Community Policing: Is It Changing the Basic Functions of Policing? Findings From a Longitudinal Study of 200+ Municipal Police Agencies

• NCJ Number: 191752
• Journal: Journal of Criminal Justice Volume: 29 Issue: 5 Dated: September/October 2001 Pages: 365-377
• Author(s): Jihong Zhao; Nicholas P. Lovrich; T. Hank Robinson
• Date Published: 2001
• Length: 13 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Survey
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This article examines change in the organizational priorities of the three core functions of American policing -- crime control, order maintenance, and service provision -- in an era of community policing.

Abstract

The nature of contemporary organizational change in policing is analyzed by using panel data from national surveys of over 200 municipal police departments conducted in 1993 and 1996. The dependent variables in the analysis reflect the level of priority assigned to core area police functions, as measured through responses to Wilson's (1968) list of 16 police activities that reflect the crime control, order maintenance, and service provision functions. A four-point scale that varied from very low priority to high priority was used in the police chief survey to obtain priority ratings on each of the 16 items. Three independent variables were used to test for the effects of a number of environmental and organizational conditions on the prioritization of police functions among these municipal police agencies. The first variable of interest was change in rate of serious crime reported to the police. The second independent variable of interest was the extent of adoption of community-oriented police (COP) programs. The third independent variable of interest concerned a key organizational resource that enables an agency to implement community policing, i.e., the extent of increase in the number of commissioned officers. Two competing perspectives, contingency theory and institutional theory, were tested for their ability to account for survey findings. The primary findings indicate that police core function priorities have remained largely unchanged during this period. Rather than representing a systematic adaptation to a changing environment, in many police agencies COP apparently represents a method of strategic buffering of a largely unaltered core police operation reflective of the professional model. 5 tables, 6 notes, and 68 references