NCJ Number
194827
Journal
The British Journal of Criminology Volume: 42 Issue: 1 Dated: Winter 2002 Pages: 147-163
Date Published
2002
Length
17 pages
Annotation
This paper considers two of the most generally applied analytic perspectives in the field of police study in the context of their application to community policing.
Abstract
The author considers some trends in analytic work on policing, drawing on research in Britain and the United States. This is not a comprehensive review of theory in the field of police studies, nor is it a review of the application of the general theories of criminology in the field of policing. Rather, it is an attempt to derive a conceptual framework for theorizing community policing from the debate in general social theory over the articulation of "micro" and "macro" social phenomena, drawing on general systems theory and its later variant in structuration theory. This is done by using a bipolar distinction between "structure" and "action" in policing. The author suggests there has been a convergence between these approaches. He distinguishes between an "analytic perspective" and a "theory" and assigns the structure and action approaches to the former category. The discussion then considers whether theory can help to resolve a "dead end" in research on community policing, which results from the dominant means of theorizing the convergence between structural and action-oriented perspectives. Specifically, the author critiques the theoretical value of Giddens' structuration theory and suggests an alternative formulation. Structuration theory views the individual as both an agent producing action and as the subject of action by others. The theory is thus an attempt to provide the conceptual means of analyzing reflexively organized action and institutional constraint. Giddens' insistence on simultaneity in the duality of structure, so that "social structures are both constituted by human agency and yet at the same time are the medium of their constitution" makes for an empirically inaccessible representation. The author outlines an approach that views policing as a system. One characteristic of systems is that change in one part has effects on other parts to which it is only indirectly connected. Research should attend to these connections that are exposed in the interrelation of action and structure. 56 references