Issues in Community Policing: Lessons Learned in the Implementation of Eight Innovative Neighborhood-Oriented Policing Programs.


Series: NIJ Report 
Published: June 1995
169 pages
340,860 bytes

Issues in Community Policing: Lessons Learned
in the Implementation of Eight Innovative
Neighborhood-Oriented Policing Programs

Volume II of a Report Submitted to the
National Institute of Justice

by Susan Sadd and Randolph Grime



"There is risk in refusing to act till the facts
are all in; but is there not greater risk in
abandoning the conditions of all rational
inquiry?"  Learned Hand--American Jurist

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Introduction

The INOP Projects
Vera's Research in the INOP Projects

Chapter 2: Research Methods

Introduction
Data Collection Strategies and Methods
Site Visits
Research Issues
Variables Measured
Types of Data Collected
Data Analysis

Chapter 3: Police Understanding of and Support for
Community Policing and INOP

Introduction
Knowledge about Community Policing and INOP
  Projects with Police Departments
Special Unit Status of INOP Projects
Patrol Resentment of INOP Units: Resources and
  Productivity
Special Unit Status and Resentment: Career Paths
Regular Hours
Overestimating INOP's Potential Effects
Community Policing as "New-Old" Idea
Perceived Loss of Enforcement Abilities
The Fleeting Nature of Police Programs
Management's Failure to Include Officers in
  Planning
INOP Projects and Individual Officers
Individual Officers and their Effect on the
  Projects
Resources
Resources and 911 Calls for Service
Resources and Beat Size

Chapter 4: Interagency Involvement in the INOP
Programs

Agency Involvement in the INOP Sites

Chapter 5: "Angels in Marble": Community
Involvement in the INOP Projects

Introduction
Levels of Knowledge about INOP Project Structure
  and Goals
Sources of Knowledge and the Relationship between
  Status and Level of Knowledge
Putting the "Community" into Community Policing:
  Issues in Stimulating Community Involvement
Fear of Retaliation from Drug Dealers
The Historically Poor Relationship between the
  Police and the Community
"Apathy"
The Fleeting Nature of "Projects" to Help Poor
  Communities
Lack of Community Outreach Means that People Do
  Not Understand Community Policing or Their Role
  in It
Heterogeneous Populations in Many Target Sites
  Make Outreach Efforts Difficult
Areas Targeted by INOP Projects Are Highly
  Disorganized
Intragroup Conflict Among Community Leaders and
  Residents
What Does the Community Want

Chapter 6: Effects of the INOP Projects on Drugs,
Crime, Fear, Quality of Life and Police-Community
Relations

Introduction
Perceived Effects on Drug Use and Drug Trafficking
Perceived Effects on Drug-Related Crime
Perceived Effects on Fear
Reported Effects on Police/Community Relations
Perceived Effects of the INOP Programs on
  Community Organization and Community Involvement

Conclusions and Recommendations

Implementation Issues within Police Departments
Issues of Interagency Cooperation
Implementation Issues Surrounding Community
  Involvement
Recommendations

References
-------------------------------
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is an exciting time for the study of policing
in the United States. Major changes are taking
place as both large and small police departments
across the country make transitions to community
policing. The Innovative Neighborhood-Oriented
Policing projects have provided the Vera Institute
with a unique opportunity to study these sweeping
changes. We would like to thank the many people
who made the research possible.

We owe a great debt of gratitude to the National
Institute of Justice and to Charles B. DeWitt who
directed its program during much of the study and
made federal funds available to complete the
research. We would also like to thank George
Shollenberger, Craig Uchida, and David Hayeslip of
NIJ, who served as grant managers for the research
and who provided us with guidance regarding NIJ's
interests in the area. Thank you, too, to Maggie
Heisler of BJA for including us in the INOP
Cluster Meetings; they gave us additional
opportunities to talk to INOP staff and learn
about the programs.

This research is certainly not our work alone;
there were many people at Vera, some of whom are
still here and others who have moved on to other
endeavors, without whom we could not have
completed this work. Vera's then Director of
Research, Sally Hillsman, guided us through the
early days of the project; her vast research
experience was indispensable in the design the
project. Since Sally left Vera to exercise her
considerable talents at the National Center for
State Courts, we have missed her expertise and
counsel more than she may know. Michele Sviridoff,
formerly a Senior Research Associate at Vera, was
an integral part of the research team for most of
the data collection phase of the project and was
instrumental in writing the Interim Report on the
project (which formed the basis of Volume I of
this report). Alexander Wright came to Vera as a
Research Assistant four years ago and worked at a
level far beyond that normally expected of
research assistants. We appreciate all his work on
the INOP project and wish him well at Harvard,
where he is attending the Kennedy School. 

Researchers always rely heavily on their support
staff to help them manage projects and produce
reports. Scott Sparks has been involved with this
project from start to finish: he produced the
proposal at the beginning, the Interim Report in
the middle and both volumes of this report at the
end. We also want to thank Scott for his tireless
work arranging our many trips on this project --
four people traveling to seven out-of-town sites
on three different occasions, on different
airlines, from different airports, is enough to
drive most assistants mad. But Scott patiently
worked with the travel agent and made certain all
the airline reservations were made and the tickets
delivered in time. We would also like to thank
Stella Deacon, who worked with Scott on the hotel
and other travel arrangements and who, along with
Scott, transcribed a seemingly endless stream of
taped interviews. 

None of the research could have been done without
the cooperation of the many people who helped us
in the INOP sites. From the first days of the
project, we relied on the INOP project directors
in the eight police departments to construct
itineraries for our visits, provide
transportation, and introduce us to members of
their departments, the community, and to members
of participating agencies. We also thank those
police officers who are making courageous efforts
to implement community policing where it counts
the most -- on the streets of their cities. We
hope this report will be shared with them.

Finally, and most importantly, we are forever
indebted to the hundreds of community residents in
Tempe, Norfolk, New York, Hayward, Portland,
Prince George's County, Houston and Louisville
who, being unnamed, must necessarily miss their
fair share of credit. In each site they graciously
opened their homes to us, fed us, and made us feel
welcome. Their words and candor were more
important than they may know in making this
research possible. We will not soon forget their
generosity. We hope that the INOP police
departments will make this document available to
the communities they serve, for we have written it
as much for them as for the police. We also hope
that this exploratory study will help them
understand community policing just a bit better
and guide them in what should be as much a
community endeavor as it is a police endeavor.

Our thanks to all.
---------------------------

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

During the 1980s, as street crimes increased,
especially crimes of violence and a growing and
openly competitive drug market, there was much
concern and discussion about the crises of our
cities and how the police address them. Community
policing has become an increasingly popular
alternative to what many police administrators see
as the failure of traditional policing to deal
with these issues, and jurisdictions throughout
the country have established efforts designed to
focus on a wide variety of problems that arise in
specific neighborhood settings (McElroy, Cosgrove
& Sadd, 1993; Kelling & Moore, 1988; Moore &
Kelling, 1983; Trojanowicz, 1983; Police
Foundation, 1981).In fact, in cities with
populations of 50,000 or more, 50% of the police
officials responding to a recent survey by the FBI
and the National Center for Community Policing
indicated they had already implemented community
policing, and another 20% had plans to do so
within the next year (Trojanowicz, 1993). In many
of these police departments, community policing is
viewed as the last, best hope, and some
administrators have expressed the notion that, "If
this doesn't work, I don't know what we'll do."
Yet the concept of community policing has been
neither well defined nor tested. While the
popularity of community policing (whatever its
local form) may be attested to by the attention it
is receiving in the popular literature, even here
there is the recognition that the ability of
community policing to meet its goals as yet
remains largely untested. An editorial in a recent
New Yorker magazine (7/5/93: 6) described the
problem as follows:

Although community policing is many things to many
people, one element on which everyone seems to
agree is the idea of recognizing the discretion of
police officers and turning them into creative
problem-solvers -- people who, instead of simply
responding after the fact (and writing a report),
try to address the patterns of crime that put whole
neighborhoods on edge. The catch is that community
policing has barely begun to move out of the realm
of theory and public relations.

Similarly, a recent article in U.S. News and World
Report (8/2/93) described both the allure of
community policing and the difficulties experienced
by many jurisdictions when they try to implement
it. The hope is that community policing will reduce
fear and increase citizen satisfaction with police
services, but cities around the country are
experiencing implementation problems that include
failure to recruit appropriate candidates for the
new style of policing; lack of training in the
skills necessary for community policing;
overwhelming demands of 911 calls for service;
inadequate resources; lack of "buy-in" by line
officers; and a failure to train, educate and
involve other government agencies and the
community. And, finally, ". . . there is no clear
verdict on whether community policing makes a
difference. . . . hard evidence of actual reduc-
tions in crime is hazy, and the most rigorous
evaluations are only now being conducted (Witkin &
McGraw, 1993: 30)."While the specific approaches
vary widely, in general community policing
contrasts with traditional policing in its emphasis
on order maintenance rather than solely upon crime
fighting, on proactive problem-solving rather than
reactive response to crime reports, and on
developing working relationships with the community
rather than rapid response to calls for service
(Sparrow, Moore & Kennedy, 1990; Sparrow, 1988).

Community policing efforts are generally based on
the theory that disorder and incivility are
strongly linked to fear of crime at the community
level and that escalating fear can reduce
participation in community activities and lead to
increasing erosion of the quality of life (Skogan,
1990, 1986; Moore & Trojanowicz, 1988; Wilson &
Kelling, 1982). Community policing efforts often
attempt to involve neighborhood residents in the
identification of local problems and in the
development of solutions to those problems. 

While the police initiatives that are typically
called "community policing" take many forms,
according to David Bayley (1988: 226), they share
four principal elements:
(1) community-based crime prevention;
(2) proactive servicing as opposed to emergency
response;
(3) public participation in the planning and
supervision of police operations; and
(4) shifting of command responsibility to lower
rank levels.

To make progress toward assessing the success (or
failure) of community policing, it is necessary to
consider whether community policing is properly
conceived as representing a radical break with the
era of "professionalism" that has dominated
American policing for the last fifty years, or
whether it is simply a tactical refinement of the
same model (Goldstein, 1990; Sparrow et al., 1990;
Greene, 1989; Hartmann, 1988; Kelling, 1988; Moore
& Trojanowicz, 1988b). In addition, the meaning of
the changes for minority groups and immigrants in
the United States may be quite different than for
white middle-class citizens (Williams & Murphy,
1990). And, finally, it is not clear whether
community policing actually represents a meaningful
change in police operations and organization, or as
Peter Manning (1988) has said, "a contrapuntal
theme: harmony for the old melody. It now seeks
control of the public by a reduction in social
distance, a merging of communal and police
interests, and a service and crime control
isomorphism."

Carl Klockars (1988:257), reflecting on the work of
Egon Bittner (1967), described community policing
as simply the latest in a series of societal
"circumlocutions" developed to help us accept that
the police have a "monopoly on a general right to
use force." Klockars says that the disturbing
nature of that fact requires that society "wrap it
in concealments and circumlocutions that sponsor
the appearance that police are either something
other than what they are or are principally engaged
in doing something else." He suggests that
community policing may serve the same function as
did the rhetoric of legalization, militarization
and professionalization in earlier periods to make
the role of the police more palatable.There is
agreement in the literature that the concept of
"community" as used in the rhetoric of community
policing is imprecise, and often used
interchangeably with the concepts of neighborhood,
District, or beat. The implications of this
imprecision for how operational boundaries are
drawn by police agencies; the assumptions they make
about order and consensus in the areas in which
they work; the social processes and structures to
which the police relate; the kinds of problems to
which they give their attention; the objectives
they establish and the variables and methods used
to measure accomplishments are important in
assessing the outcomes of the new policing
strategies (Skogan, 1990; Williams & Murphy, 1990;
Greene, 1989; Kelling & Stewart, 1989; Bayley,
1988; Greene & Taylor, 1988; Hartmann, 1988;
Kelling & Moore, 1988; Klockars, 1988; Mastrofski,
1988).Community policing seeks to reduce the levels
of reported crime; the extent and nature of public
disorder problems on the neighborhood level; the
level of citizen fear of crime; and the volume of
calls for service received by the police agency.
These are ambitious goals and are generally based
on a theoretical scheme by Wilson & Kelling (1982),
"Broken Windows," which links disorder to both fear
and crime. But, as was pointed out in the recent US
News article, empirical research on the impact of
community policing is sparse, and the results are
inconsistent (Skogan, 1990; Moore & Trojanowicz,
1988a; Moore, Trojanowicz, & Kelling, 1988;
Trojanowicz, 1983).Greene and Taylor (1988:202)
tested Wilson and Kelling's hypothesized linkages
between disorder, fear, and crime using data from a
variety of studies. The results of this work failed
to support the hypothesized link between
incivilities and a weakening of informal social
controls. While there was some evidence of an
independent linkage between incivilities and fear,
this linkage appears to be conditional, "obtaining
only for particular types of neighborhoods."
Furthermore, they found evidence indicating that
the apparent linkage between incivilities and crime
is "largely driven by the linkage of both concepts
with social class and does not exist
independently."Skogan's (1990: 75) research leads
him to a somewhat different conclusion regarding
the relationship between disorder and crime, and
the viability of Wilson and Kelling's hypothesis.
He summarizes his findings as on the effects of
disorder on crime as follows:

The evidence suggests that poverty, instability and
the racial composition of neighborhoods are
strongly linked to area crime, but a substantial
portion of that linkage is through disorder: their
link to area crime virtually disappears when
disorder is brought into the picture. This too is
consistent with Wilson and Kelling's original
proposition, and further evidence that direct
action against disorder could have substantial
payoffs.

Despite the great hopes practitioners have for
community policing, commentators have expressed
some reservations about its potential effects.
Among those that should be considered are:

o the rhetoric espoused by proponents of community
policing will create expectations that are
impossible to meet (Klockars, 1988; Manning,
1988);

o the crime control mission of the police could
get lost in the context of community policing's
multiple goals (Bayley, 1988; Hartmann, 1988;
Klockars, 1988);

o community organizing efforts of the police could
produce nothing more than a political action group
sustained and directed by the police themselves
(Bayley, 1988; Klockars, 1988);

o the police could themselves be co-opted by the
community and lose the will to maintain public
order (Bayley, 1988);

o the police could extend their reach undesirably
far into the social and cultural life of the com-
munity (Bayley, 1988);

o the interests of minorities in the neighborhoods
could go unprotected by the police because of
their desire to be responsive to the wishes of the
majority (Skogan, 1990; Williams & Murphy, 1990;
Bayley, 1988; Manning, 1988; Mastrofski, 1988);

In linking community policing to the problem of
demand reduction, and in using police-community
partnerships in an attempt to address neighborhood
drug problems, the INOP approach draws upon both
the principles of problem-solving and those of
community policing (Goldstein, 1990; Hartmann,
1988; Kelling & Moore, 1988; Moore & Trojanowicz,
1988; Spelman & Eck, 1987; Goldstein, 1979). What
is unusual about the INOP programs is that they
use community and problem-solving policing to
target a single, specific issue (i.e., drug demand
reduction).

Strategies for community-centered demand
reduction, the issue upon which the INOP projects
focus, have gained increasing support among policy
commentators in recent years. Some argue that
anti-drug funds can be spent more usefully in the
streets of neighborhoods plagued by drug problems
than in either international interdiction efforts
or national efforts aimed at large-scale
distributors (Kleiman & Smith, 1990; Moore, 1990).
Kleiman (1986) argues that the benefits of
intensive local street enforcement, designed to
reduce the demand for drugs, might "outlast the
drives themselves" by increasing the difficulties
of connecting buyers and sellers -- the so-called
"hassles," or non- financial costs associated with
buying drugs. Such an approach is seen as
potentially valuable in dissuading new users from
escalating drug use.Demand reduction efforts can
entail far more than intensive enforcement
efforts. Wilson (1990:534) points to two primary
components of demand reduction:

There are . . . two ways of reducing demand:
altering the subjective state of potential drug
users (through prevention and treatment programs)
or altering the objective conditions of potential
drug users (by increasing the costs of drug use).
Police initiatives have generally focused far more
intensively on increasing the costs of drug use --
the risk of arrest and incarceration and the
difficulties of making drug purchases -- than on
either drug prevention or treatment.Many of the
INOP projects represent a departure from the more
"usual" police "demand reduction" strategies in
their effort to supplement traditional enforcement
approaches (e.g., sweeps, street-level
buy-and-busts, periodic intensive drug enforcement
in target areas) with long-term community-based
prevention, education and treatment referral.
Although a number of school- based prevention
programs have employed police resources, these
approaches have generally not been coordinated
with a community- oriented demand reduction
effort. For example:

. . . school systems around the country have
welcomed uniformed officers as drug educators. The
most widely publicized and emulated program is DARE
[Drug Abuse Resistance Education] which has spread
out from Los Angeles. . . Drug Abuse Resistance
Education officers work full time on drug education
. . . (Kleiman & Smith, 1990:95)

Recent research suggests, however, that public
information campaigns and drug education
initiatives, although intuitively appealing, have
little demonstrated effectiveness. In a review of
research on substance abuse prevention, Botvin
(1990) found that the majority of such prevention
strategies employed for the past two decades have
had no effect on substance-use behavior. The
single exception involves "resistance-skills
training," an approach focused on psychosocial
factors that promote adolescent drug use, that
according to a number of studies, has had
significant effects in a variety of settings.
Botvin points to the need for "a comprehensive
prevention strategy that combines school-based
interventions with those effecting (sic) the
family, social institutions and the larger
community." ( p. 461)

In their proposed combination of community
policing strategies, focused drug enforcement,
interagency cooperation, referral to treatment and
community-based prevention initiatives, the INOP
projects would appear to represent a relatively
comprehensive approach to demand reduction. Yet,
for future policy-making at the local, state and
federal levels, much remains to be learned about
how best to structure these various components,
particularly in settings characterized by
widespread drug use and drug trafficking.

The INOP Projects. When the Bureau of Justice
Assistance (BJA) awarded funds to eight urban and
suburban jurisdictions in late 1990 under the
Innovative Neighborhood Oriented Policing (INOP)
program, their central objectives were to foster
both community policing initiatives and drug
demand reduction efforts at the neighborhood
level. Although both community policing and drug
demand reduction have been central aspects of
emerging police agendas in many jurisdictions
throughout the country, the linking of these fea-
tures under the BJA INOP program was unique.

The eight jurisdictions that initially received
INOP funds -- Hayward, California; Houston, Texas;
Louisville, Kentucky; New York, New York; Norfolk,
Virginia; Portland, Oregon; Prince George's
County, Maryland; and Tempe, Arizona -- developed
a variety of initiatives. Among the few components
that these various programs had in common were a
police enforcement component (except in New York),
a focus on target neighborhoods, community
involvement, interagency planning teams and an
emphasis on drug demand reduction. In addition,
all eight INOP programs either implemented or
attempted to implement a broad array of partner-
ships with various state and local agencies and
community organizations within their respective
jurisdictions.

Yet in many respects, the differences among the
eight initiatives were more striking than their
commonalities. The eight INOP projects varied
greatly in terms of the size of the locality in
which they were developed -- ranging from a
population of under 200,000 in Hayward and Tempe
to over 7,000,000 in New York City. They also
differed in terms of the size of the police
departments that designed them -- ranging from
under 200 sworn officers in Hayward to over 25,000
in New York City.

