This paper evaluates the efficacy of community policing programs in the United States following the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which established the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services and directed billions in federal funding toward local law enforcement reform. Drawing on empirical studies, the paper defines community policing, outlines its core components — community partnerships, organizational transformation, and problem-solving — and assesses evidence for and against its effectiveness. Key findings indicate that organizational resistance within police agencies, insufficient citizen leadership, and the incomplete adoption of program principles have limited results. While violent crime rates declined after 1994, rising incarceration rates and criminal justice expenditures suggest community policing alone cannot account for the improvement. Minority and economically disadvantaged communities appear to have benefited least from these reforms.
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With passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) was established within the U.S. Department of Justice (COPS, 2011). Originally funded with $148.4 million, appropriations rapidly increased and reached an all-time high of $1.633 billion just four years later. Although funding over subsequent years has fluctuated between approximately $0.5 and $1.5 billion, it is clear that Congress has remained committed to community policing programs.
This level of commitment over the following sixteen years suggests that community policing programs are effective in controlling crime. This research report examines the evidence that supports or undermines this possibility and explores whether community policing truly represents the type of police reform that communities want and that Congress expected.
The Community Policing Consortium — consisting of law enforcement professionals, public policy academics, and political leaders — defined community policing as nurturing a trusting relationship between community residents and law enforcement personnel with the goal of improving the safety and quality of neighborhoods (Bureau of Justice Assistance, 1994, p. iii–vii, 15–17). This implies that residents become active participants in helping to fight crime and solve other problems. Citizens are encouraged to keep the police informed of ongoing problems in their neighborhoods, assist with determining policing resource priorities, and become more involved in crime control through neighborhood watch groups and related activities. In turn, the police are expected to become more engaged in the communities they serve by responding in good faith to complaints, listening to residents, providing advice, mediating disputes, and being more transparent about policing strategies. In essence, community policing involves officers engaging in social-service-like activities in addition to the more traditional crime-fighting role.
The Community Policing Consortium suggested that community policing could represent a significant reform strategy capable of addressing a number of issues facing mid-1990s law enforcement agencies (Bureau of Justice Assistance, 1994, p. 3). These issues included the loss of traditional crime control effectiveness in modern society, destabilization of the traditional family unit, an influx of immigrants with distinct policing expectations, budget constraints, epidemic drug use, gangs, and increasing violent crime rates.
Community policing was also presented as a more commonsense approach to policing because it is responsive to community needs (Bureau of Justice Assistance, 1994, p. 4). It was therefore viewed as more democratic, involving participation from all parties with a vested interest in policing outcomes — community residents, police personnel, community leaders, and businesses.
Community policing has also been portrayed as a response to the increasing isolation that police had experienced within the communities they served (Bureau of Justice Assistance, 1994, p. 5–6). Police officers were historically rotated among assignments to minimize corruption, and foot patrols faded once the automobile became common. The adoption of random patrols — intended to prevent criminals from predicting a police presence — simultaneously prevented citizens from enjoying informal interaction with officers. Advanced technologies such as radios and Compstat consumed patrol time with incident responses and concentrated policing resources in crime "hot spots," pulling officers away from the rest of the neighborhood.
However, a number of potentially serious drawbacks were envisioned if community policing were implemented. As police become embedded in communities, there is a danger of a shift in political power toward law enforcement and of increased intrusion into the daily lives of citizens (Moore, 1992, p. 143–146). These changes could in turn cause policing priorities to favor wealth and power. Additionally, the risks of corruption, discrimination, and brutal policing methods may increase as professional standards are relaxed to foster normalized relations with community members. Moore (1992) acknowledges that placing police in dispute-mediation situations may deepen their understanding of fairness, but moderates this observation by stating, "It would be wrong to be too optimistic about these possibilities" (p. 146). Moore further suggests that a relentless focus on improving crime control efficiency could marginalize the legal rights of the accused, and that implementing community policing may therefore require greater emphasis on civil rights and public oversight rather than less.
