Community policing

Police department attitudes and behaviors associated with faithfully implementing community policing may determine its success for combating social disorganization. The literature review presents a background for understanding community policing and its link to the theory of social disorganization. It is hypothesized that supportive attitudes toward community policing will produce behaviors consistent with its application that may help in combating the disadvantages of social disorganization. Secondhand public data of a two-part community policing survey is used to test each hypothesis. Analysis procedures used for this test consist of reliability comparisons, bivariate correlation and finally OLS regression. The results of this thesis indicate a promising causal relationship between supportive attitudes playing a role in shaping behaviors consistent with the performance of community policing techniques. The results also reveal that police agencies that have supportive attitudes toward community oriented policing also perceive that it can have a positive impact in combating social disorganization.

Lowi's "arenas of power" theory, one of the most basic policy typologies, was the theoretical foundation for this study. Most public policies can be classified as either regulatory or distributive. Regulatory policy addresses the enforcement power of government. Distributive policy is about providing benefits to selected members of society, financed as a public good. The intention of this study is to comparatively analyze two different police programs. The study stepped back from criminal justice literature to public policy theory, to consider other ways to assess police strategies to reduce crime. Theory was linked to the practice of policing by examining regulatory policy in relation to crime control and distributive policy to crime prevention. The Truancy Reduction Program was selected as an example of regulatory policy/crime control, and the School Resource Officer Program as distributive policy/crime prevention. This is an exploratory analysis, using a quantitative case study methodology. The Broward Sheriff's Office (Fort Lauderdale, Florida) was selected as the case study. The data were drawn from six consecutive school years (1995--2001) of actual documents. The intent was to explore, not establish a causal relationship between the programs and crime reduction, because other major external factors existed beyond the scope of this analysis. The "universal" concepts of effectiveness and efficiency were adapted to create a multi-criteria evaluation of the program outcomes. The central research question essentially asked if one program (and therefore, policy) was more effective and/or efficient than the other. In this study, effectiveness refers to the relationship between program goals and outcomes, while efficiency refers to the relationship between costs and outcomes. To examine effectiveness, the fixed effects pooled time series technique for panel data was employed. To examine efficiency, an efficiency ratio was created to compare program costs against the costs of crime. A relationship was established between each program, crime reduction, and effectiveness and efficiency. The final phase was comparative, employing a multivariate analysis of variance, to determine if one policy was more effective and efficient. The results were inconclusive. The study makes recommendations for future research, discusses implications of the analyses for public administration, and concluding comments.