The projects differed substantially in their
historical relationship to other neighborhood- or
community-oriented policing initiatives within the
departments that designed them. In several sites
(Tempe, Prince George's County, Louisville,
Portland), the INOP project represented the
department's first effort at implementing a
neighborhood-oriented style of policing. In other
sites (Norfolk, Hayward), the INOP project
represented a relatively small component of a
larger, new city-wide neighborhood-oriented
policing initiative. Finally, in still other sites
(New York and Houston), the INOP projects
represented small, new efforts in departments with
extensive, well-publicized community policing
agendas.

There were also differences among the INOP
projects in terms of their approach to the
drug-demand reduction effort. In some sites (e.g.,
Houston, Norfolk), the primary emphasis was on
drug enforcement, supplemented by secondary drug
prevention activities. In other sites (e.g.,
Hayward, Portland, New York), there was
substantially more emphasis on the provision of a
broad array of community-based services, including
drug prevention, education and treatment.

The various INOP projects also featured several
additional components -- an extensive public
advertising campaign in Louisville; programmatic
reliance upon volunteers in New York City;
satellite offices in Prince George's County,
Norfolk, Portland and Tempe; and the exploration
and adaptation of new data processing resources
(e.g., Portland, Louisville). BJA also encouraged
interagency planning teams, community involvement
in the projects' planning and evaluation, and new
crime analysis techniques. 

Vera's Research on the INOP Projects. In June,
1991, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ)
awarded funds to the Vera Institute of Justice to
conduct research on the implementation and impacts
of the BJA-funded INOP projects. The Vera research
data were collected during an 18-month period; and
the study includes both a process analysis and an
assessment of program impacts and relies primarily
on qualitative methods.

Vera's process analysis provided detailed site
descriptions and cross-site comparisons of program
structure and operations; assessed factors that
appear to have facilitated or impeded
implementation within each site; identified common
implementation issues among the INOP projects; and
provided qualitative information on the
expectations for and assessments of the INOP
projects held by local project staff, police
personnel, municipal officials and community
leaders over the course of the project. Because of
its length, the descriptions of the projects are
provided in a separate volume of this report,
entitled Innovative Neighborhood Oriented Polic-
ing: Descriptions of Programs in Eight Cities.

The impact analysis, which is the focus of this
volume, examined project effects on demand
reduction, public safety and quality of life both
within and across sites; examined which project
characteristics contributed to program
effectiveness; and developed an overview of
project implementation and impact, based on
across-site comparisons. The research employed a
variety of methods: semi-structured interviews;
focus groups; observations; review of project
documents; and review of local evaluation
products.

The research design called for three week-long
site visits to each of the INOP sites -- a
preliminary site visit, designed to provide a full
description of the project and its implementation;
and two additional site visits over the course of
the following year. The last two visits provided
both evaluative and explanatory data, including
systematic observations of program operations;
semi-structured interviews with project managers,
staff and selected participants; and focus groups.

After the first set of research site visits
(conducted between June and August of 1991), it
became clear that the eight programs were so
highly differentiated (because of the importance
of allowing the sites to structure their programs
to meet local needs) that it would be impossible
to compare them directly.  Although each
represented an attempt to implement some form of
community policing, about the only features they
shared were the goal to reduce the demand for
drugs.

There were, however, common threads running
through all eight programs; these commonalities
were the problems of implementing community
policing. This was true regardless of whether the
jurisdiction was a city with extensive experience
with community policing, in which INOP was only a
small piece of the effort (e.g., Houston or New
York), or the INOP project represented a pilot
community policing effort (e.g., Tempe). The
researchers concluded that the results of the
current study might be more useful to planners,
policy makers, and community groups in
jurisdictions around the country that intend to
implement community policing in the near future,
if they could use the information to deal with
these problems before implementing community
policing. In this way, the implementation of
community policing at the neighborhood level would
be accomplished more smoothly and productively.

This is especially important in light of the fact
that these problems appear to be universal in
community policing. For example, all the INOP
sites experienced problems in getting police
officers to accept the new roles and behaviors
required by community policing; a lack of interest
on the part of the community in becoming involved
with community policing, despite acknowledgment by
residents that they thought community policing was
a valuable approach; an initial failure to train
officers adequately in problem-solving techniques;
and problems in obtaining interagency cooperation.
It is hoped that these issues will be considered
by jurisdictions planning to implement community
policing, not to influence them to abandon those
plans, but to improve the outcomes of the process.

While the report may at first glance appear highly
critical of the eight sites, it is not intended to
be so. The reader must keep in mind that these
sites, many of which were attempting to implement
community policing for the first time, were
attempting to do so with very little money and in
a relatively short time. These represent genuine
attempts to address the crime and quality-of-life
problems plaguing these cities, while trying to
improve police/community relations.

The reader must also be aware that throughout the
report, implementation problems are generously
illustrated through examples. While events or
quotes from police officers or residents in a
particular city may have been chosen to illustrate
a problem, this does not mean that the problem was
unique to that city. On the contrary, each of the
problems was experienced by all the cities to one
degree or another. The lesson to be learned from
the INOP experience is that these problems are
common in attempts to implement community policing
and should be considered before cities expend
scarce resources on all-out community policing
efforts.

Thus, rather than present a site-by-site
evaluation of the INOP programs, the chapters that
follow are organized around common issues or
problems they experienced. To provide the reader
with an understanding of how the researchers
discovered these common threads, the research
methods are discussed in Chapter 2. The discussion
of implementation problems or "issues" is
presented in Chapters 3, 4, and 5; those chapters
address, respectively, police issues, interagency
involvement and community involvement. The eight
programs shared common goals (regarding
drug-demand reduction, crime, quality-of-life
problems, police/community relations, etc.); the
outcomes of the INOP programs on these dimensions
are discussed in Chapter 6. Finally, the
conclusions drawn by the researchers about these
outcomes and issues are presented in Chapter 7. We
hope the following discussion will prove useful to
police officials, policy makers and community
groups in planning their community policing
efforts and that, by being aware of the problems
experienced by others, they can avoid some of
these pitfalls.

CHAPTER 2

Research Methods

Introduction. Vera's research on the INOP projects
includes both a description of the process of
project implementation and an assessment of
program impact. Although most evaluations employ
quantitative methods, the nature of the INOP
programs and the timing of the research precluded
the use of these methods, so the research relied
on qualitative methods.

The results of the process analysis were used to
produce detailed site descriptions that are
presented in Volume I of this report. Each INOP
project is described within the context of the
local police department; the characteristics of
the target areas; the specific types of demand
reduction strategies employed; other program
components, including interagency approaches,
training, community outreach and the role of
volunteers; and the nature of local evaluation
efforts. The assessment of program implementation
and impact has been addressed only briefly, at
INOP cluster meetings sponsored by BJA and through
papers delivered at conferences (Sadd, 1992a,
1992b, 1992c). These issues are addressed in
greater detail in the later chapters of this
report. Although the original research design
called for a site-by-site assessment of factors
that facilitated or hampered project
implementation, the actual experiences of the
research led to an alteration in this part of the
design. These assessments were made; however, they
are discussed in the context of issues for
community policing in general (see Chapters 3, 4,
and 5).

Because the eight sites varied considerably in
both their approaches and their expected impacts,
and because of a severe lack of measurable impact
indicators, the assessment of effects across sites
was extremely difficult. Quantitative measures of
impact were virtually unavailable in almost every
site at the time the data collection for the
evaluation was concluded. As a result, the impact
analysis was based on respondents' reports of
their perceptions of program effects on drug
trafficking and use, drug-related crime, fear of
crime, community organization and police/community
relationships.

Data Collection Strategies and Methods. The data
collection strategies were designed to fit the
scope of the research -- an evaluation of eight
programs spread across the country, to be
completed within 18 months. Thus, the data were
collected through a series of three week-long
visits to each of the eight cities, by teams of
two Vera researchers. To maximize rapport-
building and accrued knowledge about the programs,
personnel and cities, whenever possible teams were
kept consistent across the three visits. Before
the first set of visits and between site visits,
research staff maintained contact with the sites
through telephone calls and mailings and by
attending the BJA-sponsored cluster meetings.
Before each site visit, the research staff con-
tacted individual INOP project administrators and
community members to make arrangements for the
individual interviews, focus group interviews and
observational sessions that would be conducted
during the visit.

Site Visits. The first set of research site
visits, dubbed (by the research staff) the
"implementation site visits," provided research
staff with a comprehensive overview of the
projects. Prior to the first visit, project
administrators at each site were asked to set up
an itinerary for the visit that would include a
tour of target areas; individual and/or focus
group interviews with police personnel, including
administrators, officers involved in the INOP
project, and officers not involved in the project;
interviews with staff of other city (and private)
agencies that were involved in the project; and
interviews with community members. In those sites
in which local project evaluators had been
identified, interviews were arranged with them as
well. These visits were conducted during June,
July and early August of 1991, and the data were
used to produce the descriptions of the programs
that appear in Volume I.

Two additional sets of visits were conducted to
collect evaluative and explanatory data. While the
structure of these visits (observation and
interviews with key project participants) was very
similar to the implementation site visits, there
was one critical difference. Interviewees in the
implementation visits were selected by INOP
project administrators (police managers in each
site); by the time of the second visit, research
staff were familiar enough with the programs to
identify for themselves those individuals they
wished to interview. Wherever possible, lists of
names (of police officers or community residents)
were obtained from the sites by the research staff
and then random samples were drawn to select
potential interviewees. The second set of research
site visits were conducted in January, February
and early March of 1992 and the final set of
visits in June, July and early August of that
year. During the third set of visits, the
researchers felt that they had a thorough
understanding of the structure of the INOP
projects and shifted their emphasis almost
entirely from police agency staff to community
residents.

Both the individual and the focus group interviews
were semi-structured, meaning that they were
formal, in-depth interviews, but were not rigidly
structured around an absolutely fixed schedule of
questions. William Foote Whyte (1984:97) has
referred to this as the "non-directive" interview
because it is loosely organized around a number of
predetermined areas of inquiry and questions, but
also allows the respondent some degree of freedom
in introducing unanticipated commentary and data.
This commentary and data, in turn, give rise to
new, spontaneous questions by the interviewer.
These questions may then be added to the interview
schedule for subsequent interviews.

The interviews were tape-recorded. Recorded
interviews were then transcribed or, at the
discretion of the researcher, copious notes were
taken on the interview. Field observation data
were recorded through written field notes at times
that such recording would not interfere with or
bias field operations. In addition, when possible,
observational notes were made on tape recorders
(while researchers were in the field) and later
transcribed.

Research Issues. The goals of the INOP study were
to describe each project's structure and operation
within the context of the local police department
and community; to describe the street-level
enforcement operations and any prevention or
treatment programs designed to effect drug-demand
reduction; and to measure the program
participants' (including police and other agency
personnel and community residents) perceptions of
the project's effectiveness with regard to drug
trafficking, drug- related crime, fear, quality of
life, community organization and community
involvement.  In addition, the INOP research
raised some broader issues for community policing.
What is the definition of success for community
policing? Is it less crime, safer streets, more
visible police, etc.? Respondents were also asked
what changes they would like to see made in their
police departments. These are issues for the INOP
programs in particular and for community policing
in general.

Variables Measured. The INOP impact evaluation was
designed to provide information regarding the
effects of the various demand reduction strategies
implemented in the INOP sites on drug trafficking
and use, drug-related crime, and other crime. In
addition, data based on interviews were collected
on the impacts of these community policing
experiments on fear of crime in the target
communities, citizen mobilization, and
police/community relations.

To adequately assess the effects of a program, it
is necessary to document the extent to which the
program is actually implemented (i.e., conduct a
process analysis). This is an especially important
issue for community policing, which remains
largely ill-defined and yet is very popular among
police administrators across the country. As
Skolnick and Bayley (1988) have argued, "The
variety of programs that are described as
'community policing' is truly bewildering." The
process analysis generated descriptions of the
eight INOP programs (see Volume I of this report)
and some insight into the factors affecting
implementation and effectiveness.

Types of Data Collected. Because of the design
limitations discussed above, it was not possible
to collect pre-post, quantitative data. The INOP
projects differed in the specificity of the
interventions and in the scope of their focus. The
timing of the research relative to INOP program
operation, resulted in a "snapshot" of these
programs at varying stages of implementation. In
addition, even the quantitative data that one
would normally expect to be available from all
police departments (i.e., crime statistics) were
unavailable in some sites. Thus, the data
collected for the INOP project were strictly
qualitative.

Data were collected in a series of three week-long
visits to each site over the course of 13 months.
While much of the implementation site visit was
spent observing the projects and interviewing
police administrators about program structure, the
second and third visits were devoted to collecting
data for the impact evaluation. A set of
open-ended, semi-structured interview schedules
was prepared and tailored to the type of
respondent(s) being interviewed. That is, specific
protocols were developed for use with each of the
following categories of respondent: (1) individual
interviews with police administrators and
officers; (2) focus groups of officers involved in
the INOP program; (3) focus groups of officers not
involved in the INOP program; (4) individual
interviews with personnel from other city and
private agencies; (5) focus groups with agency
personnel; (6) individual interviews with
community residents; and (7) focus groups with
community residents. While many of the questions
contained in these interview schedules were
identical across groups, care was taken to keep
the interviews of manageable length and not to ask
questions that were clearly inappropriate for the
interviewee (e.g., there was no reason to ask
citizens about training received by officers). The
same protocols were used in all INOP sites.

To assess respondents' knowledge of the structure
and goals of the INOP project, each respondent (or
group of respondents) was asked to describe
his/her role in the INOP project; when the program
went into effect; and the goals of the program. In
addition, police department personnel were asked
how many officers participated in the program and
how they were deployed, selected and trained. All
respondents were asked to describe any problems
the program had experienced and also to describe
"facilitating factors." They were also asked to
list any city, state or private agencies that were
involved in the program and to describe the role
these agencies played. Similarly, they were asked
to describe the role of the community in the INOP
program. Residents of the target area were asked
how they learned about the INOP project; to
describe what the project had done in their
community; about their own involvement and that of
other members of the community with the program;
to describe any outreach efforts made by the
police to the community; and to identify the major
problem in the community. Responses to these
questions were used first, to develop the program
descriptions and second, to assess the levels of
knowledge and involvement of the various groups of
respondents.

Data Analysis. The large volume of observational
and field data necessitated a sophisticated and
systematic approach to recording and analyzing a
very large quantity of data. Using personal
computers and appropriate software for the
recording and storage of data enabled the research
staff to manage the data efficiently and analyze
the data systematically. Both observational (field
notes) and interview data were entered into
personal computers using a free-form text database
manager (askSam) This approach made the data
accessible for coding and analysis.

As indicated above, the observational and
interview data from the implementation site visits
were used to produce descriptions of the programs
(see Volume I of this report). The data from the
second and third sets of visits were the basis of
the analyses presented in this report. Using the
methods described above, data were collected and
analyzed from a total of 522 interviewees across
the eight sites. 

CHAPTER 3

Police Understanding of and Support for INOP and
Community Policing

Introduction. Over the past decade, community
policing has grown from an experimental reform
movement into the new orthodoxy of contemporary
policing. Part of the reason for its success as a
reform concept is community policing's combined
appeal as a "new old" idea, invoking a nostalgic
return to the "beat cop" while implementing a
progressive, shop-floor management style
appropriate for "policing for the year 2000," as
one department description puts it.

The considerable public appeal of community
policing, while going a long way to explaining its
rapid adoption by so many jurisdictions, has
actually led this reform into a crisis of meaning.
Many police professionals and policy experts have
come to feel that, in their rush to capture what
are thought to be the operational and political
advantages of community policing, police
departments have implemented a management reform
that is not fully understood or sufficiently
defined.

The inadequate definition and understanding of its
goals and means has complicated the implementation
of community policing by eroding the credibility
of reformers and police managers among the two
groups whose confidence and cooperation they need
most: patrol officers and the communities they
serve. If police managers do not bring the
rhetoric and reality of community policing into
closer agreement, these reform concepts will be
further devalued among these groups, and community
policing runs the risk of being relegated to the
ever-expanding scrap-heap of unsuccessful reform
movements.

The difficulty of implementing community policing
is largely a product of the ambitious nature of
its mission. Community policing seeks to create a
new role for the patrol officer and forge new
working relationships (termed "partnerships") with
the public. Because restructuring these
fundamental elements of policing will have
important ramifications for virtually every aspect
of police work, community policing requires that
personnel at all levels of the police bureaucracy
support or "buy into" its goals and means.
Similarly, police departments must elicit support
from community residents with whom they hope to
form "partnerships."

Implementing community policing, while partly a
management and administrative task, is therefore
more fundamentally a fight for the "hearts and
minds" of patrol officers and the public. Data
collected for the present research show that
police managers and policy researchers may have
gravely underestimated the difficulty of gaining
the support of these groups. This problem stems
from the inherent difficulty of executing a
management-led reform with such radical
consequences for the grass-roots level of the
police bureaucracy, and from the considerable
resistance of patrol officers to change.

Patrol officers are particularly resistant because
community policing changes their job description,
and because the paramilitary structure of police
bureaucracies has, over time, produced a
well-documented antagonism between the officers
and police management. Communication between these
"two cultures" of the police bureaucracy is thus
complicated by a history of resentment and
distrust (Ianni & Ianni, 1983). Community policing
is a management restructuring instituted, in true
paramilitary style, from the top down, and since
its success is dependent on the support of patrol
officers, the resistance of patrol officers to
management-mandated change is a major stumbling
block to its implementation. Managers thus meet
heavy resistance precisely where they most need
cooperation.

This profound skepticism of community policing
among patrol officers has in many cases
compromised its implementation to the point where
the very concept of community policing has become
devalued. Unless community policing is properly
implemented early in its history within a
department, police managers will not be able to
demonstrate to patrol officers the benefits which
they promise will follow (such as the reduction of
911 calls for service and improved
police-community relations), thus increasing the
very skepticism and resistance they need to
overcome. This negative feedback loop may have
already gained a footing in many police de-
partments claiming to have successfully
implemented community policing.

The issues of police management's credibility and
institutional resistance to community policing
were fundamental problems common among virtually
all the INOP projects. These issues are explored
below.

Knowledge about Community Policing and INOP
Projects within Police Departments. The first task
in describing the lack of support for community
policing among police officers is to assess the
overall level of knowledge about INOP project
goals and operations. Because the majority of the
INOP projects consisted of pilot or experimental
community policing units, which were distinct from
the rest of the patrol force, the level of
knowledge about the projects themselves was
generally very low among officers not involved in
the projects. This lack of understanding of the
INOP projects among officers not involved in
project activities was a considerable problem for
project implementation, for reasons that are
discussed below. The level of knowledge about
community policing was higher among officers
participating in the INOP projects, but even among
these officers there were very few who
demonstrated a good understanding of community
policing methods and goals.