Community policing involves three core components: community partnerships, organizational transformation, and problem solving (COPS, n.d., p. 5–6). Community partnerships represent collaborative interactions between law enforcement and the various elements within the community that have a stake in policing effectiveness. Potential partners include other government agencies, community members, businesses, and private organizations. Participating government agencies may include schools, social services, city councils, state and federal law enforcement, and municipal services. Community members may serve on a community policing board, volunteer for a neighborhood watch group, or simply call when they observe a potential problem. Businesses can help identify public safety issues and provide valuable resources. Nonprofits can offer oversight, and the news media can serve as a conduit for distributing current policing information to the public.
The transition from traditional policing to community policing requires transforming the organizational structure of local law enforcement agencies (COPS, n.d., p. 7–11). Perhaps the most important change is in the decision-making hierarchy. Because community policing emphasizes a problem-solving approach, patrol officers are given greater responsibility for identifying and developing solutions to problems. The overall effect is a decentralization of decision-making and a shift of resource control to the field, which means that strategic planning necessarily requires the participation of patrol officers. Other changes include long-term patrol assignments, specialized training, citizen satisfaction evaluations, and greater transparency.
Another aspect of community policing that represents a dramatic break from historical practice is its proactive approach to crime control (COPS, n.d., p. 12–13). Rather than waiting for crime to occur, community policing strategies attempt to address the underlying problems that could eventually precipitate criminal activity. The problem-solving model known as SARA — scanning, analysis, response, and assessment — tasks patrol officers with scanning for potential problems and prioritizing them by threat level. Officers then analyze the problem to understand contributing factors, develop a response to eliminate, reduce, or control it, and finally assess whether the solution was effective.
The physical environment also takes a prominent role in community policing, replacing the traditional focus on the psychology of crime (Clarke and Eck, 2005, p. 14). Rather than concentrating on the mental state and background of potential offenders, environmental criminology focuses on situational predictors of criminal behavior, such as opportunity. Opportunity can take the form of an absence of security precautions or the availability of suitable targets. The "Problem Analysis Triangle" proposes that predatory crime is precipitated by the convergence of a likely offender and a suitable victim in the same place and time. Predatory crime prevention can therefore be managed through security measures that discourage criminal behavior at a specific location, a "guardian" for the victim, and a "handler" for the offender.
A guardian may represent the victim taking personal security precautions, or the close physical proximity of a friend, coworker, or police and security personnel. A handler is someone who can influence an offender's behavior, such as a family member, friend, pastor, or probation or patrol officer. The person who owns or manages a location typically implements security measures to deter crime — this can be as simple as a bus driver removing a troublemaker, a bartender cutting off a patron, or a landlord threatening to evict a problem tenant, or as involved as a property management company installing outdoor security cameras and lighting.
A 2003 National Research Council report assessed the empirical evidence supporting different policing strategies (reviewed by Clarke and Eck, 2005, p. 4–5). Standard, or professional, law enforcement — which entails responding to crime increases by adding patrol officers, decreasing response times, instituting random patrols, increasing pressure to solve crimes, and arresting more offenders — has been shown to be largely ineffective in deterring crime. The evidence does reveal, however, that two criteria produce the greatest benefit: (1) increasing the diversity of approaches and (2) using crime analysis to focus on high-crime areas.
Community policing incorporates a diversity of approaches by spreading the responsibility for crime control among all interested parties. The community policing strategies supported by the strongest (though still weak-to-moderate) empirical evidence include making connections with community members, officers engaging citizens respectfully, improving the legitimacy of police, and instituting foot patrols (reviewed by Clarke and Eck, 2005, p. 5). In contrast, problem-oriented policing (POP) employs both a diversity of strategies and focused policing, and is accordingly supported by the strongest empirical evidence — particularly strategies targeting crime hot spots.
The effectiveness of community policing depends, of course, on how committed police agencies are to implementing its core elements. By the end of the 1990s, over 90% of police agencies serving communities larger than 25,000 people reported having adopted some form of community policing (Morabito, 2010, p. 566). The key word is "reported," because academic researchers subsequently found that many of these claims were little more than rhetoric.
A study examining factors affecting community policing adoption across 474 U.S. municipalities found that community characteristics such as ethnic diversity, economic disadvantage, and concentration of political power were not significant predictors of adoption (Morabito, 2010). The author suggested that the use of federal dollars may have moderated biases that would otherwise have arisen; however, a centralized form of government was found to be a strong predictor of community policing adoption.
