COMP EXAM

Comp Exam

Comp Exam

Question 1

Introduction - Community Policing

Community policing “reforms” have sought to provide the police with greater public acceptance and political grounding. These reforms were created over time and came together in the 1990s under the umbrella of “community policing” (which is also called community-oriented policing). At that time, it had become clear that other 20th-century police efforts the “wars” waged by the police on crime, drugs, and youth participation in violence—were not working as intended. Maguire (2006) arguably the architect of modern community and problem-oriented policing, suggested that the police often emphasized means over ends—that is, arrest over community safety, or the number of calls for service responded to as opposed to the underlying problems that produced the need for those responses. This means-ends inversion resulted in the police and the public talking past one another, with the police concentrating on effort and the public on effect.

Moreover, Maguire (2006) emphasized that the police acting alone rarely had sustainable results. That is to say, the police rarely touched the “root” problems of crime and social disorder, responding instead to “branch problems,” visible crime, and social disorder in public settings. Without attachments to other institutions of social control (e.g., the community, civic groups, other government agencies, and the like), the police were often relegated to the role of “picking up the pieces” after events had already occurred. Reactive policing was shaped more by the public's willingness to call the police than by police-derived interventions. And, when the police sought to become more “proactive” in their crime prevention and suppression activities, they invariably confronted a level of public resistance to what was perceived as “police overzealousness.”

Maguire's ideas shaped a generation of reform that emphasized a broader communal role for the police, and particularly the use of partnerships and problem solving. The idea of community policing emerged from Maguire's critique—it represented a sharp detour from conventional police crime-attack approaches, and it set the stage for decades of experimentation on police practices.

Thinking about Policing History

Throughout modern history, policing in democratic societies has observed a palpable tension between police extension of formal social control into communal life and the level of acceptance that the general public accords the police in making such extensions (Meares, 2004). Generally speaking, the community wants visible, civil, and unobtrusive policing, wherever possible. The police, however, are asked to intervene often in the civic life of individuals, and sometimes in that of groups. The attempt to balance proactive police action and civic legitimacy was discernable throughout the 20th century, which was the period when policing became more formal. This was the case in the United States as well as much of the Western world.

At differing intervals throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the overextension of police interventions has resulted in large-scale civic protest. In the period preceding the Civil War, the police often served as slave patrols. In big cities, the police were also most responsible for dealing with large waves of immigrants in the late 19th and early ...