The lack of knowledge about the INOP project goals
can be traced to inadequate efforts in
communicating those goals at the outset. In an
extreme case for example, officers in Houston,
even those involved in project activities funded
under the BJA grant, had a minimal understanding
of its goals and saw the project simply as a means
to increased overtime pay. When asked if they had
received any briefing on the purpose of the
project one officer, reflecting a consensus,
replied: "No. At least I wasn't. I remember them
just saying that they had money for overtime."
Most INOP projects expended considerable effort in
explaining project goals and operations as part of
their training program for INOP officers. The bulk
of this training was, however, focused only on
those officers who were to participate in the
projects, and often did not reach non-project
personnel. But even those officers who received
training in community policing as a result of
their involvement in the INOP projects often
displayed only a rudimentary understanding of
community policing. This is not to imply that
there is a single agreed-upon definition of
"community policing." All definitions of community
policing, however, contain certain common elements
and it is to these that we refer when assessing
officers' knowledge of community policing. In
addition, researchers used each individual police
department's definition as found in their INOP
proposals to BJA, or other relevant department
literature discussing community policing.

In part, this lack of understanding can be
attributed to the complexity and novelty of
community policing; another reason is a lack of
training in the principles of community policing
and problem-solving. Officers in the majority of
the INOP sites had not, by their own accounts,
received any special training in community
policing. After more than a year of regular
involvement in problem-solving activities, for
example, an officer involved in Louisville's INOP
project expressed his confusion over the goals of
the project and of community policing generally.
Asked how he viewed his present role in the INOP
project he replied:I'm not sure. I thought when I
came into the community-oriented police program
that I understood what it was about, where we were
going, what we wanted to do. Now, I'm more
confused than ever.

More commonly, officers (both those involved in
the INOP projects and those not involved) when
asked about the INOP project goals or for their
definition of community policing, would focus on
its emphasis on community outreach and the new
relationship community policing hopes to forge
between police and community residents. Only
occasionally did officers mention problem-solving
activities or interagency cooperation as elements
of community policing or the INOP projects.

When asked to explain what "community policing"
means, one officer from Louisville (who was not
involved in the INOP project) gave a typical
response: "[Better] interaction with the public."
While it might be logical to expect a lower level
of knowledge about the project from officers who
were not directly involved in it, the above
statement is not very different from the
formulation of one project administrator in
Norfolk:

To me it's (i.e., community policing) just simply
working very close with your citizens, with your
community. You're not out there, like I said, to
take the hard approach with folks. You enforce the
law as you're supposed to, but you also have to be
sensitive. That seems to be a key word . . . So
it's just working hand in hand with the folks and
knowing you're out there to be their friend.

However, by failing to identify community policing
with problem-solving, for example, or with a
proactive, interagency approach to crime and
quality-of-life problems, resistant officers set
themselves up to reject the "soft" part of
community policing's agenda: community outreach
and partnerships. Asked how community policing's
emphasis on interaction with the community was
viewed in his department, an officer involved in
Louisville's INOP project replied, "We look at it
as social workers instead of police officers."

Community policing's outreach and partnership
components (commonly described as "social work,"
"smile and wave," or "Officer Friendly" policing)
were typically the most rejected components of the
INOP projects. Because most officers had little
knowledge of community policing beyond this
category of "social work," those bent on pursuing
traditional law enforcement had no qualms about
rejecting community policing in its entirety.
Officers who were knowledgeable and supportive of
the INOP projects and of community policing in
general often connected what they saw as a
widespread lack of respect for project goals with
an equally widespread lack of knowledge of those
goals. For example, when the Prince George's
County INOP unit's activities were associated with
a drop in the number of violent crimes in a
particular sector, many patrol officers expressed
doubts that community policing was in fact
responsible for the decline, especially in violent
crimes. This attitude was explained by INOP
officers as the result of the widespread
perception that community-oriented police officers
don't do any "real" work.

Most police officers defined "real" police work as
work involving crime-related tasks. It is the
apprehension of an armed felon or a burglar, for
example, that constitutes the "good job" for the
majority of police officers. It is, after all,
these jobs which attract the attention of their
colleagues, the press, and the public, and which
earn officers command citations. Most of the time
spent on patrol by the typical police officer,
however, produces few, if any, situations in which
s/he is presented with the opportunity to arrest a
suspect. It is, rather, the non-enforcement
functions, "peace-keeping" or service functions
that occupy the officer's time and effort (Rumbaut
& Bittner, 1979; Banton, 1964; Cummings et al.,
1965; Niederhoffer, 1967). Although community
policing proponents take great pains to assure
both the police and the public that community
policing is not "soft" on crime (i.e., officers
will still play the crime-fighter role), it is
clear that police departments must do more to
train officers to adopt the role of
problem-solver.

Many INOP officers attributed the perception that
INOP officers do not do any "real" police work to
the widespread ignorance of community policing.
One officer from Louisville, for example, said:

". . . They [patrol officers] don't understand
what actually we're [INOP officers] doing, so of
course they're going to say, "They [INOP officers]
couldn't have done it [reduced 911 calls] because
. . . all they do is have office hours; all they
do is attend meetings, and that's it." But it goes
well beyond that; it's not just office hours and
meetings and things like that, and they just don't
know it. So they say, "What I know about community
policing, they can't reduce anything, you know,
the only thing they can do is reduce the IQ level
when they walk into the room," you know, that kind
of thing. . . ."

An INOP officer in Norfolk felt that this kind of
ignorance of and lack of support for community
policing was common not only among patrol
officers, but also among many supervisors working
with project officers:

"Now with the sergeants and stuff, they still make
their little comments [about the INOP project],
and they still don't understand [the INOP project]
. . . I have one corporal saying: "Yeah, I want to
transfer to PACE because you all [PACE officers]
don't do anything. I want to hang around not doing
anything." People actually think we don't do
anything, and, from the sergeants and the
corporals, I -- my observation is they're not
totally understanding of what we're doing. They're
not actually doing anything to undermine us, but
by the same time they are all saying things that
don't help. It's the morale of the officers on the
street, when they make their comments about we're
just out there slacking off."

Despite years of experimentation with and careful
expansion of community policing, the general
feeling about community policing and the INOP
project in New York City and Houston did not
differ significantly from that in cities where
community policing is a relatively new concept.
A supervisor of one of New York City's community
policing units (CPU), for example, who was only
indirectly involved in the INOP project there,
felt indignant about what he perceived to be a
lack of support for community policing among most
officers. Again, the officers who discounted
community policing as a "waste of time" justified
their attitudes by describing the CPU as a unit in
which little or no real police work gets done.
Asked how community policing was perceived by most
other officers, the CPU supervisor volunteered:

"They think it's a joke. I go to one precinct
where I used to work and they say, "Oh, you're the
supervisor of CPOP [the old community policing
acronym] now?" I go, "Oh yeah, but it's CPU." I
always correct them . . . They say, "Oh, they're a
bunch of do- nothings!" And I defended my guys, I
said, "No. You may do that in your precinct, it
may be true [of the CPU] in your precinct. But my
guys are happy to be in the conditions unit.
They're into making arrests."

In failing to provide adequate education for
patrol officers, supervisors and administrators
not involved in the INOP projects about community
policing and the INOP project goals (and, in some
cases, failing to explain adequately these to
officers involved in the INOP projects), police
managers have made it easier for resistant
officers to see only those parts of the projects
which they are most apt to dislike.

Even officers who eventually "bought into" the
idea of community policing enough to volunteer for
duty in the INOP projects often possessed a lack
of understanding of project goals. These officers
generally felt that the INOP projects needed not
just to be described by management, but to be
actively "sold" to patrol officers because of the
non-traditional nature of community policing and
the INOP projects. One officer in Portland, for
example, said:

"It was hard for a lot of people to buy into it
[community policing]. Way too new, the concepts
were way too new. When I first applied, they
[regular patrol officers] had names for us
already: the "Hap-, Hap-, Happy Police." So there
was a lot of bad perceptions on what this program
was going to be."

However, rather than actively "selling" them, most
departments merely solicited volunteers for the
INOP projects by issuing a department-wide
announcement with only a rudimentary description
of its operational details and goals. The lack
of any real "selling" of the projects led even
officers volunteering for the projects to expect
that community policing wouldn't be very different
from the kind of traditional police work they had
done in the past. One project officer in Portland
said:

"Originally, when I started, I thought I was just
going to be out [in the community], solidly there
and nothing more. Enforcing heavily the trespass
rules and regulations, kicking a lot of people
out, basically doing traditional law enforcement
that we have always done: finding and ferrying out
the people who are selling drugs, serving search
warrants, arresting people left and right,
throwing them out and making sure that they don't
come back."

Officers who were very supportive of community
policing in general confessed to having initial
doubts about the value of the INOP projects when
they signed up for them. These officers attributed
this early skepticism to the inability of their
departments to describe adequately and "sell" the
concepts of community policing.

While most of the INOP projects did not invest
much effort initially in explaining community
policing to officers who were not going to be
involved in them, preferring instead to con-
centrate their efforts on training the INOP
personnel for their new jobs, even those
departments that consciously attempted to explain
community policing ran into difficulties. One
project administrator in Louisville described the
failure of roll-call briefings and department-wide
announcements, even when delivered by the Chief
and the Mayor, to communicate the community
policing mission and the INOP projects' part in
that mission:

"I think that the officers have got to be
bombarded [with explanations of community
policing] on sort of a constant basis, like water
torture. And that was the reason for giving a
statement about what community policing is, for
the Chief. I mean, the Mayor's been there, the
Chief has been there. He's been to roll call. He's
come back a couple of times and still you get
this: "Well I don't know what this shit [community
policing] is," you know? So I said . . . look,
we've got to come up with a statement about what
this is, you know, in the department as we
transition [to community policing], if you are
really going to do this. Because there's a lot of
rumor, there's a lot of mythology out there."

As seems to be the case generally, the early
inability of police departments to describe
adequately their community policing projects
contributed to the lack of patrol officer "buy in"
to the community policing concept, which, in turn,
produced widespread institutional skepticism of
and resistance to the INOP projects. This
skepticism and resistance are described in more
depth below.

Special Unit Status of INOP Projects. Because the
INOP projects constituted the first experience
with community policing for most of the
participating police departments, they were
usually constituted as distinct units within the
patrol force. While some degree of conflict
between community policing's reform agenda and the
traditional, para-military structures of most
police departments seems almost inevitable, the
introduction, through INOP, of community policing
as distinct, special units often exacerbated the
scale of this conflict. Of the departments
involved in the INOP program, only New York City
and Houston have a substantial history of
community policing as a department-wide approach
to crime and quality-of-life problems, and even
these two departments continue to experience heavy
resistance to community policing from patrol
officers. Given its claims to "empower" the patrol
officer and to place a new value on careers in
patrol, the goals of the INOP community policing
units consistently clashed with the institutional
expectations of the specialized, traditionally
structured police departments. These clashes
typically coalesced around long-standing issues in
policing and patrol deployment, such as police
productivity, resource allocation, career paths
and shift assignment.

The "special unit status" of the INOP projects was
a major factor perpetuating distrust between
police management and patrol officers, and
provided fertile ground for the growth of
resentment and bitterness between traditional
patrol officers and community-oriented officers.
One project administrator from Louisville
attributed the tendency to experiment with
community policing as a special unit to a larger
trend toward specialization within police
management:

"Look at all the police chiefs. You'll never find
a one that is a patrolman, or spent any time in
patrol. And you look at all the police chiefs
being chosen around the country, you'll find the
vast majority of them have been specialists as to
their career. So they take that mentality into the
chief's job and they try to build a specialist's
police department. And they end up dividing their
police force, you know, into the people who just
handle the [911] calls and the people who do the
real police work."

This statement describes precisely the kind of
schism between patrol and special units that
community policing is meant to close, empowering
and valuing the patrol officer as the most
important agent for police work. This
administrator felt that the value community
policing places on the patrol officer, and the
power and responsibility it places on his/her
shoulders, was the perfect solution to the
problems he associated with a department
structured around special units:

"And where I guess I see [community policing]
fitting in is, I see it just being integrated and
actually changing police departments . . . placing
emphasis on what the patrolman is doing out there,
and changing all of that specialist area."

A high-level administrator in Norfolk also thought
that the special unit status of this
community-policing project was the single most
important problem in its implementation and the
greatest threat to its future success.

"I'm studying a lot of programs throughout the
country. Any community policing project that has
ever come out of a designated unit, and
differentiated between specialized uniformed
officers and regular uniform officers has not
worked, throughout the country. That is the
biggest problem that I see with PACE."

A certain amount of the intra-departmental
resentment toward the INOP projects is
generalized, and might exist to one degree or
another between patrol and any other special unit,
or indeed even between any two special units
within a department. "Turf" battles and rivalries
among special units are common in most police
departments large enough to have them. Thus while
the INOP projects, due to their innovative and
non-traditional activities, come up for a special
kind of criticism and resentment, there is also
evidence to suggest that these police departments
were generally plagued by institutional conflicts
and resentments and turf battles between different
units and divisions. INOP officers in Prince
George's County, for example, summed up the police
subculture of intolerance in response to a
question about patrol's attitude toward the INOP
unit:

I: Is that sort of the general perception of
patrol, that you guys [INOP unit] don't do much of
anything?

R1: Exactly. I think the basic perception of most
of the police officers in the department is that
the work force is all the guys out there in the
trenches, the guys out there just responding to
domestic calls, the guys just the first ones
responding to shootings and stabbings, the guys
out there putting hands on people and getting
hands put on them. And that was my perception
[when I was a patrol officer], that I'm doing all
the work and everybody else in CID [Criminal
Investigations Division], they're just like
support for us, they come out here after we do the
dirty work, they go out and clean it up. And
that's what the consensus is.

R2: That would be true if we were working in CID,
it's the same thing: "You know they don't do as
much work as I do." And they would say, "You're
not doing as much work as we do in investigations
and follow-ups," and things like that. So it's
just a revolving point of concern saying, "I'm the
better guy than you are."

This institutional context of intra-departmental
rivalry created special difficulties for the
implementation of those INOP projects which
introduced community policing in the form of a
special patrol unit. These difficulties most
commonly took the form of a generalized resentment
of and resistance to community policing and the
INOP projects from patrol officers. This resis-
tance and resentment, in turn, tended to focus on
the recurring issues in policing discussed below.

Patrol Resentment of INOP Units: Resources and
Productivity. Regular patrol officers generally
felt some degree of resentment or animosity toward
the INOP project officers, or towards community
policing in general. These objections to the
community policing projects often stemmed from the
belief that community policing is a less
productive, and less labor- intensive, form of
policing than traditional patrol. Within the
context of strained police resources, these
supposedly "less productive" units come up for
special criticism. The issue of community policing
and police resources surfaced regularly in
conversations about how the INOP projects were
viewed by patrol officers. One administrator
involved in Norfolk's PACE project described his
discomfort with any criticism of the project that
focused on the issue of scant police resources:

"The community police officer seems like a
selective unit; they are a special unit in the
department. The other officers resent that; they
have a problem with that and, "How do we reconcile
that [with the fact that] we have resource
problems?" That sort of thing. We hear a lot of
that."

Many patrol officers in the INOP sites felt that
the community policing projects were safe havens
for officers who didn't want to work very hard. A
regular patrol officer in Prince George's County
described INOP project officers as not wanting to
be as "active" in making arrests as regular patrol
officers. This perception seems to stem from the
fact that community police officers there are not
required to answer 911 calls:

"I think a lot of it is because they have a lot
more freedom. I mean, they don't take calls,
they're probably not going to be doing very many
reports. They're kind of on their own. If they
[dispatchers] run out of cars because we're [patrol
officers] all tied up in court, they're not going
to give them [911 calls] to the COPS officer."

Patrol officers generally felt that community
police officers should respond to calls in their
beats, if only to serve as back up for regular
patrol. This was an issue even in Tempe's INOP
project, where officers involved in the Beat 16
Project responded to roughly half of all emergency
calls. It was a big enough issue for patrol morale
and the morale of INOP project officers that at
the time of the last site visit, Beat 16
administrators were lobbying their Chief for an
increase in manpower which, coupled with a
reorganization of the work shifts, they hoped
would allow Beat 16 personnel to answer all
emergency calls in the beat.

There is some evidence that the perception of
community policing as a less productive deployment
of police resources, and one where officers are
liberated from the radio and, therefore, unwilling
or unable to provide back up to patrol officers on
emergency calls, causes some discomfort to
officers involved in the INOP projects. An officer
involved in the Prince George's County community
policing unit funded under BJA's first year INOP
grant wondered whether members of the newer
community policing unit, created from second-year
funding, weren't perhaps making a concerted effort
to take emergency calls to gain acceptance from
the larger patrol force:

R: I get a general feeling that they're [the new
INOP unit] not going in quite the same direction as
we [the old INOP unit] are. And I don't know if
this is right or not, but it seems like they're
trying to . . . I don't know if they're trying to
be accepted because they take all these calls.

I: You mean to be accepted by the other officers?

R: That's what I'm wondering.

Just as officers in Prince George's County sought
the approval of their peers by continuing to handle
911 calls in their beats, officers who were
skeptical of the value of the INOP projects
expressed a grudging willingness to change their
minds if community policing could achieve
traditional law-enforcement goals. The key to
community policing's credibility, according to
these officers, was its ability to reduce 911
calls, reduce criminal activity and produce
arrests.

Special Unit Status and Resentment: Career Paths.
The perception that special units are elite
assignments where "hand-picked" officers work
toward promotion and advancement within the
department's command structure was an important
source of the resentment of the INOP projects among
patrol officers. In traditionally-structured
departments where patrol assignments and
special-unit assignments are distinct and mutually
exclusive categories, the INOP projects, seen by
many officers as special units within patrol,
represent a puzzling incursion of elitism and
specialization into the patrol force.

Police managers and academic proponents of
community policing are quick to point out that
their mission is to reverse the trend toward
increased police specialization by encouraging
patrol officers to become generalists and
problem-solvers rather than simply 911 call-takers.
These changes in the patrol function are loosely
termed "empowerment" in the community policing
literature. By "empowering" the patrol officer
(changing the role of patrol to include problem
identification, strategy design and community
outreach while at the same time including a new
element of accountability through fixed beat
assignments), police managers hope to make patrol a
more attractive career path for talented officers,
rather than "lose" that talent to special units.
While there is evidence that integrating community
policing into the career path for ambitious
officers may be a long-term process (McElroy et
al., 1993), the mere appearance of the INOP
community-policing projects as distinct units
within patrol has elicited a kind of defensive
skepticism from patrol officers not involved in
them.

The issues of promotion, advancement,
pay-for-performance and the special unit struc-
ture of most municipal police departments are
critical for any department considering the adop-
tion of community policing (Moore & Stephens,
1991). A project administrator in Louisville,
committed to neighborhood-oriented and
problem-solving policing, felt that the absence of
larger departmental changes, especially concerning
the special- unit structure of his department, had
eroded the credibility of the INOP project's notion
of officer empowerment:

"They [police management] were trying to take a
traditional organization and make it participatory
without going through the steps. And at the same
time, they were trying to implement a community
policing program. Now, empowering the patrol
officer was their gimmick. Yeah, that was the
gimmick to get officer involvement and to get them
to buy in and then to claim that you have this
entire community policing department because,
"Anybody can do problem solving." And by empowering
them to be able to contact [other city agencies
directly], that was another gimmick."

