Ben-Zadok, Efraim

Community policing has emerged as the philosophical foundation for a new paradigm in American policing calling for police and community residents to work jointly in identifying and solving neighborhood problems. As an example of an innovative public policy, community policing implementation may be affected by a number of factors. This dissertation synthesized what is known about innovation in public policy and community policing. It examined how certain socioeconomic, political, and organizational factors affect and predict innovativeness in policy formulation and explored their effects on its implementation. It has implications for law enforcement agencies that have already adopted community policing and may serve as a resource to those deciding whether to begin implementation. Data reflecting the structure and organization of police departments, the nature and extent of local community policing implementation, citizen response to police activities, socioeconomic characteristics of the service area, and the local political environment were collected from 151 police departments across the United States and the local governments representing their jurisdictions. Results of the correlational, regression, and cross-tabulation analyses showed that among the socioeconomic variables, race emerged as the most interesting in relation to community policing implementation. Specifically, as the proportion of white residents increased, implementation decreased. Conversely, as the proportion of black residents increased, implementation also increased. Political variables had little relation to community policing implementation. Organizational factors made the greatest contribution to community policing processes. Reducing the ratio of administrative to patrol personnel, increasing the ratio of line to staff, making personnel more generalist than specialist, and having adequate policies and procedures to insure accountability all had a positive effect on community policing implementation. The study concluded that because the three categories of factors are so interwoven in producing innovation, the power of any of them to predict where and to what degree innovative policies will be implemented was limited. Overall, despite the fact that community policing as an innovative policy deviated in some areas, it was largely consistent with established innovation theory.

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.