The inchoate nature of community policing: Examining the differences between community and traditional police officers.

摘要

Police departments across America have adopted a community or problem oriented policing philosophy over the past twenty years. During the 1960's and 1970's, problems such as social upheaval, rising crime, officer discretion issues, and research questioning the practices of the reform era propelled the search for alternative philosophies of policing. Goldstein's problem oriented policing and Wilson and Kelling's Broken Windows conceptual framework provided alternative approaches for conducting police work. However, community policing has not been implemented wholesale: Most departments have some officers assigned to community policing roles while the majority of officers continue to serve in reactive, traditional motorized patrol assignments. Thus many police departments simultaneously field officers with two distinct approaches to policing: Reactive and Proactive. The community policing literature suggests conflict exists concerning role adoption and job enactment between these two groups of police officers. The Work Redesign theoretical framework, focusing on job satisfaction, has been used as a conceptual basis to explain officer functioning in both community policing and traditional motorized policing settings. Zhao, Thurman and He (1999) applied this approach to officers in traditional motorized patrol while Greene (1989) utilized this framework with officers in community policing assignments. This research links the theoretical framework of those two studies through an exploratory, quasi-experimental design involving officers assigned to community policing, COPS AHEAD roles and officers in traditional motorized patrol roles. The research questions concern the impact of assignment (to a community policing program or to traditional motorized patrol) and experience on the mediating variable of job satisfaction, and the subsequent impact on outcome variables such as performance, time allocation, police style, and interaction with the public. Findings indicate that while satisfaction, perception of impact, information usage, activity, and policing style differences exist between community policing officers and officers assigned to traditional motorized patrol, key similarities are also present. These include endorsement of a traditional style of law enforcement and traditional law enforcement activity.