This same INOP project administrator explained
community policing's dilemma in terms of the
failure of the special-unit system, which typically
weakens the patrol officer, favoring instead those
who are picked for duties in special units:

"What community policing has pointed out is that by
emphasizing the role of the police officers in
fighting crime, lets say, that they [police
managers] have to change their entire organizations
to make that possible. And our organization is not
one that has traditionally been designed to do
that. It seems to be -- to take everything away
from these guys [patrol officers]. You know, strip
them to the bone. And what we've got, we give to
the special units, because we hand pick those
people, and we think they're the best people. 
They're the cream of the crop in the police
department, and we try to give them the best
resources that we have available, to have an
impact. And in my opinion, they have not had an
impact at all. But because all these people were
hand-picked, you don't want to confess to that, you
know." 

Similarly, a community police officer in Norfolk
viewed the widespread resentment of PACE as the
result of a larger institutional rivalry between
patrol and the detective bureau, the prototypical
special unit:

"It's the Haves and Have-nots. Detectives are
Haves, and the patrol officers are Have-nots. We've
got that kind of philosophy or kind of mentality, I
guess, throughout the police department. And it's
just kind of carried over here (i.e., PACE)."

These long-standing institutional rifts and
rivalries have serious implications for the
success of the INOP projects and for community
policing in general. Officers and administrators
in many sites identified senior officers with a
significant number of years in the department as
the most resistant to the changes brought by the
INOP projects and community policing. Presumably,
officers who had become thoroughly socialized to a
department in which the path to advancement
included assignment to a special unit and
promotion would be most resistant to any new
structure brought on by the advent of community
policing. An officer involved in Norfolk's
community policing project, for example, said:

"I was a field training officer before . . . and I
don't think the problem is with the new officers
coming on. I think they've been trained properly;
they know what to do. I think it's a lot of the
older officers that are set in their own ways and
don't want to change."

Senior patrol officers seemed to make up the
backbone of the resistance to the INOP projects
and the reforms they represent, largely because of
long-standing working styles gained from
performing years of traditional patrol work, but
also because they feel disenfranchised by a
management system which takes the best and
brightest out of patrol, and which has left them
behind. This is precisely the point made by one
officer in Norfolk in reaction to the above
comment made by his colleague:

". . . I don't think it's the old officers per se
[who are resistant to the INOP projects], I think
it's that specific officers that have been stepped
on so long that they don't care wherever you put
them at. You understand? The majority of the good,
older officers are highly specialized in all their
fields. You get them in the detective bureau, you
know, you got the good ones already gone to special
units, where they want to be. They're not in patrol
anymore, they're where they want to be and they're
doing their job at those particular areas. So
you've got [senior officers] down in patrol and
their objective is retirement . . . They got the
knowledge, but I mean, they just are set to the
point of where they're saying, "Hey, all I want to
do is do my eight hours and go home."

While the intrusion of the INOP projects and their
community policing agenda into the long-standing
promotional structure of departments which rely on
the distinctions between patrol and specialized
units has caused many senior patrol officers to
become embittered and resistant to reforms, it has
also inspired some officers to become involved in
community policing. This is particularly the case
in departments which have expressed intentions to
expand their community policing initiatives. An
officer in Prince George's County, for example,
described how the department's plans for expanding
the INOP project and adopting community policing
as an important element of their patrol force
deployment had led some officers to believe that
the INOP projects were the new career path to
promotion:

Recently, it was in the past couple of months,
there's been a lot, a lot more interest in
community policing from patrol officers. You get a
lot more people putting in for it because they
see, you know, "Hey, this is where this
department's going, and I'm going to get into this
and learn while I can."

Officers involved in the INOP projects often
expressed their belief that community policing
would gain widespread acceptance in their
department only after a generation of younger
officers, trained in community policing from the
beginning of their careers, had filled the ranks.
While training plays an important role in the
future success or failure of community policing,
new officers will not invest their energies in it
unless community policing is integrated into a
department's career path. 

Regular Hours. One group of patrol officers
described the lure of community-oriented police
work entirely in terms of the regular weekends off
they could expect as members of the INOP unit. 
Regular weekends, originally designed to draw more
senior officers into the program, have made
community policing a "plum" job in many of the
sites, available only to those who have "got some
strings to pull." Patrol officers in Houston
described the INOP officers as trying to protect
their coveted assignments by seeming to expend
considerable energy in what they saw as a
relatively undemanding assignment:

And now it's the type of thing where, they got a
nice, cushy job - - they only got to run their
little calls, and their little projects, and they
go to make a few meetings and so forth. Okay,
granted, some shifts might work heavier than
others, but they don't want to lose their little
job right now, so they turn around and put as much
as they can on their work cards to make it look
good, "Whew! We really did a lot of community work
that day!"

Officers assigned to the project in Portland had a
similar story of the evolving popularity of the
community policing unit, with similar
justifications for this change. As in Houston,
when the Portland project initially solicited for
volunteers, it was unpopular. As one officer
reported, ". . . Quite honestly, when this job [as
an officer in the INOP project] opened up it was
like three people that applied." Even officers who
volunteered for the Portland INOP project reported
having serious doubts about joining the new unit:

R1: I had to twist this guy's arm to drag him in
[to the unit].

R2: I waffled several times: "Day shift, weekends
off . . . that would be nice! Community meetings?
Forget it, I want to drive fast at night!" I went
back and forth. Finally decided, "Well, give it a
shot."

Ultimately, the lure of consistent day shifts with
regular weekends off tilted the scales for this
particular officer. These are the same perquisites
which officers in Houston described as
contributing to the current reputation of
community policing as a "nice little job," the
kind of assignment that comes only with
connections. The officer in Portland for whom the
work schedule of the fledgling INOP project proved
the decisive factor in the decision to volunteer
for duty also reported that these same
considerations are now contributing to a certain
popularity of community policing among many patrol
officers. An officer in Portland reported that, ".
. . officers are now scheming on ways to try to
get into the [INOP] unit if, and when it ever
expands full-time."

Overestimating INOP's Potential Effects. Another
factor affecting the legitimacy of the INOP
projects among patrol officers was overestimates
of the potential effects of the projects. In
trying to "sell" the new projects to resistant
officers, police managers in many INOP sites
described community policing's potential benefits
too broadly and optimistically, and thus helped to
create a crisis of credibility among police
officers. By inculcating unreasonable expectations
for its success in the process of describing its
goals, police managers gave naysayers an open
opportunity for criticism if the project failed to
deliver the promised effects (a potential problem
identified by Klockars (1988) and Manning (1988)).

INOP officers in all sites felt that, just as
community policing needs time to overcome the
label of "management reorganization of the week,"
so too it needs time to demonstrate the effects
and efficiencies which it claims to produce. These
officers felt that critics of the projects were
pointing prematurely to failures which had not had
sufficient time to mature into successes. (This
phenomenon was also observed in community
policing's crisis of credibility among community
residents.) One INOP officer in Portland felt that
he had to defend the project against its
detractors, and that the institutional
expectations for community policing were so high
as to cause a general misunderstanding of it
goals:

I don't think that people should teach that
community policing is going to fix everything.
Community policing is just another way of
addressing a continuing problem that has been
around since we have had to live together in a
community, and that is crime. And it is not
something we are going to look at in five years
and say, "I told you it wasn't going to fix our
neighborhood." It was never designed to do that,
it was designed to . . . address these many
problems that are going to happen instead of
slapping everyone in jail all the time. I think a
lot of officers and people are looking at it as,
"That will fix the whole problem."

The low level of credibility accorded the INOP
projects within their respective police
departments is often expressed by officers through
the use of pejorative labels. Labeling of the
projects involves concretizing a range of
judgments about them in a single name or phrase,
often a corruption of the acronyms given to the
INOP projects. For example, when asked if they had
heard of the INOP acronym, officers in Houston
recognized only the last three letters, which
represent their community policing initiative
("Neighborhood-Oriented Policing" or NOP):

I: Is that a familiar acronym, INOP?

R1: Just N-O-P is what we call it. Amongst other
things! (Laughter.)

R2: Yeah. We on patrol heard that: "Not Our
Problem," "Nobody On Patrol." (More laughter.)

One chief in Houston felt that by not using the
community policing acronym, he could overcome a
great deal of the institutional resistance to
community policing:

The words NOP [Neighborhood-Oriented Policing] are
no longer used in the Houston Police Department
because they became a curse word to the officers,
or to a good many of them . . . we don't use NOP,
as everyone in the United States knows that it
came to mean here "Never On Patrol." And so I
don't use the word, I don't use the word at all
and we don't use it in our documents . . .

Such derogatory labels are a manifestation of the
conflictive relationship between police management
and line officers who feel that community policing
is already a failure. The Houston chief quoted
above went on to describe how the community
policing "curse word" was used by officers as a
way of expressing their dislike of police
management:

. . . The concept [of community policing] itself
became, I guess a trigger word for mistreatment
that they [line officers] feel from the city
government and from the management of the police
department. And it became one of the things that
contributed to the polarization between the
working officers and the management of the
department.

The persistent labeling of the INOP projects by
officers who were not involved in them thus
reflects the difficulties of implementing a
management reform like community policing within
an environment which is characterized by a
"polarization between the working officers and the
management of the department." This polarization,
what Ianni and Ianni (1983) describe as a fixture
of the "two cultures of policing," is a major
issue for the credibility of the community
policing reforms which the INOP projects
represent.

Community Policing as "New-Old" Idea. There was
another pattern of behavior, related to the
labeling phenomenon, observed across sites, and
that was only marginally less harmful to the INOP
project innovations. In virtually every site, most
officers would describe the kind of community
policing implemented through the INOP projects as
nothing new, but rather as just "good, old-
fashioned policing." As one officer said:

. . . I think a lot of officers have got the same
feeling I do. It [community policing] is not really
a program. I mean, it's not something that you can
bring in and say, "This is the way we're going to
be doing things." It's just on how you deal with
people, and if you dealt with people on a human
standpoint before this, you were being a
community-based police officer . . . Some officers
that have been around for a while, I speculate that
they may balk at the idea of having to change their
style. But if they've been successful in the past
in dealing with people, they're not really going to
have to change their style. They're just going to
have to call it community-based policing as opposed
to whatever they called it before.

By arguing that the INOP projects are essentially
asking officers to engage in the kind of "good
policing" that many of them have been doing for
years, officers resistant to community policing
reform make a case for the continuation of the
status quo.

Officers in all sites routinely described the
community policing of the INOP project as a return
to the "beat cop" of the past. One officer in
Louisville felt that the basic ideas of community
policing were as old as policing itself.

I think it [community policing] is an old concept
of policing. Because if you go back to the history
of police departments, the old English policemen
when they came to this country, an [INOP] program
existed then. So what we're seeing is the old
policing revised for the nineties . . .

While different officers chose to anchor their
views of the present-day INOP projects in different
moments of history, they always described the beat
cop as a fixture of some period when police and
citizens, according to these officers, enjoyed a
better, more trusting relationship.

Although the historical placement of community
policing was occasionally espoused by officers
making a case for the validity of the INOP
projects, it was more often used by officers who
were skeptical of the value of the INOP reforms as
a way of distancing themselves from institutional
changes while still claiming to be good police
officers. This attitude was common among officers
who expressed resistance to the INOP projects and
community policing in general, and demonstrates
that the distrust of police management (and their
"projects") lies at the heart of their resistance
to change. One officer in Houston spoke of
community policing as a basic part of traditional
police work, and so resented being told to do it by
police managers. Indeed, officers in all eight
sites often argued that much of the rank and file
resentment to community policing was grounded in
the philosophy "being shoved down their throats" by
superiors:

Well, it [community policing] is something that
we've been doing since day one as police officers:
go out and talk to people wherever you're working.
But whenever they [management] start ramming it
down your throat with a battering ram, it gets kind
of old.

Officers who espoused this particular view of
community policing invariably pointed out that,
unlike the INOP projects, "good policing" has had
no need for a management-devised acronym, label, or
special unit, and that it used to be done on the
initiative of dedicated patrol officers, not on
that of police managers and academics. They also
implied that the INOP projects and community
policing are merely a management fad, and that
"good policing" will still be done by good cops
long after INOP has been replaced by another new
program. However, this particular view of community
policing was made possible largely by the general
lack of knowledge of community policing among
officers espousing it. As the officer quoted above
who attributed to community policing only a mandate
to "go out and talk to people," so most of those
who felt that community policing was an old idea
seemed to be referring almost exclusively to its
community outreach component.

Perceived Loss of Enforcement Abilities. Those
officers who laid claim to the
"get-out-and-talk-to-people" definition of
community policing by saying it was what good cops
had been doing for years, later claimed that
community policing was simultaneously hamstringing
officers by putting too many restraints on police
powers. For example, one INOP officer in Houston
described how a new concern for the community had
compromised traditional policing's aggressive
enforcement tactics:

When we all came out on the street, we were taught
this is what policemen do: you can't let the crooks
take over the area. You have to take over the area.
If there was something you didn't like or you saw
something suspicious, go out put your hands on it.
But so many of the younger people were trained in
the later part of the seventies and early eighties,
they weren't trained to get out and aggressively go
after these people, they were trained, "Well, you
have liabilities, you've got to be careful if you
unlawfully detain this person, even if you are just
talking to them."

In all the sites, community policing's perceived
lack of an aggressive enforcement component was
shown to be the biggest single stumbling block to
the acceptance of the INOP projects by non-project
officers. Asked about morale in their department,
one group of patrol officers in Houston felt that
the loss of certain discretionary enforcement
powers, which they associated with the rise of
community policing, was having a deleterious
effect:

Why will the upper echelon and what-not, why will
they not allow the street officers, the trench
officers to be out there fighting crimes? You get
burnt out because you see the crime going on, but
yet they tell you to smile and wave at people.

For these officers, community policing's "smile and
wave" directives are hated not simply because they
come from the "upper echelons," but because they
are perceived as eroding the traditional
crime-fighting mandate of police.

The Fleeting Nature of Police Programs. The
perception that the changes in their job
description have a political rather than
law-enforcement origin provides another point of
resistance to community policing among patrol
officers. By turning project acronyms into
pejoratives (e.g., N.O.P. into "Nobody On Patrol"),
officers distance themselves from institutional
change, taking comfort that a long list of "new
projects" and "restructurings," each with its own
acronym, have come and gone without significantly
changing the way policing gets done. Despite his
support for Norfolk's INOP project, an
administrator described his officers' frustration
with the pace of this renaming of supposedly "new"
police projects:

. . . And even since we started this [INOP project]
we've changed the names several times. You all come
in as INOP and now that acronym's out. Last week or
the week before we went to some training called
POPS or Problem-Oriented Policing, so already the
officers and the supervisors are saying, "Gee, we
have INOP, we have POPS, we had PACE, so is there
any difference between the three and what we had
prior to that? You know, years ago?"

The quick succession of repackagings which has
taken place since the current round of police
reforms began in the '70s has convinced many
officers that all "new" police projects are driven
by political pressures put on police and city
management, and are thus inherently of dubious
value.

Much of the resistance patrol officers display
towards community policing is therefore generic,
the result of the low credibility of any
management-instituted change or reform. The typical
justification for this low credibility is the
perception that each new political administration
and each new police chief institutes reforms,
renaming old services and developing "innovative"
projects without fundamentally changing police
work. The high turnover in police administrators
makes for a high turnover of new police programs,
none of which have the time to prove their merits.
As one officer in Portland said:

As a police department, we don't trust . . . every
time we get a new chief or something, we have had a
lot of them recently, and they always come up with
a new program, got to change everything. So there
is a certain amount of credibility community
policing needs to be credible. It has to stick
around a while and not be somebody else's new idea.

Management's Failure to Include Officers in
Planning.  Within this context of skepticism for
"new" programs and of strained relations between
patrol officers and police managers, most officers
felt that community policing was happening to them,
not with them. The perceived lack of any
good-faith effort to explain the new INOP project
or community policing unit, or to communicate the
department's future plans for community policing
created another problem for officer "buy in." As
management reacts to political realities, patrol
officers feel disoriented and abandoned. An officer
in Houston, for example, reported:

Nobody's in charge any more, you know? That's the
biggest problem [with community policing]. They
come to us and they tell us something in roll call,
and the next thing they say is "Well, we're going
to restructure the whole deal, and it's going to
take place by so-and-so a date." Wait around. By
this time, everybody just thinks to themselves,
"I'll believe it when I see it." Because they tell
us so many things.

Many officers thus believe that directives come
down from the "bosses" without any form of
consultation, or any attempt to bring patrol
officers into the decision-making process. Patrol
officers in Hayward felt that the widespread
resistance to community policing was a reaction to
the way management had implemented it, rather than
the result of the goals or methods of community
policing:

I don't think [there is] a problem with the concept
or the philosophy of COPPS [Hayward's INOP project
acronym]. In your job, if your boss comes in and
says, "I'm going to cram this up your nose or down
your throat -- you're going to accept it!" that's
where you're going to have problems. And that's
where we're having problems internally.

This general acceptance of the "philosophy" of
community policing expressed by the Hayward officer
quoted above was not as common in other sites or
among other police respondents as was the
resentment of the manner of implementation of
community policing and the INOP projects. While
officers across sites often expressed their
distaste for certain aspects of the community
policing "philosophy," they were almost unanimous
in their criticism of what they considered the
heavy-handed style of its implementation. This is
an especially interesting critique of community
policing in light of its claims to "empower" the
patrol officer. This officer empowerment is roughly
parallel to the community empowerment, which is
also an objective of community policing. But
whereas community policing emphasizes bringing
community residents into the police decision-making
process and into the process of identifying
community problems, management often does not seem
concerned to do the same for its patrol officers.

Consider this description of the new efforts
community policing is making in regard to including
community residents in police operations and
decisions, a reaction against the "professional
era" of policing:

It's building trust, and that's something that we
didn't do in this profession prior to the '80s when
we started looking at neighborhood-oriented
policing or community-based policing. Because basi-
cally people, the citizens, didn't know how we
operated. And we basically operated in a vacuum. We
implemented our policies ourselves. We told the
citizens, "We know what's best for you, so we'll
give you what's best for you." We didn't take out
the time to hear what their concerns were. And
basically, I don't think we created an environment
that they could come and talk to us.

The desire for this kind of openness with the
community is directly at odds with the kind of
relationship that community policing seems to
foster between management and the majority of
patrol officers. For example, when asked why most
officers in Houston don't understand, and therefore
don't support community policing, one officer
traced patrol officers' general resistance to
precisely this issue in management relations:

I think it has to do with the officers' ability to
change. Change is a big issue, no matter what it
is. Beat integrity was frightening to us. "How dare
you say stay in my beat! Are you kidding me?" Well,
that's change. Inevitably, it happened, and it took
a lot of lumps and bruises, some officers getting
suspended. I mean, we're serious about this [beat
integrity]. There's a reason why we need to do it.
But they never told us why: shorter response time,
you get to familiarize yourself with the areas, you
get to know the community people, who's in your
area, both the crooks and the good citizens. That
wasn't explained to us, it was rammed down our
throats. So management had a major influence on how
we initially were introduced to community-oriented
policing . . . I don't think the police department,
as far as management, took into account the
resistance to change, no matter what concept they
were going to initiate. And I don't see that
officers' aptitude is the issue; it's the attitude
that's the issue. The management was not willing to
accept that the officers' attitude just wasn't
ready for that type of philosophy.

