NCJ Number
203042
Date Published
2002
Length
8 pages
Annotation
This article discusses the changing role of police in society and how community policing is significant in this change.
Abstract
Anglo-American community policing is widely spread throughout the Western world in police organizations. There is a need to look behind the Anglo-American facade of community policing. Contextual and ethnocentric character of community policing is an important factor in evaluations of significance and success of the policy and its implementation. Community policing needs to be understood in terms of local exigencies. The aim of local networking is to organize partnerships and create community security policies that try to link the immediate situational measures to prevent crime with more strategic policies to deal with the root causes of criminality. The relationship between the adopted community policing policy and its effects and impact on the role of police in each society depends mainly on social and political conditions. Community policing has been adopted for clear political reasons to establish some accountability and trust, and to build local democracy by democratizing policing. In some cases the major focus is crime control, and the broader significance can be found somewhere between these dimensions. There has not been much research about policing networks and partnerships yet. Networking is becoming a super-ideology that bridges local, national, transnational, and virtual levels of analysis. Networking politicizes local policing. Crime prevention and security are now central political and popular concern and security strategies pervading the routines of everyday life. 2 footnotes, 21 references