solve problems.

In a study of police officer adaptation to community and problem-oriented policing in Chicago, Skogan and Hartnett (1997) found ”evidence of modest opinion shifts” in police officers who participated in the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) program. These modest changes were reflected in CAPS officers becoming more optimistic about their interventions being thought effective in regard to traditional police concerns (for example, crime reduction), their ability to actually solve problems, the impact of the program on police autonomy, and their satisfaction with the Chicago Police Department. Interestingly, this study also found that the CAPS program had a wider association with general improvements in police attitudes toward beliefs that the program was impacting communities and that community policing concepts were indeed viable as a policing strategy in Chicago.

The National Institute of Justice funded a collaborative research project in 1997 to measure the impact of the COPS AHEAD program in Philadelphia.The Philadelphia study revealed that rookie COPS AHEAD officers were better prepared to ”do” community policing, as evidenced by their higher scores on academy training scales for problem solving and dealing with diversity and conflict. Both rookie and veteran COPS AHEAD officers and the comparison group of community policing officers reported having stronger orientations toward problem solving and community policing than their motorized counterparts. COPS AHEAD rookies were more satisfied with work on their present job, as compared to other officers, and COPS AHEAD and motorized rookies were more satisfied with their coworkers, as compared to veteran officers. COPS AHEAD rookies had higher scores, indicating greater overall job satisfaction, as compared to other officers.

Collectively, then, police officer affective attachments to, and understanding of, the community have been enhanced in certain cities, as have officer role definitions as a result of police and community programs. These findings are indeed encouraging in that they suggest that police attitudes can be shaped toward the values and practices envisioned in community and problem-oriented policing.

Conclusions

Community and problem-oriented policing have shaped American law enforcement in important ways during the past twenty years or so. Generally speaking, the police have broadened their interactions with the public, increased attention to neighborhood crime and disorder problems, and better prepared officers for the new roles anticipated of them. Such changes have not been without their problems, but from the perspective of changing institutions, COP and POP have made some inroads in shaping policing for the twenty-first century.

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