By failing to take as much care to include their
own personnel in community policing as they do to
include the general public, police managers have
begun to further distance their already alienated
patrol officers.

INOP Projects and Individual Officers. The new role
that the INOP projects set out to create for the
police officer, with its emphasis on community
outreach and interaction, problem-solving, and
leading other service providers to attack problems,
requires a new outlook and a new set of skills from
officers. The very notion of "empowering the patrol
officer" to complete this new set of tasks
demonstrates the extent to which community
policing, unlike some other policing reforms,
concerns itself primarily with the individual
officer. Indeed, much of the resistance to the INOP
projects among regular patrol officers can be
traced to the scale of change in the police
officer's basic job description and therefore in
his/her occupational identity.

Officers involved in the INOP projects and those
not involved both thought that certain
personalities and abilities were more suited than
others to the new community policing role. The
introduction of questions of individual temperament
into community policing underscores the importance
of the individual officer in the successful
implementation of the INOP projects. INOP officers
in Louisville described community policing as more
of a state of mind, a question of an individual
officer's motivation, than an institutional
mandate. They felt that individual officers could
implement community policing by themselves,
irrespective of their participation in a special
program:

. . . Yeah, we've got people who utilize the
concept of the COP program who are not involved in
it. That's just an individual who will take his job
a step further and get on the phone, come in here
to do an investigation and call the different
agencies and people they know can best help them
get from point A to point B . . . It's really a
matter of the individual's motivation. We've got
officers doing COP stuff all the time.

The critical importance of certain police personnel
for the success of the INOP projects was a fixture
of the projects in all sites, and manifested itself
in several ways. For example, community policing's
concern with the individual patrol officer, when
combined with the failure of officers to "buy into"
the INOP project commonly produced a situation in
which a few dedicated and knowledgeable police
personnel essentially carried the entire INOP
effort. The problems of institutional credibility
common to all the INOP projects thus placed an
increased responsibility for their success on a
small, core-group of officers, supervisors and
project administrators involved with the
projects.

In some of the INOP sites, the project relied on
one or two specific individuals. Officer and
resident respondents argued that the projects would
falter without those individuals. In one INOP site,
where broader departmental support for the project
seemed contingent on continued federal funding, an
administrator felt that in his absence, his
District would go back to "business as usual":

I: Are all the other captains in favor of community
policing?

R: No, not necessarily.

I: So what happens when you get somebody in here
who is -- [not supportive of the INOP project and
community policing]?

R: Well, it becomes less of a priority, the whole
program will be less of a priority. We'll probably
go back to business as usual.

The importance of individual supervisors was more
commonly demonstrated by the variation in the
"styles" of different supervisors. This variation,
which is common in traditional departments and
units, is more pronounced in the INOP setting where
the newness of, complexity of and resistance to
community policing increases the latitude for
individual interpretation of its goals. This was
the situation described by an administrator in
Norfolk:

Each individual supervisor, being a human being,
may interpret this [INOP project goals] one way or
another. And of course we can't be out there with
them. . . I'm sure that there are some supervisors
who, just like any other police department, would
say: "I don't agree with A, B and C, so we're going
to do E, F, G'. . . And the same thing occurs with
individual officers.

While for Norfolk's PACE program, the influence of
individual supervisors could lead to different
definitions of community policing from shift to
shift, in Prince George's County, the importance
of INOP supervisors was underscored by the
differences between the two INOP units themselves.
An officer from one of the INOP squads, when
questioned about the relationship between his
squad and the other squad, said, "I get a general
feeling that they're not going in quite the same
direction as we are." Here two definitions of
community policing, held by the two supervising
sergeants of the two INOP project units, resulted
in a lack of interaction and useful cooperation
between the officers from those units:

R: We unfortunately don't have the greatest working
relationship with the other squad, and I think it's
more so because of the sergeant, or the sergeants,
I should say.

I: There are two?

R: Well, our sergeant and their sergeant. They
don't see -- She has her perception of the way
things should be going from what she's read. He's
got his perception of the way it should be from
what he's actually done. . . . So he knows from
actually doing it [community policing] and she just
assumes from reading, and they just seem to be
bumping heads and it's affecting us . . .

The ability of individual supervisors to influence
the type of community policing that gets done in a
particular unit or during a particular shift is an
important issue for Prince George's County's INOP
project, just as it is for Norfolk's. While a few
of the INOP projects used only one supervisor, the
increased importance of these individuals is a
serious concern for any proposed expansion of the
INOP projects.

Individual Officers and their Effect on the
Projects. Each INOP project is heavily influenced
by the "working styles" of its officers and their
supervisors. Michael Brown (1981:221) has suggested
that the formation of highly individualized styles
of policing are developed by police officers, based
on solidarity among officers in concert with an
ethos of individualism and the "debureaucratizing"
effects of limited formal administrative controls
over officers in the field. Thus, police behavior
is guided by an officer's subjective assessment of
a given situation based upon his/her values and
beliefs -- these values and beliefs are translated
into a consistent pattern of behavior and
constitute an officer's working style. The basic
components of a working style, according to Brown
(1981:223) are:

. . . style initially derives from the choices a
patrolman must make about how to work the street.
. . .  Patrolmen could be differentiated in terms
of two characteristics: how aggressive they were in
the pursuit of the goal of crime control, and how
selective they were in the enforcement of the law.
Beliefs toward aggressiveness and selectivity are
the core elements of a patrolman's operational
style.

A problem affecting the implementation of community
policing is that traditional policing has
emphasized and rewarded officers who are highly
aggressive in the enforcement of the law and who
are highly selective (i.e., who make felony arrests
a priority), what Brown refers to as the "crime
fighter" style of policing. Community policing, by
contrast, seeks officers who are problem-solvers
and who treat criminal and non-criminal
quality-of-life problems as equally worthy of their
attention. Community policing thus seeks, to use
Brown's term, a "professional" officer -- such
officers approach cases involving criminal
misconduct and calls involving less serious
quality-of-life problems in the same thorough
manner.

Because of its emphasis on interaction with the
community, community policing can stand or fall on
the public perception of an individual officer and
of the work s/he does. This increased importance of
the individual officer is demonstrated in the
emphasis placed by community policing on the
continuity of the beat officer. By maintaining
stable assignments to specific areas, community
policing hopes to foster partnerships between the
beat officer and community residents. Reacting to
what they perceived as the reassignment of the
original INOP officers, agency representatives in
Portland criticized any police policy which led to
officer turnover in the INOP project, stating that,
"it gets more difficult as time goes on to have to
re-establish that trust relationship over and over
and over with different people, with officers from
different shifts as well."

Public perceptions of the INOP projects therefore
rested almost entirely on the performance of
individual officers. The following statement comes
from an INOP project officer who had recently taken
over a particular beat from an INOP officer whom
the residents felt had not been doing a good job.
The officer feels that his community's perception
of the INOP project in general rested almost
entirely on their perception of him:

That was the biggest problem I had was the
transition from taking over where he left off. Some
of the community perception about him wasn't as
favorable for him and the job that he did, and some
of the community members kind of had a stigma that
that's the way I was going to be also. Since then
I've managed to swing everybody's opinion about me
and about the program very well.

While this demonstrates that the public perception
of the projects rested on the performance of
specific INOP officers, it had little effect on the
public perception of police officers generally.
Thus while the negative perception of a single
officer had a negative effect on the public
perception of the INOP project, the good reputation
of a particular INOP officer did not generally
translate into a more positive public perception of
other police officers. A project supervisor in
Tempe described how the good relationship between a
few young community residents and certain INOP
officers seemed to exacerbate their dislike of
other officers:

For a while we were having problems, and we still
do every once in a while, with the kids [who live
in the INOP target area]. They know all the
officers on the beat [INOP officers]; they may not
be crazy about all of them, but if an outside cop
comes in to try to arrest them, they get awfully
ticked off. And . . . they don't like the other
officers' approach sometimes. We had a problem not
long ago and I asked them, "Well, if you had to be
arrested, who would you want to arrest you?" And
they named almost everybody on the [INOP] team.
They said the other people don't respect them and
don't treat them right, and you know, they
sometimes have a point.

By excluding beat officers from other shifts in
whatever training INOP officers may have received
for their projects, the police departments made
the distinction between the "good" officers
(usually project officers) and "everyone else"
(non- project officers).

Resources. Officers in the INOP sites reported
that community policing was more time-consuming
and required more police resources than
traditional policing. In particular, community
outreach and problem-solving were the two specific
activities that officers identified as being the
most labor-intensive, the most time-consuming, and
the most difficult to integrate with their more
traditional police duties.

Most police officers (and many community
residents) felt that their police departments were
understaffed and overworked. Officers in Houston
were very concerned about the shrinking of the
Houston Police Department in the late 1980s, for
example. Officers in Prince George's County,
Portland and Louisville expressed concern over the
way the fiscal crises in their local government
budgets would affect staffing levels in their
departments. Indeed, these fiscal and manpower
issues played an important part in the way the
INOP projects were viewed by police officers. Many
officers in Houston, who had faced a wage freeze
for several years and had seen the closing of
their police academy and the shrinking of their
police force through attrition, viewed the INOP
project as merely a way to collect extra money
through overtime. One officer familiar with the
INOP project implementation gave this account of
the part that grant funds played in this larger
issue of police resources:

Federal money was spent to boost morale on people
that were underpaid. This was just a way for them
[patrol officers] to make a little extra money
without busting their ass, so the federal money
went to boost morale.

This kind of resources-oriented approach to
community policing was not uncommon. Officers and
supervisors who were unfamiliar with community
policing often considered the INOP project in
light of the likelihood it would ease or
exacerbate perceived police resource problems. A
project administrator in Norfolk described the
general police perception that most crime
conditions require additional police resources,
and how this perception turned an exercise in
problem-solving into a bid for a traditional,
manpower-intensive strategy:

R: Everybody's solution is, "More police officers
patrolling the area." I mean, that's everybody's
solution. They want more cops. If you tell them,
"We'll put more people in there," then they're
happy. We just did the thing with -- the
problem-solving thing. So I had everybody submit
cards about their problems in their car districts,
because I was going to have them pick some
problems and work on them. We know how things get
twisted around. And the lieutenants send me a
letter, each one from each sector, and it lists
the problem and it lists the solution.

I: More cars?

R: Yeah! "High intensity patrol." And I said,
"This is crap! You ain't getting no high-intensity
patrol!" You know, got forty problems and the
solution to each one of them is to put more police
there! And we're just kind of keeping afloat now.
"You're not getting that. You're all going to have
to do better than that. You're going to have to
select one problem, and the solution ain't no
high-intensity patrol."

Since police staffing levels and resources are
perennial issues for police departments, the
interaction between community policing and
concerns over police resources will be crucial for
the future of community policing. Within the
general context of scarce police resources,
community policing either can hold out the promise
of 911 call reduction or threaten to stretch
existing resources even thinner by adding
time-consuming tasks to the list of police duties.
Even officers who believed that community policing
would eventually lead to a reduction in 911 calls
for service and an easing of manpower constraints,
felt that it would require additional investments
in manpower initially.

Concerns about community policing's impact on
police resources were reported as a major factor
in the lack of support for the INOP projects, and
for community policing generally, among police
unions in at least two INOP sites (Portland and
Houston). Portland's Police Bureau, which is
making a department-wide transition to community
policing, did not have support from its police
union for this very reason:

In this Bureau . . . we have had a union that
takes a negative view of the community policing
program for a number of reasons: they say it is a
manpower shortage, and we can't do it because
we're are not equipped to do it. We need money and
manpower, and until we do have that, we shouldn't
be talking about it [making the transition to
community policing].

Officers interviewed in all eight INOP sites all
raised concerns about community policing and
police resources. Their concerns fall into two
basic categories: concerns having to do with 911
calls for service and problem-solving and
community outreach activities; and concerns having
to do with the size of the areas
community-oriented officers are assigned to work.

Resources and 911 Calls for Service. Officers who
felt that community policing was too
resource-intensive to be successful in today's
budgetary climate often cited the overwhelming
demands of 911 calls for service as the main
reason for the conflict between traditional
policing and community policing activities.
These officers found it difficult to reconcile
their new role as problem-solvers and leaders of
an interagency consortium of public service
providers with the fact that they must still
answer calls about such things as barking dogs and
loud music:

R1: That's where the resources are out of our
hands.

R2: Well, that's what I mean. That's where the
confusion is, is that for us to take on this
greater leadership role and get involved in the
causes of problems and long term . . . We can't do
[traditional] police work. We can't, after all the
loud music calls, we can't . . .

The question of resources becomes confused with
what police officers see as the incompatibility of
their role as long-term problem solver with that
of the "radio cop" answering "junk calls" like
loud music complaints. INOP officers generally
felt that the demands of community outreach and
problem-solving were such that they prohibited
answering 911 dispatches. One INOP officer in
Tempe described the tension between answering
calls for service and working closely with
community residents in terms of the different
kinds of demands these two activities made on her
time:

One of the problems I've run into is I was
supposed to kind of work with the schools as much
as I could. Yet we're supposed to handle all the
calls of Beat 16. It can't be done if you're the
only person out there mostly. I mean, you can't go
to the school and tell the people you're going to
be there and then 10 minutes later have a burglary
come out and you've got to run off. . . I just
don't think there's really enough [manpower] to do
what we're supposed to be able to do.

Officers in Louisville expressed a similar
frustration with institutional expectations that
they felt were pulling them in opposite
directions, and that therefore were stretching
already minimal resources too thin. This is
another illustration of the perceived difficulty
surrounding the incompatibility of answering 911
calls and working closely with the community:

In the old days, a policeman, he knew his
businesses, he knew his beat, he knew his area and
the people. He knew the thieves. We're spread so
thin now that you can't do that . . . We get out
and talk to people, but you're constantly on calls
. . . We don't have enough police officers to
handle this program. We need more, see, if you're
going to take people off the street and get them
doing this [community outreach] and walking [the
beat] . . .

While most officers felt that interacting with
community residents was an extra duty which
necessarily would consume extra time, there was
also a general consensus that community policing
activities required a different kind of time from
that required to perform traditional police
functions. Just as the officer in Tempe felt that
she needed large blocks of uncommitted time to
develop a relationship with schoolchildren in her
beat, so too officers in Norfolk felt that working
with community residents demanded a new work
flexibility which was directly at odds with
responding to 911 calls. For these officers, the
issue was maintaining credibility with community
residents by appearing responsive to their needs
while still answering some portion of the 911
dispatches in their beats:

. . . We are supposed to be able to, if a citizen
sees something and wants to call us, that we're
not supposed to tell them, "Well, we're doing
something else. I've got to go." You know, can't
do that. . . So we have to be able to, if this
person comes up to me and wants to either give me
information or wants to tell me something, or if
he needs me to address a problem for him, I'm
supposed to be able to do it, and I need that
freedom and that time. I can't be worrying about
handling an accident that's going to tie me up for
two hours.

The tension between answering 911 calls and
conducting problem-solving and outreach was a
crucial issue for the INOP project in Tempe. INOP
officers working in the project's target area were
able to answer roughly 50% of the 911 calls
dispatched there. Project administrators and
supervisors estimated that, depending on which
shift they worked, officers could expect to spend
between 50% and 80% of their time just answering
calls. Because officers working nights tended to
spend closer to 80% of their time answering 911
calls, the opportunity to do community- policing
activities fell disproportionately to day-shift
workers, who were invariably the officers with
seniority. In the words of one project supervisor,
the staffing-levels for the INOP project led to a
situation in which, "We've got some officers doing
all the community-oriented stuff and some officers
so busy they don't have time." An administrator in
Tempe's INOP project felt that, because of the
demands made on the officers to answer 911 calls,
much of the project's community-policing agenda
was given short shrift:

The one problem that I have is we never really had
a chance to give this [the INOP project] a fair
shake. We're given half the manpower to handle the
calls for service, and as a result the [non-INOP]
officers don't think about the administrative
things, all they know is that time after time
they're being called into Beat 16 to take their
paper, and they're like "Where the hell are the
Beat 16 guys?" What they don't realize, even
though they've been told and they don't think
about it, is that we're not given enough people to
do it [answer all the calls for service]. I would
really like to have five or six more people to
give it [INOP project goals] a fair shake.

In this case, the staffing levels of the INOP
project also contributed to strained relations
between the INOP project staff and regular patrol
officers, who were forced to enter the project's
target area to answer roughly half the calls for
service. These strained relations were a great
concern to Tempe's INOP project officers, who
reported that they were consequently wary of
becoming involved in community-policing activities
for fear of being unable to answer incoming calls
for service:

I hate to say it, but . . . I don't want to do
things that are going to take me away from
answering the calls in the beat because if I was
working the other beats, hey, I'd probably feel
just like they do: "We come into your beat, have
to take stuff [calls for service], but you never
leave your beat." And it's just, the problem is
shortage of manpower or ladypower -- personpower.

Resources and Beat Size. One of the features of
community policing common to all of the INOP sites
is the assignment of community policing officers
to a fixed geographic area. In contrast to common
patrol work schedules, which have officers
rotating out of one sector or District and into
another on some kind of schedule, community
policing underscores the importance of a police
officer's relationship with and accountability to
the community s/he works by stressing the
importance of the stability of geographic
assignments. Community policing "beats" are
typically smaller than the geographic designations
that apply to radio motor patrol, often allowing
the community-oriented officer the opportunity to
walk the beat and to become a recognizable figure
in that area. This is the case with community
policing in New York City and in Prince George's
County.

However, most of the INOP projects did not
subdivide their pre-existing system of
geographical deployment to accommodate the
community policing agenda of the INOP projects.
INOP sites like Tempe, Hayward and Houston instead
assured the continuity of the community policing
officer in a particular area by "permanently"
assigning certain officers to pre-existing patrol
sectors. INOP officers in all the INOP sites
described the size of the area they were
responsible for as a resource issue for community
policing. In Louisville, officers volunteering for
problem-solving were given no specific area as a
target for their efforts, and consequently felt
that the INOP project stretched their resources
too thin:

. . . With the manpower we have now, it [community
policing] is not real feasible because so much
crime is spread out, and we're scattered so thin
that you have to pretty much stay in your car and
get from one run to another. And when you do get
out and take time to stop and talk to somebody,
then you've got a fender-bender over here that
you've got to rush over to. . . You get another
run and you're across town again, and you may not
see this guy for a whole 'nother week after that.
You may not even be in his area. We need more
police on the street and get back to the
neighborhood.

For Louisville's INOP project officers, the sheer
size of the area in which they focused their
problem-solving presented difficulties. This was
also the case in Prince George's County, where a
single INOP officer might be assigned a beat with
a population of 70,000. Some INOP officers in
Norfolk also felt that the areas for which they
were responsible were too large. Several officers
worked beats that consisted of as many as three
distinct, non-contiguous areas.  This issue of
beat size had serious implications for the
community orientation of the INOP projects, as
individual officers felt that they were assigned
to police a number of different "communities." One
officer in Norfolk's PACE project described the
difficulties of being assigned a large beat area
in just these terms. "We cover too much of an
area. Too big of an area. And that is, that it's
hard to address three different communities that
have three different problems."