The strongest predictor of adoption was robbery rates — more crime predicted greater use of community policing strategies (Morabito, 2010). Yet when organizational structure was controlled for, measured by pay disparity within police agencies and the number of sworn officers, community characteristics were found to play only a minor role. This conclusion is supported by the finding that organizational commitment is by far the biggest factor influencing adoption, and that larger police agencies are more likely to commit to community policing.
Shifting a police department from professional to community policing is therefore influenced by agency size. Having administrators who are willing to innovate and having resources to manage innovative change also play a critical role (reviewed by Morabito, 2010, p. 581). Smaller departments may lack the personnel and funding necessary to support the additional training that community policing requires. Rural jurisdictions, where communities are spread over large areas, are generally not viable settings for community policing strategies (reviewed by Morabito, 2010, p. 565). This helps explain why Chicago was able to commit fully to community policing: it had innovative administrators and sufficient resources to implement the necessary changes.
A more recent assessment suggests that police agencies are beginning to move away from community policing in favor of the "order maintenance" strategy, also known as broken windows theory (Lombardo, Olson, and Staton, 2010, p. 587). Broken windows theory holds that allowing minor crimes to go unchallenged creates the impression that no one cares, leading crime to increase in both prevalence and severity (CJCJ, 1999). Some administrators interpreted this as a policy of "zero tolerance" toward any criminal activity or disorder. Former Mayor Rudolf Giuliani was widely celebrated for implementing a zero-tolerance broken windows policy that contributed to a dramatic decrease in crime in New York City during the late 1990s.
The Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) primarily emphasized community mobilization, in addition to addressing physical decay and social disorder (reviewed by Lombardo, Olson, and Staton, 2010). To implement community policing, duties were divided between community police officers tasked with mediating solutions to a broad range of neighborhood problems and patrol units responding to 911 emergencies. Municipal services stood ready to address physical decay complaints, and civilians were hired to augment officers on the beat.
The success of the CAPS program can be measured through community satisfaction with policing (Lombardo, Olson, and Staton, 2010, p. 596–597). Citizens' perceptions of criminal activity have a direct impact on their quality of life. Researchers measured how effectively police were perceived to be fighting crime and combating disorder. When prototype CAPS neighborhoods were compared to non-CAPS neighborhoods, community policing was found to have improved residents' perceptions of crime prevalence, fear of crime, and quality of life by 61%; however, police were not found to be more effective at controlling disorder in CAPS neighborhoods. Importantly, the demographics and socioeconomic status of respondents did not appear to influence results, though ethnicity was not examined.
Despite these gains, Lombardo and colleagues (2010) found through interviews with Chicago police officers that community policing is increasingly being replaced by "intelligence-led" policing. Such reports are consistent with Morabito's (2010) finding that the primary determinant of community policing success is organizational commitment. In Chicago, community policing appears to have already been sidelined, despite its effectiveness in reducing residents' perceptions of crime prevalence.
Organizational resistance to community policing reforms is not unique to the United States. A review of studies examining community policing in the Netherlands found striking parallels (Terpstra, 2011). The general goals of community policing there include increasing proximity between police and citizens, addressing a broad range of community problems, using both preventive and reactive policing, and establishing partnerships with other agencies and citizens. As in Chicago, implementation has been only partial. Police support for community policing is waning as accountability and governance bureaucracies emerge that undercut the community policing paradigm of increased officer discretion and flexibility. Community apathy has led officers to feel caught between a "rock and a hard place": administrators are returning to centralized command-and-control approaches while citizens remain largely indifferent to community policing efforts. Any gains in crime and disorder control that community policing promised are thus eroding over time.
Other factors also influence program success. A study examining police cynicism regarding the cooperative attitudes of neighborhood residents found that the least cynical officers were those with more experience and those patrolling lower-crime neighborhoods (Sobol, 2010). Cynicism was not related to whether officers were assigned to random reactive patrols or community policing. Officers in Indianapolis were more cynical than those in St. Petersburg, Florida, possibly reflecting differences in management styles between the two cities. Race, gender, and educational level were not correlated with cynicism. These results suggest that efforts to control crime in high-crime neighborhoods will produce officer burnout more quickly, regardless of whether a community policing program is in place.
"Leadership gaps and citizen participation failures"
"National crime data, incarceration trends, and budget evidence"
"Synthesis of failures and policy implications"
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