Kappeler: Community Policing, 6th Edition


Case Studies with Questions and Answers

Chapter 02: A History of Communities and Policing

You are the police chief of a large urban police department. The mayor has asked you to meet with him to discuss recent spikes in crimes in your community. The mayor indicates that his office has been bombarded with complaints from citizens about crime in the community including increased homicides and violent crimes, gang and drug activity, prostitution, and vandalism. He wants to know what your department is doing to address the issues. You indicate that you have increased patrol in high crime areas, but this has not resulted in a significant reduction in crime.

You suggest that maybe the solution to the problem is to implement a community policing model. The mayor is hesitant because he is not familiar with community policing. He asks you to form a task force of people to educate him and the city commissioners about community policing. He asks you to include a brief history of community policing.

Questions

  1. What were some of the initial attempts by police to reach the community?
  2. Correct Answer

    The police reform movement launched by Vollmer in the 1920s, which took hold in the 1930s, seemed to offer the promise that society was on the brink of solving the riddle of crime. Police departments were now increasingly insulated from the political pressures that had spawned a variety of abuses, and they were organized according to the principles of scientific management theory, which promised increased efficiency and effectiveness. Over time, educated and highly trained officers roamed the streets in new squad cars that gave them the mobility to swoop down quickly on problems. As home telephones became increasingly affordable, it seemed there would be no way crooks could escape the ever-tightening net of police technology. The used of new tactics and technology ushered in the "professionalization" of the police.

    The professionalization movement, however, had its problems. As Jack Greene (2000:305) notes, the police were "isolated from the publics they serve, relied on personal as opposed to constitutional authority, and lacked the communal attachments necessary for effective citizen-police interaction. Contributing to the communal isolation of the American police has been a shift in organizational strategy emphasized throughout most of the twentieth century. This shift to professionalize the police generally separated these professionals from their clients, often in profound ways." By the 1950s, blemishes had begun to appear in that model of perfection. Many police departments found themselves the target of mounting complaints. Many accusations seemed relatively trivial-perhaps the officer appeared indifferent to the caller's seemingly petty concerns such as broken streetlights or barking dogs. Often the charges were serious and well founded, such as minorities' accusations of police harassment and brutality.

    While concern about the isolation of the police from their constituency had not reached crisis proportions, the increasing pressure to find a way to build bridges to the community fostered interest in Police-Community Relations (PCR) efforts. The best PCR programs represented sincere efforts to reach out and address a host of community concerns. The worst PCR programs were half-hearted, understaffed, and underfunded attempts to blunt public criticism without making any substantive change. The worst PCR programs were often little more than attempts to legitimize past police practices, protect political leaders, and secure business interests.

    In 1955, the National Institute on Community and Police Relations, co-sponsored by the School of Police Administration and Public Safety of Michigan State University and the National Conference of Christians and Jews, convened to help police become aware of their problems. Later, the National Association of Police/Community Relations Officers outlined seven objectives of a good PCR program, paraphrased below:

    • Improve communication, reduce hostility, and identify tensions between the police and the community;
    • Assist both the police and the community in acquiring skills to promote improved crime detection and prevention;
    • Define the police role, emphasizing equal protection;
    • Adopt a teamwork approach, including the police department, the public, and other public service agencies;
    • Instill in each officer a proper attitude and appreciation of good police-community relations;
    • Enhance mutual understanding between the police and the community; and
    • Stress that the administration of justice is a total community responsibility that necessitates total community involvement (NAPCRO, 1971).
    • As these laudable goals suggest, PCR efforts aimed high, but they fell short on structure and tactics. In practice, PCR units operated as separate entities within the department, never fully integrating into the police milieu. In the organizational scheme, the PCR unit was usually in the service track, not part of the operations bureau, which meant the jobs were filled with staff and not line officers. While this made sense, given the unit's mandate, it meant PCR officers were not viewed as real cops. The officer's mission was not to handle crime on a daily basis, but to "make nice." In some cases, the PCR director was a civilian, further distancing the effort from service-based policing.


  3. What were some of the challenges to public-community relations in the late 1960s?
  4. Correct Answer

    The country was instead plunged into domestic chaos, and policing encountered perhaps its most formidable challenge—a direct and frontal assault on the legitimacy of the police and indeed the legal and economic systems. The civil rights and Vietnam antiwar movements, as well as the emerging youth culture of the 1960s, effectively merged two groups that had previously been socially and politically separated—minorities, particularly Blacks, and urban and suburban middle-class White youth. The convergence of these social and political movements confronted American policing in direct and visible ways (Greene, 2000:307).

    Talk of revolution filled the air, as cities burned, and crime rates soared. The Civil Rights Movement and decades of oppression spawned the militant Black Power Movement, which included groups such as the Black Panthers, whose bloody clashes with police heightened tensions on both sides. Race riots erupted summer after summer—in Watts, Newark, Detroit, then in cities nationwide in the spring of 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

    Meanwhile, protests on college campuses became increasingly violent, as the focus narrowed to the pressing issues of the Vietnam War and the draft. The nightly news was filled with images of students, armed with lists of nonnegotiable demands, taking over university administration buildings as riot police lobbed tear gas into the crowds. History repeated itself; or, as we have observed at the onset of this chapter, the same tactics and mistakes were repeated. For example, the military units were called out to control a student protest at Kent State University, which resulted in the killing of four students by national guardsmen.

    The upheaval pitted hawks against doves, Blacks against Whites, students against the establishment, the powerful against the powerless, in an atmosphere of increasing fury on all sides. As representatives of the establishment whose job included maintaining domestic peace, the police often found themselves on one side of the barricades facing any one of a number of widely diverse groups collectively known as the New Left.

    The New Left was a loose coalition of groups demanding a variety of social, economic, and political changes, under the overall umbrella phrase "social justice." Their unifying slogan was "Power to the People." The agenda ranged from legalizing marijuana and other drugs to ending the draft, from sexual freedom to equality for people of color and women. Protests covered the spectrum, from nonviolent actions to bombings conducted by small, ultra-radical groups like the Weathermen, who had split from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) over the issue of violence. The underground Weathermen served as a model for other groups, such as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) that made headlines when they kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst.


  5. What are the factors that set the stage for community policing?
  6. Correct Answer

    Many factors set the stage for the birth of community policing:

    • Police and political reformers advancing their agenda;
    • The influx of government funding for community policing;
    • The alienation of the police from the community;
    • The narrowing of the police mission to crime fighting;
    • An over-reliance on scientific management that stressed efficiency and effectiveness;
    • Increased reliance on high-tech gadgetry instead of human interaction;
    • Insulation of police administration from community control and accountability;
    • A long-standing concern about police violation of human rights; and
    • Failed PCR, Crime Prevention, and team policing units.

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