Concerns about police resources thus touch on
several important issues for community policing,
ranging from the temporal and geographic
deployment of community-oriented police officers
to officer morale and relations between INOP
project officers and those engaged in regular
patrol activities. Any proposed expansion of the
INOP projects will necessarily propel these
concerns about police resources to the fore in any
discussion of community policing.  

CHAPTER 4

Interagency Involvement in the INOP Programs

Interagency involvement is probably the least
discussed and perhaps the least well-implemented
component of community policing in the INOP sites
and in other cities around the country. As was
discussed in Chapter 3, many of the INOP projects
were perceived to rest on just one individual, and
that person was usually a police administrator or
a beat officer. Even in those cities where the
INOP project was well-integrated into the
department or sector in which the project was
implemented (e.g., Prince George's County),
involvement of other city agencies or private
agencies was minimal. The only site that was an
exception was Norfolk; in fact, it is the
involvement of all city agencies that makes
Norfolk's PACE program notable. But for community
policing to be successful, it must incorporate
problem-solving policing into its design, and no
police department can do effective and efficient
problem-solving without the active involvement of
other city agencies.

Traditionally, police are reactive and respond to
calls for service with the tools in their arsenal;
these are primarily enforcement -- file a report,
make an arrest, issue a summons, etc. But
problem-solving policing requires police officers
to be proactive, to identify problems (with the
help of the community), analyze the problems,
devise strategies and implement them (Goldstein,
1977; 1979; 1990). In the absence of comprehensive
training on problem-solving methods, the
strategies police officers choose tend to be the
methods they are most familiar with, e.g., conduct
high visibility patrol, issue summonses, make
arrests. (See for example, McElroy et al., 1993.)
These strategies do not involve other city
agencies and often do not involve other units from
within the police department. But many problems
cannot be solved through traditional means alone
and require the involvement of other agencies (and
residents of the community). This is especially
true of quality-of-life problems, for which
traditionally structured police departments have
not taken responsibility.

Most police officers are not experienced in
dealing with other agencies; nor do effective
mechanisms exist to make such interactions work
smoothly and predictably. If an officer deems
another city agency could be helpful in dealing
with a particular problem, the officer most often
relies upon the one person he or she knows at that
agency (if the officer knows anyone at all). If
that contact should leave the agency, the officer
will be lost and have no quick and effective means
of dealing with the next problem of a similar
nature. An officer in Houston described the
process as follows:

It's not a network. We just talk to whoever we can
get on the phone. If they don't give us any
satisfaction, then we ask for their supervisor,
and we go up until we can find somebody to help us
with our problem.

This is the "business as usual" approach that was
observed in most of the INOP sites. Despite the
fact that the INOP programs were "innovative
neighborhood-oriented policing" programs designed
to foster interagency partnerships, with the
exception of Norfolk, none had active involvement
of all city agencies. In addition, in some sites
there was little support for the program from the
city government. Community policing for these
cities and most other cities around the country is
de facto a police department phenomenon. It begins
as a police department pilot program or in some,
such as Hayward, it is sold as a philosophical
change, but is always confined to the police
department.

The data that are accruing from community policing
experiments around the country suggest that if
community policing is an isolated change within
the police department, it will not work. Police in
a number of the INOP sites complained that
residents do not distinguish police work from
issues that should be the responsibility of other
city agencies. (This is not unique to INOP. See
also Sparrow et al., 1990.) Residents call the
police to report abandoned vehicles, barking dogs,
overgrown lots, health hazards, as well as crime
and disorder problems. If the change to community
policing involves the entire city government from
the beginning, then police and citizens alike can
be educated regarding how to deal with
quality-of-life conditions that do not fall within
the purview of the police department. Furthermore,
if all city agencies make the transition to what
might be thought of as "community governing," then
they too can work together, with the police and
with the public to ensure that the appropriate
agencies are involved in the problem-solving
process from the beginning.

Agency involvement in the INOP sites. While most
of the INOP sites made some attempts to involve
city agencies in addition to the police, none had
formal interagency agreements. And only in Norfolk
was the support from the city government strong
enough to, in fact, be a mandate that every city
agency be involved.

When the funds for the PACE program were approved
by the voters, the mayor of the city of Norfolk
made clear to every department head within his
government that all city departments were part of
PACE. Not only is there support from the mayor,
but also from the city manager. The Assistant City
Manager for Public Safety plays a very active role
in the PACE program, promoting it at every
opportunity and was an active participant in the
BJA cluster meetings. In addition, training in the
PACE program was not only provided to all police
department personnel, but also to administrative
personnel from every city agency. It is apparent
from the experiences in some of the other INOP
sites that this type of support from the city
government is the only way to ensure participation
by all city agencies.

Central to the design of the interagency component
of the PACE program is the PACE Support Services
Committee, which meets at least monthly and which
has representatives from every city agency
(including the police department). There are also
two subcommittees of the Support Services
Committee -- the Family Assessment Services Team,
known as the FAST team, and the Neighborhood
Environmental Assessment Team, known as the NEAT
team. In the original design of the PACE program,
there was to be a FAST team and a NEAT team for
each neighborhood designated as a PACE target
area. As is described in Volume I of this report,
the FAST team is made up of representatives from
the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority
(NRHA), the Public Health Department, Social
Services, Community Services, Norfolk Police
Department, Norfolk Juvenile Court, Department of
Parks and Recreation, and the school system. It is
designed to provide a neighborhood-focused
approach to family assessment and services whose
purpose is "to enhance family and individual
functioning through team assessment of service
needs, action planning and follow-up" (PACE
Support Services notebook). The FAST team provides
interagency staffing for multi-problem families
and adults; information, referral and advocacy;
and community involvement, needs identification,
and problem-solving. Identified service needs are
reported to the Support Services Committee.

The purpose of the NEAT team is to address
environmental problems in the neighborhood such
as, abandoned vehicles, vacant lots, houses in
disrepair, improper storage of trash, etc. This
team has members from the Police Department,
Bureau of Environmental Health, Department of
Public Works, Division of Existing Structures,
Parks and Forestry, and NRHA.

As the PACE program expanded to more and more
target areas, however, it became clear that there
would not be enough staff in the agencies to have
a separate team for each neighborhood. Eventually
the structure was modified to have only one NEAT
team for the entire city. While the FAST teams
continued to be neighborhood-specific, the rapid
expansion of PACE made some agency representatives
feel that, like the police, they were being spread
too thin. To reduce the strain on the agencies,
some Teams would serve more than one neighborhood;
this was more efficient for the staff because many
of them (e.g., the public health nurse) served
both areas anyway. But the residents of each
community wanted their own FAST team. An
administrator from a city agency, who was very
actively involved in the FAST teams described the
problem as follows:

The Huntersville team used to be
Huntersville-Calvert Square combined, one team
because many of the same people were serving both
areas, like public health nurse, same one on both
teams, serving both areas. Social service,
sometimes same person serving both areas. The
police. But what we found was that when we had an
activity in Calvert Square, nobody from
Huntersville came. We had the activity in
Huntersville, nobody from Calvert Square came. And
plus, their issues were very different: one was a
housing area; one was a private area. It just
didn't work, so we ended up splitting that team in
January this year. So now that gave us even more
teams, which is kind of a nightmare, and they're
going, "No, no, no more teams." We don't have the
staff for any more teams.

Even with this formal structure (of the Support
Services Committee and FAST and NEAT teams), at
least one police administrator in Norfolk believed
that there was not enough involvement of other
city agencies. While he attributed this to the
fact that the police are the ones who attend civic
league meetings, and are therefore known to the
residents, it is also likely that this is an
example of what happens when a city fails to
integrate all three components of the city --
police, agencies and community residents -- into
its program:

Getting back on the conversation about why the
police department is looked upon with the signal
lights, the garbage and so forth and so on, we are
at, we're the ones that are represented at the
civic league meetings. We're the one that, you
know, that they've become, become to know. Where
PACE is supposed to be a city-wide effort, all the
departments within the city are supposed to be,
but the only time that you ever see anybody from
any other department is when they're invited in as
a guest speaker, not to come in and listen to the
problems of the neighbors. You know, that's our
focus in being there; we want to know where, we
want to make ourselves readily available. "What is
your problem?" we even ask them. "Put us at the
top of the agendas so that we can find out; we can
address your problems, and then we can get back
out on the street to patrol and protect your
belongings while you're in this meeting conducting
the rest of the business." But you don't see any
other representation. And those who do come are
case workers and they're not, they're not . . .
administrators, or yeah, at least mid-management.

As will be seen in Chapter 5 (on Community
Involvement) below, with the exception of
community leaders, most residents of Norfolk,
including those in PACE areas, were unfamiliar
with the structure of the program. Thus, they
would not know which agency to call to repair a
street light or clear a vacant lot of trash, and
therefore, continue to rely on the police to
handle such problems for them.

The problem was substantially worse in the other
INOP sites, where interagency involvement was
minimal and much more informal than that in
Norfolk. The approach tried in Prince George's
County was to establish a COPS Planning Committee;
this committee was supposed to serve as an
advisory group to review COPS strategies and
provide interagency and community support. It was
composed of four community representatives and
five agency liaisons, representing the Department
of Environmental Resources (DER), the Health
Department, Child Protective Services, the
Department of Public Works and the Apartment and
Office Building Association. During the early
months of the COPS program, officers complained
that other agencies were not responsive to the
problems referred to them. These complaints led
the County Executive to hold a meeting with all
the agency heads in the county and have a
"symbolic cutting of red tape." At that time the
County Executive indicated that requests from COPS
officers were to be treated as if they had come
from the office of the County Executive and be
given top priority. However, unlike the situation
in Norfolk, the "mandate" from the County
Executive did not have the desired effect. At
least one police administrator identified the
problem as resulting from the lack of specific
demands being made of agencies. He thought that
this lack of clarity about their role led them to
become apathetic:

. . . The one thing that we really fell down on
was having planning committee meetings. For a lot
of reasons. Probably the most prevalent was, we
really didn't know what to do with it. What kind
of problems do we bring to them? What are we
really looking for in the Planning Committee? And
so we said that that somewhat large, unwieldy
committee, we think that something that's more
appropriate would be mini-planning committees.
That's why we came up with the idea of
mini-planning committees. They meet monthly . . .
We're now back on board with our planning
committee, and hopefully we will continue, and it
will become a more successful and a more viable
part of the overall project.

This problem is not unique to Prince George's
County. Police agencies around the country are
jumping on the community policing bandwagon
without having a clear conception of community
policing. This is reflected in failures to
mobilize the community, lack of interagency
involvement and a lack of understanding among
police officers regarding their own roles.

Tempe's approach was similar to that tried in
Prince George's County, but with a less positive
outcome. At the beginning of the project, the Beat
16 Coordinating Committee was established. This
committee was made up of representatives of
community groups, representatives of city
government, and local service providers. While the
committee initially met monthly, by the time of
the third research site visit (approximately one
year later), the committee had been dissolved. One
representative from a city agency blamed this
failure on a combination of lack of commitment
from the community members and problems with
BJA.

. . . There was really nobody from the community
portion who wanted to take the ball and go.
Everybody seemed to be sitting there waiting for
someone else. And I think the biggest problem was,
everybody who was from the community, and even the
City themselves, were looking at money. Any time
you're on a committee, you're looking at dollars,
and you want to know how much is allocated. Well,
zero was allocated. So all the time that was spent
thinking, well what are some of the things we can
do, and almost anything you want to do costs
money, nothing was able to be done because
whomever from BJA, never freed up any money. And
there was nothing more that the committee, nobody
on the committee would stand forward and say,
"Well, I'm going to go ahead and take this
committee." And without any money there's nothing
you can do anyway. So rather than screw around and
meet, we just dissolved. . . . I think the way we
left it was if an issue would come up, we would
reconvene, if there was a need to.

One problem common to all of the INOP sites was
that the police had to take the lead and other
agencies might follow along. In some of the
cities, such as Tempe, at least some police
administrators saw the program as primarily a
police effort, requiring little input from other
agencies:

It's pretty much just a police function; what
we're trying to do is, he's been taking city
managers, deputy managers and council people to
these different clusters and meeting and stuff to
try to introduce them to the idea, because it's
his feeling that we're in a crossroads. Either the
police department goes and does the community
policing alone or the whole city jumps on board.
The city of Tempe has always been a very
responsive city; the quality of life is pretty
good and that has to do with the fact that
sanitation, places like that, have been very
responsive and met the needs of the people. . . .
This whole project, it's police initiated and
basically we have to be real careful in that
arena. I know that we're going through some major
changes and we're having to change the way that we
do business. And that's real important, but we
can't spread ourselves too thin. We can't be all
things to all people.

This was also true in Hayward where, according to
most respondents, city government paid little
attention to the COPPS project. Interagency
involvement was fragmented, and this was
attributed by at least one police administrator to
a lack of buy-in from the other city agencies.
There were no regular meetings of all the agencies
together, rather representatives from the police
department would meet with representatives of each
agency individually. Some agency representatives
expressed concern that the city government did not
play a big enough role:

Well, I also like to think that it's the
responsibility of the City Council. I really think
that . . . it's the city government needs to pay
attention and encourage and empower the community
to get the things that they need. Each community
is slightly different.

Well, I think peoples' perception of municipal
government is what they see and what they see most
frequently in the cities are particularly police
departments, maybe some public works, but for the
most part, it's the police department, the most
visible part of what people see.  I really don't
know what the level (there's no participation) of
participation of the City Council.

I think they need to do more. I mean, I'll say
that straight out. I mean, I like all of them;
they all care. I think they all try, etc., etc.,
but I mean, they need to even maybe do City
Council. I mean, wouldn't it be nice . . . if they
did the same thing that each one of the seven
councilmen each year had a different part of the
community and they rotated every year. It would be
their responsibility to go to the meetings and get
to know the homeowners and be involved.

The situation in Louisville's Fourth District was
similar. While the Captain was able to identify a
group of agency representatives as his "Support
Committee," these representatives seemed to be
unaware of the existence of such a committee.
Rather, the agency representatives were quite
willing to provide services to the COP program,
upon request. There were no regular meetings of
the group, and no one saw a need for such
meetings. As one police administrator put it:

In our system . . . concept, and I guess in our
program, this full committee which is on the
department head level more or less, is a reactive
group. We're not asking them to be proactive while
we're developing this program. . . . I wonder if
we can maintain that for a period of time. And at
what point will they want it to be proactive, and
want a direct interchange. And actually start
filtering things back down to us. I see what we've
done though is work out a two-way relationship
with each of the agencies, and by them being
primarily reactive, they wait until they have a
problem, or if we have a problem, we take it to
them.

As late as the third research site visit, the
"Support Committee" remained a reactive group of
departments, with no regular meetings. While none
of the participants saw this as a problem, there
is almost certainly a link between the isolation
of the COP program in the police department and
the lack of non-traditional approaches to
problem-solving. As may be seen from the
discussion of Police Issues above (Chapter 3),
there was no real problem-solving in Louisville,
only the use of "task forces" to deal with drug
problems.

Interagency involvement in the remaining INOP
sites -- Houston, New York, Portland -- was either
non-existent or so similar in nature to the models
already discussed, that it would not be
illuminating to discuss them in any detail. What
is clear from a review of interagency involvement
across the eight INOP sites, is that the
interagency involvement is informal, and business
is conducted the way it always has been. When the
police encounter a problem for which they need the
help of another city agency, they call the person
in that department with whom they have a personal
relationship. If that person leaves the agency, a
new relationship must be cultivated with his/her
replacement.

CHAPTER 5

"Angels in Marble": Community Involvement in the
INOP Projects

Introduction. While there is little agreement
among theorists and practitioners on the precise
definition of "community policing," common
elements are found in all definitions. Among these
is the idea that the police and the community must
work in concert both to define and develop
solutions to problems affecting the community.
Increasing contact between police officers,
individual community residents, and existing
community organizations to enlist their aid in
this task is thus central to all definitions of
community policing. Indeed, where formal community
organizations do not exist, the police ought to
help develop and support them (Goldstein, 1987;
1990:21). Although there may be some controversy
over the precise role of the "community" in
community policing, few theorists or practitioners
would deny that the community is of central
importance to its success. It is therefore
surprising that many police departments have paid
so little attention to the education and inclusion
of the community in their transitions to community
policing.

In a radical departure from the era of
"professionalism" in policing, in which the police
claimed a monopoly on the responsibility for crime
control, police now argue that they can do little
about crime, social disorder, or the myriad of
other quality-of-life problems that affect
communities, without the active assistance of the
community (Kelling & Moore, 1988:21). Indeed, in
describing community policing as the "new
professionalism," Skolnick and Bayley
(1986:212-213) write, "the new professionalism
implies that the police serve, learn from, and are
accountable to the community. Behind the new
professionalism is a governing notion: that the
police and the public are co-producers of crime
prevention." Thus, what the police can accomplish
in reducing the incidence of criminal activity,
social disorder, and levels of fear, is dependent
on the types and numbers of "partnerships" that
they form with members of the community. The
police are a powerful resource, willing to provide
guidance and assistance, but they cannot create a
safer environment without the active involvement
of the community (Goldstein, 1990; Trojanowicz &
Bucqueroux, 1990:293).

Community policing's emphasis on the new role of
the community as "partner" and "co-producer" of
neighborhood safety, is a key element separating
it from "traditional" or "professional" policing
in which communities were given little, if any,
formal role in policing their own neighborhoods.
Indeed, the era of "professional" or
"bureaucratic" policing, actively emphasized and
encouraged the police officer's detachment from
the community (Greene & Taylor, 1988:196). In
light of the failure of professional policing,
police administrators and theorists of community
policing, like the English statesman Disraeli,
look out on the "community" as a vast, inchoate
mass and see an "angel in marble." The "community"
represents a vast, untapped resource in the fight
against crime, disorder, and fear. How to unleash
the potential for effective organization lying
dormant in the community will perhaps prove itself
to be the greatest challenge facing community
policing. As one police administrator in Norfolk,
for example, observed:

Our biggest problem is community partnerships . .
. [We institute community policing] in mostly
low-income areas where they have a high incidence
of crime, and a lot of the residents are not well-
educated . . . We have to teach those civic
leaders and those residents, those concerned resi-
dents, how to become empowered, how to seek out
resources that are available . . . the [law
enforcement] stages of PACE [Norfolk's community
policing] are easy . . . the community partnership
stage is the most difficult, time consuming, and
resource draining.

Norfolk's problem in stimulating community
involvement and building partnerships is not
unique; all eight INOP sites continue to
experience great difficulty in establishing a
solid community infrastructure upon which to build
their community policing programs. The following
discussion will address a number of issues and
problems related to generating community in-
volvement that police departments must consider in
their efforts to establish community policing.

Levels of Knowledge about INOP Project Structure
and Goals. In all eight INOP sites, respondents'
knowledge of a project's existence, goals, and
tactics varied greatly. Interviews strongly
suggest that the level of understanding people
have about INOP, or community policing in general,
is closely linked to their status in the
community. Thus, community leaders with close
and frequent interaction with the police had a
higher level of knowledge about INOP or community
policing, than did ordinary residents who did not
belong to any organized community group. Even the
most enlightened community leaders in all eight
sites, however, had only a limited understanding
of INOP project goals and tactics.

Interview data show that the first and highest
level of knowledge about INOP and community
policing was found among local community leaders.
Neighborhood Alert leaders in Hayward, BOND board
members in Houston (both "block watch" groups), or
residents' council members in Portland's target
area, for example, knew a great deal more about
project goals, strategies and tactics than did
their membership, and a great deal more than the
average citizen not associated with a community
group. A well-informed residents' council member
in Portland, for example, said:

"I think the police are trying to do community
policing through the residents. You police your
own neighborhood and [the police] are here to
assist us. [The police] will teach us how to do
this. The goal of the project is to make this a
drug-free and a crime-free zone."

However, even among community leaders, few knew
many details about the INOP projects. For example,
all the INOP projects were designed to include an
interagency component that would secure the
cooperation and participation of other city and
private agencies in the INOP effort. Few community
leaders in any of the sites knew of other agencies
involved in their projects.

A second level of knowledge exists among
"ordinary" area residents (i.e., those not members
of any formal community organizations such as a
block watch or residents' council), members of
community groups, and employees of city agencies
other than the police. These people know that
there is a "program" present in specific
neighborhoods (or, more frequently, that there was
an increased police presence in their area), but
few of them could specify much detail about the
INOP projects or community policing in general. In
Norfolk, for example, a community leader thought
that residents in PACE-targeted neighborhoods who
were actively involved in the community would know
more about PACE than people who lived in
non-targeted areas of the city (i.e., non-public
housing communities). Information about PACE had
been "disseminated pretty well" in PACE target
areas. However, the "average person" in the target
areas, while aware of an increased police
presence, probably knew little about the project:

I think the average person, if you said "PACE,"
they'd say, "Yeah, that's some kind of program
that the police department has to get the
community involved." But when you start getting
more specific than that in your questions, I don't
think that they [know].

Similarly, in Houston, a member of the Frenchtown
Community Association said:

"Well, . . . people might have seen what was
happening when more policemen had come through and
got the [drug dealers] off of the street. But [I
don't think] that they knew why that was happening
. . . . My aunt likes to sit on her front porch --
a lot of the older people like to sit on the front
porch -- so she told me, "Yes, I noticed it (i.e.,
more police activity). . . . But when I was
listening to her this morning, asking her about
the name of it and everything, she didn't [know]
-- just wasn't knowledgeable."

The final, and lowest, level of knowledge was
found among respondents (usually "ordinary"
community residents with no community group
affiliation) who had no idea that any police
program was operating in their neighborhood. In
all the sites, these people were most likely to be
senior citizens (who present an especially
difficult challenge for officers engaged in
community outreach).

Similarly, within police departments, the lowest
level of knowledge was generally found among
officers not involved in the projects. This was
not always the case, however. In Houston, for
example, officers involved in implementing the
INOP program at the street-level knew nothing
about the nature or goals of the project. Rather,
they were informed by their immediate superiors
that "there was federal money available for
overtime," and that interested officers should
"sign up" if they wished to participate. It is
clear from data presented earlier, that line-level
officers in most of the INOP sites (especially
those sites where community policing is a totally
new approach) had a limited level of knowledge of
community policing philosophy, problem-solving,
and community outreach. Given this finding, it
would be unreasonable expect that members of the
community would know as much as these officers do.

Data from Chapter 3 indicate a need for increased
training for officers in the philosophy and
implementation of community policing (including
the importance and necessity of community
outreach). Observations and interviews with
officers responsible for the implementation of
INOP in all eight sites, however, revealed that a
number of officers in each site appeared to be
relatively well-trained in many aspects of
community policing. Such officers were clearly an
asset to their respective projects because they
actively communicated the idea of community
policing to individual residents and community
groups. In fact, as discussed in Chapter 3, such
officers often embodied the program for many
residents -- without these few officers involved,
the projects would suffer serious setbacks.

According to most community leaders and individual
residents in all the INOP sites, their respective
police departments did not adequately inform or
educate the general population affected by the
project in the goals and objectives of the
projects or the role of the community resident.
Indeed, when asked if they thought that the larger
community was aware of the INOP project, or
community policing in general, most community
leaders and members of community groups familiar
with the INOP projects answered that they did not
think either was known to the communities affected
by the projects. For example, a resident in
Norfolk argued:

I don't think the [average] residents [know about
PACE]. . . . There are people out here who own
their own homes and . . . if you go around and ask
them what they thought about the PACE program,
they would say, "PACE? What?" They don't know what
it is. That's one of the things PACE has got to do
-- is to get out there and let them know what they
got.

Similarly, a PACE officer responsible for
patrolling several public housing projects, found
that ordinary residents on his beat were unaware
of PACE per se:

In talking to the people when I first went into
the PACE neighborhood . . . people in the commu-
nity know the PACE officers and they still don't
know about [the substance of] PACE. We've got to
get past the [community] leaders [in making
information available]. . . . we're not telling
people, educating people (i.e., "ordinary
residents") . . .

This difficult problem manifested itself in all
INOP sites to one degree or another. Even in
Portland's Iris Court Community Policing
Demonstration project, a project directly
affecting only 159 residents (many of these only
children), project staff experienced great
difficulty in community outreach. As in all sites,
Portland staff had enormous difficulty in getting
senior citizens aware of and involved in the
project.

The lack of education on the INOP projects (or
community policing in general) also extended to
other city agencies (see Chapter 4). As a rule,
employees of other city and private agencies that
were supposed to be "involved" in the INOP
projects, often knew very little. Police officials
in nearly every city scheduled appointments for
Vera research staff to interview city officials
whose departments were "actively involved" in the
INOP projects. In fact, however, many such
officials openly admitted that they had never
heard of the projects but that they "routinely"
interacted with the police. During an interview
with a large group of INOP project officers in
Tempe, for example, one officer angrily argued
that other city agency officials and workers did
not understand the Beat 16 project or the
principles of community policing underlying it.
Later, a second officer complained that most
officers within the police department did not
understand the project or the philosophy of
community policing. It is difficult to imagine
how workers in other city agencies should be
expected to understand the tenets of community
policing if, as these officers agreed, most
members of the police department do not understand
them.

In sum, community residents affected by the INOP
projects, even those with close and frequent
contact with the police (block watch captains,
residents' council members, etc.), had limited
knowledge about INOP project structure, goals or
their police department's efforts to make the
transition to community policing. More importantly
(to be discussed further below), residents were
most confused about their role in community
policing. In addition, personnel from other city
agencies tended to know little about the INOP
efforts or community policing. Such findings point
to the need (discussed in greater detail below)
for police departments to commit significant
resources to outreach and education efforts.

Sources of Knowledge and the Relationship between
Status and Level of Knowledge. Very active
community leaders who have frequent contact with
the police knew a great deal about the INOP
projects and community policing relative to
"ordinary residents" or, especially, senior
citizens. While community leaders often knew a
great deal about the structure and goals of INOP
projects, ordinary residents in public housing or
other poor neighborhoods that were the targets of
INOP projects would often define community
policing or specific INOP projects only in terms
of picnics, block parties, shows for youngsters,
etc., that were so often used as vehicles for
community outreach. Unfortunately, they knew
little of the substance of community policing or
the INOP projects.

Whereas community leaders often heard about the
INOP projects directly from officers involved in
the projects (in community meetings), sources of
knowledge among many of the poorest of area
residents were social functions such as parties,
barbecues, and neighborhood "fairs" of one sort or
another. Although these events may serve the
positive social function of getting neighbors
together (with the hope that this will help create
solidarity in the community), they constitute
"outreach" in only the broadest sense of the term.
Indeed, when asked to tell interviewers about the
INOP projects, many people responded by first
talking about the parties, barbecues, PAL events,
and then whatever services might be provided by
the project. When asked about the structure of the
Portland project, for example, a resident said:

After the block party, it was nice. . . . They
have ASK OMSI (an after school science class for
children), . . . the Boys' and Girls' Club. We
have PAL, and we have the Saturday School for the
kids, and we have women's self-defense classes.

The problem with social events such as block
parties is that they do virtually nothing to
inform or educate community residents about
community policing and their role in it. One
community leader in Portland, for example,
described the annual block party/job fair as a
great success in which "everybody" from Iris Court
would turn out. Even people from outside the
community would come to the fair. However, as a
form of outreach and a vehicle for stimulating
interest and involvement in community policing,
such events produce poor results:

Whenever we have a free event, the whole complex
will show up. When something requires work or when
we need to raise money for the [residents']
council, nobody shows up. We might have an event
where you have to pay a dollar or two for an
event, to raise money for a bus trip for the kids,
and nobody shows up. . . . They [police] have
these projects going on so people will become
involved. . . . When you throw a block party or
any kind of party, they show up. But when we knock
on doors [for a meeting] they say, "Okay, I'm
coming." But when we start working, they are not
there. But let the food come up and everybody's up
here, not only [from Iris Court], but from outside
[the neighborhood] too! . . . There's more people
who show up for the parties than who get involved
in organizing. There's really just a handful of us
that always show up to organize things and there's
a large group that comes for the fun part. That
hasn't changed much over the last year -- the same
people who plan and do the work stays the same.

When asked if the projects had any effect on the
level of community organization, many residents
across the eight INOP sites answered that the
projects had positive impacts on the level of
community organization and involvement (see
Chapter 6). However, in many instances, residents
tended to associate large turnouts for barbecues
and picnics as manifestations of community
organization and solidarity. Larger turnouts for
community meetings or significant increases in the
number of people volunteering to help the
community policing effort would, of course, be
better indicators of increased solidarity and
community organization. When questioned further,
residents made it clear that community
organization and involvement in the projects had
not changed significantly since the projects
began. In nearly every instance, residents
reported that only a small core group of residents
were involved in the INOP projects.

Putting the "Community" into Community Policing:
Issues in Stimulating Community Involvement. One
of the most frequently observed cross-site
patterns was that police administrators, officers
involved in the INOP projects, and community
leaders alike, argued that their most pressing
implementation problem was that community
residents were not getting involved in the INOP
projects or community policing in general. As a
result, during the second and third site visits to
the eight INOP sites, the research began to focus
on the issue of why efforts to stimulate community
involvement had fared so poorly in all the sites.
This issue is of critical importance both to
theorists of problem-solving and community
policing, and to practitioners.

There is often an assumption made, by both
practitioners and theorists of community-policing,
that because community policing offers such clear
benefits to the community, once educated about
these benefits, community residents will actively
aid community policing efforts. It is often an
explicit or implicit assumption that community
policing should also actively organize the
communities it serves. The experience of the INOP
projects, however, suggests that such assumptions
largely ignore and underestimate the hostilities
that have existed between the police and members
of poor and minority communities who have often
borne the brunt of police indiscretions. In light
of the historical relationship between the police
and minority communities that are most often the
targets for new community policing initiatives
such as the INOP projects, practitioners and
theorists alike would be better off asking, "Why
should community members be willing to involve
themselves in community policing?" Among police
officers involved in the INOP project, this issue
did not completely escape the attention that it
deserves. One police officer associated with the
New York INOP project said:

You know, one of the untested assumptions about
community policing as a whole is that the
community wants to be involved in this project, in
this grand idea (i.e., community policing). The
police department is [officially] behind it,
moving full speed ahead towards it, but there is
one untested assumption . . . that the community
wants to be in partnership [with the police], that
they want to be involved.

Data collected from the eight INOP sites strongly
suggest that community residents generally may not
want to become involved in the community policing
effort. At the very least, exploratory data
suggest the need for further research on this
issue. The following discussion, however, will
present some reasons for the lack of community
participation in the INOP projects. These reasons
may seem all too familiar to experienced police
administrators, beat officers, and community
leaders, but some may have received little
thought. While police officials and project
officers may have attempted to address some of the
barriers to community participation (especially
fear), others are often ignored completely in
community outreach efforts. However, because these
eight, very different, INOP efforts encountered
the same problems in stimulating community
involvement, they provide police administrators
and community groups interested in instituting
community policing in their own cities with
valuable information regarding the obstacles to
generating community involvement.

Fear of Retaliation from Drug Dealers. Across all
eight sites, the most frequently given explanation
for lack of community involvement in the INOP
projects (and community policing in general), was
residents' fear of retaliation from drug dealers.
One Neighborhood Alert leader in Hayward, for
example, said:

"People on this block will not get more involved
because they are afraid. It's difficult for us to
even advertise that we're with the Neighborhood
Watch or to pass out flyers, because when they
(i.e., drug dealers) see us on the street passing
out flyers, they automatically harass us, we're
automatically labeled . . . as snitches. . . .
People are afraid of that, and they don't want to
get involved in anything that's going to upset the
street anymore than it already is, and they are
just afraid of retaliation. . . . The fear is so
strong that it's going to take the street being
patrolled [by police officers] 24 hours-a-day
before the people are actually going to feel
better."

Residents in several cities also expressed fear of
reprisals from drug dealers because when they
would call 911 to make a complaint, responding
police officers would come to the resident's door
to question them. In Norfolk, for example, a
resident explained that:

I find that most community people are fearful [of
reprisals]. A lot of the fear comes from . . .
when you call [the police] up on the telephone,
your home telephone number pops up [on the dis-
patcher's computer screen]. Then the officers come
to your house, and people would say that you're
with the police and they label you [a snitch].
And, you know, with all the drugs and things
around here, you hate to be labeled as calling the
police. So we in the community when we meet with
the [PACE] officers, we say that we did not want
this to happen.

Similarly, in Louisville, several residents
complained that:
. . . . you call the police, okay? And then what
the police would do, instead of them going and
checking out what you said, they would come to
your home and knock on your door . . . People are
going to see them come there! . . . So people
wouldn't call [the police].

All theories guiding community policing make
perceptions of "fear" a central concern.
Implicitly, or explicitly, most community policing
adherents incorporate the theory of "broken
windows" (Wilson & Kelling, 1982) into their own
programs. According to Wilson and Kelling, the
police need to emphasize their order maintenance
function (i.e., attending to disorderly behaviors
such as people "hanging out" or public
drunkenness). Such behavior, if neglected by
police, leads to increased incivilities, lessened
informal social control, and increased fear among
community residents. Such a condition, left
unattended to, increases levels of community decay
and makes the area ripe for intrusion by outside
criminal elements. This, in turn, generates even
more fear. The role of the community police
officer will hopefully lead residents to feel
safer because the officer will concentrate on the
incivilities and order-maintenance problems that
inspire fear in residents.

It may well be, however, that fear is so deeply
ingrained among residents in lower-income areas of
urban areas (where virtually all community
policing programs are targeted initially) that it
may not be possible for community policing
(through foot- patrol, community organizing, and
other tactics) to reduce fear to the degree that
will allow residents to feel safe enough to
"police themselves" and "take back their streets."
It may be, therefore, that community policing
finds itself confronted by a major contradiction.
It appears that for community policing to attain
its goal of fear reduction, it must first make the
streets safe from the perspective of community
residents. For this to happen, the level of real
crime must drop, according to respondents (see the
discussion below on residents' definitions of
success for community policing). However, most
theory on community policing seems to assert that
without the active participation of the community,
the police cannot reduce the incidence of crime
and disorder and thus reduce fear. An officer in
Prince George's County argued that before
residents will get involved, they must be less
fearful. This will come about as a result of
increased enforcement efforts on the part of the
police:

Our initial step was first to show them that we
are doing something . . . a lot of these people
are scared and they are not going to go out there
just because you tell them to go -- "Hey, lets
start a march against drugs or a neighborhood
crime watch!" . . . We have to go into their
neighborhoods and show them that we actually do
care . . . make lock ups!

The designers of many of the INOP projects
(Houston, Tempe, Portland, and Hayward), realized
this and began their projects (or preceded their
projects) with intensive traditional law
enforcement efforts. To reduce fear in Houston,
for example, two districts engaged in "zero
tolerance" whereby all crime and disorder become
the target of enforcement. In Portland, the police
department prefaced its INOP project (consisting
almost entirely of social service delivery) with
an intensive enforcement effort to evict
drug-using or trafficking tenants in the Iris
Court public housing target site. The Portland
police, in association with the Housing Authority
of Portland, also implemented a "trespass"
enforcement effort whereby non-residents guilty of
engaging in criminal behavior or causing other
problems (the "incivilities" discussed by Kelling
and Moore) would be "excluded" from the project
site. In Tempe, the INOP project included "Sweep
16" in which all major drug dealers in the target
area were arrested.

Such efforts, however, may well serve to produce
unintended and negative effects. Residents almost
unanimously applaud police efforts to increase the
level of enforcement in their neighborhoods (for
almost all residents, the more police in their
neighborhood, the better). During such
"crackdowns" residents report feeling safer.
However, many of these heavy enforcement efforts
are short-lived and therefore do not have the
desired effect of reducing residents' fears in the
long run. When this is the case, it may actually
create an additional crisis of legitimacy for the
police as residents begin to define community
policing as "just another program" where services
are "here today, gone tomorrow."

The Historically Poor Relationship between the
Police and the Community. Common wisdom among
police officers holds that, "Ninety-five percent
of the community is good and law-abiding. These
are the people with whom we must work." However,
one of the untested assumptions of community
policing is that residents want closer contact
with the police, and, further, want to work
actively with the police to reduce the incidence
of crime in their neighborhoods. The assumption is
that people who do not routinely violate the law,
the 95% of all neighborhood residents who are
"good," will eventually come to work cooperatively
with the police. These are the people, according
to police officers, who will be the logical target
audience for the community policing approach.
Exploratory data collected in interviews with
residents, however, casts some doubt on these
assumptions.

According to a large number of community residents
interviewed during the second and third visits to
the INOP sites, a major reason why residents do
not get involved with community policing projects,
or are hostile to any police efforts, is the
historically poor relationship between the police
and the residents of poor communities. This
observation was often made during interviews by
residents who fall into the category of "good."
Such poor relationships, most common in those
areas of the city usually chosen as the target
sites for community policing demonstration
projects, will not be easily changed. One resident
in Louisville, for example, explained:

. . . there has been such a negative view of the
police. People don't trust them . . .  And most of
those who are policing us do not live in our area
so, therefore, they don't understand what we're
going through. . . . So, there's a lot of
misunderstanding -- no communication at all. . . .
That's the kind of attitude [distrust of the
police] that the community has . . . Attitudes are
learned . . . So for 20 years they're taught that
the police are no good . . . You know, it's a lot
of hard work to get somebody to change their
perspective of something like the police
department all of a sudden when you've been taught
all your life to think a certain way about them.

A community leader in Hayward reported that she
had experienced a great deal of difficulty in
communicating to her neighbors what the INOP
project and community policing were all about
because of the extreme level of distrust residents
feel toward the police: "In the beginning, they
[residents] wouldn't even listen to me. They're
(i.e., the police) bad, period! Not that the
police even know about this because it's all
behind the scenes." Similarly, a residents'
council member in Portland argued that even though
the police had made outreach efforts at Iris
Court, few people utilized the contact office
because of their fear and distrust of the police:

The only people that are willing [to go into the
contact office] are the ones that basically be in
there all the time (i.e., the core group of
resident organizers). The rest of them . . . are
scared of it 'cause it's the police. The only time
they want to be bothered is if their boyfriend is
beating them up, or they've been threatened or
something like that. That's the only time they
want to be bothered with the police, but other
than that they brush them off.

At the very least, these findings call into
question the assumption that even "good" people
desire a closer relationship with the police and
are willing to participate in the community
policing process. They also suggest that there is
a need for further research into community
perceptions of the police and the bases for those
perceptions.

"Apathy." During the course of interviews with
police administrators and police officers assigned
to the INOP projects, it was clear that many
police officers had become increasingly hostile
toward community residents who, because of a
perceived "apathy," or lack of interest in
"bettering their own lives," refused to get
involved in community policing efforts. Such a
perspective, however, fails to appreciate the
depth of distrust and fear of the police among
residents where community policing projects are
often initiated. Such areas are typically poor,
disorganized areas of the city where residents
have for generations borne the brunt of police
abuses. The apparent unwillingness of residents to
involve themselves with the police may thus be
less a product of apathy than of fear and
suspicion grounded in their largely negative
experiences with the police in the past. In
addition, people in poorer communities also have
vast experience with seemingly endless government
programs designed to improve their quality of
life. It is little wonder then that residents in
these communities often label community policing
"just another program" that will come and go.

However, police officers across sites sometimes
reported increased hostility toward community
residents who, because of their apparent apathy,
refused to involve themselves in the INOP
projects. Police officers, many of whom were
extremely enthusiastic at the beginning of the
INOP project, often found themselves demoralized
because of the lack of community enthusiasm and
involvement. One administrative officer in
Norfolk for example said:

. . . . there's maybe three or four people in each
community involved and the rest are apathetic.
They are either hopeless or they have no hope..
They don't think it can work and aren't doing any-
thing to make it work -- maybe because they don't
feel safe yet . . . or they feel it's just another
scam. And then, some are just bad people. There's
a whole bunch of bad people. . . . But the
community. I say the community is like a bunch of
baby birds, "Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme!" And they
. . . oughta start getting out there and getting
their own stuff. Until they do that, this program
won't work. The officers will just have disdain
for them.

As an illustration of that disdain, officers
involved in the Tempe project recalled a community
clean-up effort in which almost no community
residents participated:

R1: Well, see, I don't think the community has
bought into this yet.

R2: Yeah, but what we've been doing [regarding
community clean- ups] is getting people from ASU
(Arizona State University) who do their fraternity
or sorority volunteer work. You know, some of
these people (i.e., community residents) are just
down right lazy and they won't do anything for
themselves.

R3: Exactly. I've been to all the clean-ups but
one. You've got a handful of people doing it all.
Most of them won't do it. And see, they
(residents) know our city [sanitation] crew [will
clean up] . . . . Everybody just throws trash by
the side of the road because they know it's going
to get cleaned up by the city free of charge . . .
I mean, they don't even want to take it to a
dumpster.

R4: That can be a little discouraging because
you'll have some people who bring all these people
in from other agencies to help the community, but
the community don't want to help themselves. 
To give you an example . . . I was cleaning some
fields and all of these guys are out and it's 112
degrees. We're sweating to death on a Saturday and
we look up, and there's a couple of the homeowners
sneering at us, sitting there drinking beers and
watching us. And I start thinking, "Wait a minute.
What's wrong with this picture?" I'm in this
neighborhood on my Saturday, cleaning this guy's
yard, and he's sitting there drinking a Budweiser!

R5: I look around and there's a couple of ASU
fraternity guys and me pulling weeds, _____ had
brought his brand new lawn mower the day before
and had it chewed up, and there isn't a single
person from the community participating. I'm
going, "Wait a minute! I don't mind doing this,
but where's the neighborhood? I got weeds at my
own house I could be working on if they're no more
interested than this!" I have some real concerns
about perpetuating sort of our welfare society
where all we do is give, give, give, because I
really believe that that has led to a lot of the
apathy that we're experiencing today.

Indeed, among police officers not involved in the
INOP projects, the feeling that the INOP projects
constituted "welfare" was a common idea. This was
even a concern among some project personnel in
some of the sites. Portland's Iris Court project,
for example, is almost entirely devoted to the
delivery of social services to 159 residents of
one housing complex. The project emphasizes
education and health services delivery as a means
to reduce the demand for drugs. Several officers
here, however, asserted that such "welfare"
services merely made people more dependent:

This sounds funny, but we started off giving
everybody stuff, giving out badges to the kids.
Give them this or that. You can't drive down the
street now without giving them a sticker. . . . It
seems we are sending the wrong message by doing
all these goody give-aways -- there was candy,
free parties, free chicken . . . It's true you got
to have a party once in a while, but it was
getting out of hand here! Everything is kind of
like a handout -- "Come along with our program and
look at all the goodies you'll get!"

Such perceptions were common among both police
officers and community leaders who also argued
that many residents were "apathetic or lazy" and
believed their lack of involvement was merely a
manifestation of these failings. The lack of
involvement on the part of poorer residents in the
INOP sites, however, may be less a product of
apathy or laziness, than a demystification of
community policing's perspective on community
involvement. As shall be discussed below, from a
residents' perspective, there are a large number
of rational reasons why it is difficult to inspire
the community to trust and help the police in
their efforts. It is unlikely that the long
history of fear and distrust that exists between
the police and communities served by the INOP
projects will be bridged soon. A lesson learned
from all the INOP projects is that community
policing practitioners (whether at the
administrative or beat level) must take far more
seriously the need to narrow the gap between
police and ordinary community residents in poor
neighborhoods who have often been the victims of
police injustices of the past.

The Fleeting Nature of "Projects" to Help Poor
Communities. Another reason for a lack of
community involvement was the feeling among many
residents that projects (not only police projects,
but others as well) "come and go" all the time in
poor communities. Why, they reason, should
community policing be any different? There is, in
short, a healthy skepticism in poor communities
that projects designed to help them are going to
be anything but short-lived. Residents of
neighborhoods targeted by the INOP projects have
empirical experience with projects that are
designed to help them, but which disappear when
funding for them runs out. One volunteer in the
New York INOP project, for example, claimed that
outreach efforts had largely failed because:

. . . what normally happens in the community is
that something (i.e., a "project") comes in and
you just start to get the feel of it, and then
it's pulled out. You know, it's pulled out because
it wasn't doing what anyone thought it should be
doing. . . . But what normally happens in the East
Harlem community is that programs come in and you
start to warm up to them, and you start to develop
a relationship to them, but they get pulled out.
So that creates skepticism in the community,
because you don't know if you want to participate
or not because you don't know how long it's going
to be there.

Because of the fleeting nature of "projects" in
poor communities, the credibility of any city or
government-sponsored "project" to "help" the
community is suspect among residents. In
Louisville, a police administrator observed:

The folks over [in public housing] are used to
talking police programs, they have for years and
they haven't given the police department a lot of
credibility. They know that when there's federal
bucks out there, that we'll throw some program in
there and then, when the money runs out, the
program dies. So when the COP program started
getting publicity, I don't think anyone over there
[in target site] really cared.

In addition, many respondents felt that the police
were "pulling out" of their communities too soon
after delivering an initially high level of
services. In Portland, for example, several
residents' council members argued that at the
inception of the INOP project, they had two
officers who walked through the housing project
every day. Officers often drove through the
complex as well. By the time of the third Vera
site visit (in the summer of 1992), however, they
claimed that the level of police service had
declined dramatically. Many residents, they
claimed, felt that the police had withdrawn too
soon. The level of personal contact with residents
had also declined:

R1: When I see the police now, they drive in and
out.

R2: I see the same things. They go [into the
contact office], and make their reports. I don't
see them doing nothing here. They go inside and
then you don't see them no more . . . I've gone in
[the contact office] to make a report and they've
told me, "Tell the manager." It was about a dope
dealing car. A car that was selling drugs right on
the sidewalk. I took the license plate number. I
took it to them and they said, "Take it to the
manager. Take it to the Housing Authority." . . .
You call the police now and they don't show up.

R3: I'm here every day and I don't see a [police]
car come in.R1: That's what it is [another
"project"]. When I was moving in here, I was told
that there are always police around here, there
was a community policing office right here, you'll
always see a cop at night. I never see cops here
at night, not once!

R2: . . . I think it's a lot of patrol officers
that don't take the time. They'd just as soon sit
on Union Ave., one [patrol] car facing one way,
one facing the other, and they have their meeting
right there, whereas at one time they met here. I
don't know. I never get the feeling when I see
them driving, they just turn around and drive out
[of Iris Court]. I don't know if they just get a
call every time they come here, but it's always
something. It's just, like, at one time you'd see
two or three cars [come through at night] and now
you hardly see them at all.

If they remain unchanged, such perceptions on the
part of residents in communities targeted by INOP
may contribute to a crisis of legitimacy for
community policing. These perceptions were most
apparent in projects that had strong enforcement
efforts at the outset of the project. In theory,
such crackdowns (i.e., "sweeps" in Norfolk,
"trespass" enforcement in Portland, "zero
tolerance" in Houston) are designed to reduce the
level of fear in a community to the point where
residents can actively organize and "reclaim their
streets." In practice, the duration of such
crackdowns is generally far too short for fear to
be reduced significantly. When a high level of
enforcement is provided and then withdrawn
suddenly, the general response of most residents
is anger. In such instances, the police lose
credibility and the project legitimacy in the eyes
of the community.

A related problem (to be discussed in more detail
below) observed in all sites was one of inadequate
training and education of the community in the
concepts surrounding community policing and the
role of the community in the process. A
representative of a city agency in Norfolk, for
example, explained:

"Well, when we first started, when I first started
working with PACE, I was just like a resident,
really foolish. I thought [the police] were going
to come in and clean up. And, yeah, they did for a
moment . . . they were just so fantastic, it was
just unbelievable! . . . They were able to reduce
[drug activities] for a short period of time.
Well, what happens after this? The police can't
stay here forever, and it became apparent to me
that the next step would be to help the
communities to keep that kind of [drug] activity
out. Now, it's up to the community to just say to
the dealers, "You will not come back!" And I don't
mean it for you to stand out there with guns, but
that you start coming out, you start being
visible. You start bringing city resources and
services back into the community, and that's what
I thought PACE would eventually do. I think that
they left too soon. . . . And after you get past
the police, the community is not quite sure what
happens next. I know what is supposed to happen,
but I don't know how you make it happen. I think
that [the police] left at a key point . . . they
should have had a backup unit in there working
with the tenant groups, so when the police did
pull out, you start having [the community] willing
to take charge of something. They followed it up
with a "community service day," it was like a
celebration. Everybody bought into that and then
the resources left . . . [the community] didn't
really see anyone in there working to pull them
together to make sure that they were able to
continue the work after the police left."

While intensive enforcement efforts such as those
seen in many of the INOP projects, may make clear
and immediate impacts on the levels of crime in
any given community, their long-term impacts are
highly suspect. It is less clear whether such
crackdowns can (either alone or in concert with
other agencies) inspire the level of community
organization and participation that is necessary
to maintain those effects. Without a solid
infrastructure of community support and
organization, it is unlikely that such enforcement
measures can have any enduring value.

Lack of Community Outreach Means that People Do
Not Understand Community Policing or Their Role in
It. If, as community leaders report, most
residents are unfamiliar with the INOP projects
specifically, or community policing generally, it
is difficult to see how residents could be
inspired to organize around and participate in
these efforts.

All of the INOP sites were hampered in their
attempts to generate community organization and
involvement by a lack of fundamental resources and
experience. While these departments recognize
the immediate need to train their officers in the
philosophy, strategy and tactics of community
policing, none has taken steps to provide the same
"training" to members of the community. As
Goldstein (1990:114-118) has observed, "conveying
sound, accurate information is currently one of
the least used, but potentially most effective,
means the police have for responding to a wide
range of problems." While meeting with community
groups has been the preferred method for conveying
information to the public, Goldstein notes, little
attention has been given to the type of
information that is presented or the most
effective way to present it.

Certainly, one type of information that members of
the community need is training on the fundamental
principles of community policing and the role of
the community. A major problem encountered in
all eight INOP sites was that while community
leaders had some notion of what community policing
was, ordinary residents had limited knowledge
about the INOP efforts specifically, and community
policing generally. The potential for success of
these projects and community policing in general
will ultimately be limited if major commitments to
community education and training are not
forthcoming. Thus far, police departments have de
facto viewed community policing as a police
department phenomenon. When police departments
make the decision to adopt community policing
principles and tactics, they take the logical step
of training and educating their officers in the
new approach. The education of the organized
community is an afterthought. Often, departments
rely solely upon the officers who have been
trained to pass on information to the community,
but the INOP experience indicates that this
approach is inadequate. One community leader in
Hayward, for example, believed that few people in
the city had any knowledge of the COPPS program
and argued that, even as a well-informed community
activist, she was unsure of what the police meant
by "partnership" and what the community's role was
in community policing:

Well, I just think that the average person doesn't
have a clue what it (i.e., community policing)
means, all they know is that if you call the
police, somebody pays attention . . . . But the
one question that never gets answered to my
satisfaction by the police department is -- they
want this "partnership," right? But I still can't
figure out exactly what we are supposed to do in
the "partnership." I don't think that question has
been thought through . . .

This confusion about the role of the community in
"community policing" was common across the sites.
While most of the INOP projects attempted to
involve residents in some manner (e.g., volunteers
in Tempe and New York; helping residents form
councils in Portland; allowing residents to take
part in interagency problem-solving sessions in
Norfolk), even community leaders are unsure about
the fundamental role of the community in community
policing. All respondents, for example were asked
what the police in their city meant when they
asked the community for "help" under the new
banner of community policing. The most frequent
response was that the police wanted residents to
be the "eyes and ears" of the police. When the
police ask for "help" according to residents, they
are asking for information on crimes. As some
residents in Houston said:

R1: We're supposed to be their eyes and ears. . .
. That's the way that I understand it. . . .
That's the way that we can help them. If we see
something going on, we must call them.

R2: It seems that they are asking for our help
more often. Not to be more or less doing their
work, but they figure that we can help them by
letting them know what is going on.

Similarly, police officers involved in the INOP
projects generally defined "help" as the community
providing information on criminal activity. An
officer in New York, for example, said:

The only way that we can get to know who the
players are in drug activity or criminal activity,
is by getting members of the community to either
phone in that information or write in that infor-
mation. Then that information is disseminated to
the agency or group of police officers who will
deal with that particular instance . . . Without
the community giving us the information, we just
wind up answering 911 emergencies . . .

Some officers, mostly administrators more
knowledgeable about the theory of problem-oriented
community policing, added that the community
needed to actively participate in problem
identification and problem solving, and become
better organized. A small number of community
residents and leaders also recognized the need for
the community to become more actively involved in
the problem-solving process.

When asked how this was different from the "help"
police had requested under "traditional" policing,
most respondents were hard-pressed to answer.
Those that did answer generally thought that under
community policing the police were "nicer" in
their request and also seemed more willing to help
residents and community groups. However, some
community leaders who had a better understanding
of community policing thought that "help" went far
beyond being the police department's "eyes and
ears." A community resident in Prince George's
County, for example, said that "help" meant:

[Providing] information, involvement [in community
policing projects], attending meetings, helping to
clean up the streets, educating the police as to
the problems [in the community], and cooperating
with the police.

At least three of the INOP sites, Tempe, Prince
George's County and Hayward have instituted
"citizens academies" which can provide at least
one avenue for education of the public in
community policing. The idea of training the
community may at first appear strange, but police
departments have offered training to the public in
a variety of forms in the past (in CPTED, or crime
prevention strategies, for example). Too often,
however such citizens' academies focus on
introducing the public to the police role and thus
emphasize "ride alongs" with officers so that the
public may develop a better appreciation of that
role. Such programs are fine in so far as they go.
However, if these academies do not properly
instruct residents in the community role in
community policing, they will not aid in the
effort to institutionalize community policing.
It must be remembered that community residents
have been conditioned for over a
century-and-a-half to view the police officer as
crime-fighter. During the era of "professional"
policing, the police actively discouraged any
community participation in order maintenance and
problem-solving in their own neighborhoods. The
lack of participation and enthusiasm in the INOP
projects and community policing in general is thus
not so much a manifestation of "apathy" or
"laziness" as it is a historical product of the
era of professionalism. If the police are genuine
in their appeal for help from the public, it will
be the responsibility of the police and other city
agencies to educate and train the public in their
role.

Heterogeneous Populations in Many Target Sites
Make Outreach Efforts Difficult. Several of the
INOP projects targeted areas where the population
is extremely heterogeneous. Hayward, for example,
must deal with a large number of ethnic groups
that do not welcome police intervention in
neighborhood problems. In addition, in several of
the sites (Hayward, Houston and Tempe), many
residents do not speak English. In Houston, for
example, one resident reported that she had
stopped attending area BOND (a city-wide block
watch organization) meetings because they are
conducted only in English. She also reported that
Spanish speaking friends on her block would ask
her what had transpired at the BOND meetings, but
she could not tell them. According to officers
in both Tempe and Houston, an additional problem
concerned the lack of Spanish-speaking officers
who could communicate with the large numbers of
Spanish-speaking residents in the sites.

In several of the sites (particularly, Tempe,
Houston and Hayward) many residents also told
researchers that there were a considerable number
of undocumented aliens living in target areas.
Because they fear the police, there was no chance
of them becoming involved in any police initiative
such as community policing. A community leader
in Hayward, for example, explained why her efforts
to increase the membership in her branch of
Neighborhood Alert had met with failure:No, we
(i.e., residents of the neighborhood) haven't
contributed to [community policing] at all. . . . 
I would speak about my street. Not involved at
all. . . . It's [ethnically] mixed -- Afghans,
Iraqi, Guatemalans, American Blacks, Nicaraguans.
It's very hard to organize because the Afghans are
very suspicious of the police . . . they will not
get involved. The Iraqis will help you, but they
don't want to be seen getting involved [with the
police]. It is perhaps that in some cases, they
are not citizens yet; they have green cards, but
they do not want to get in trouble. . . . It's
hard in our area . . . people are too [ethnically]
mixed, the racial conflicts, and so on. . . . For
instance, there are lots of black people that live
there. So, I would confront them and say, "Would
you like to help us?" They say, "Yes, I'm against
crime, but I cannot go against my own people."
Afghans, for instance, they tell us, "No, we don't
trust the police; police is paid off! . . .
"Although not a problem in most of the INOP sites,
the great heterogeneity in population found in
Hayward presents the police department with yet
another outreach challenge.

Areas Targeted by INOP Projects Are Highly
Disorganized. Community policing theory argues
that the community must become an active partner
with the police before crime and other
quality-of-life problems can be effectively
addressed. One problem for community policing is
that the poorer areas of cities that are generally
the testing grounds for community policing
projects are highly disorganized. These are the
areas of cities characterized by poverty,
unemployment, poor educational systems, and high
crime rates. In such areas, it is often difficult
to find well-organized community groups attempting
to address quality-of-life issues.

The question facing the police is, "Who will
organize the residents of troubled areas so that
they can work in "partnership" with the police?"
Because the police are asking for the public to
assist them in the transition to community
policing, it would appear, as Goldstein (1990) has
suggested, that the initial responsibility for
generating community organization where it does
not exist must fall to the police. Such an effort
may best be undertaken by the police along with
other appropriate city agencies. In Portland, for
example, where the Iris Court project serves
people living in public housing, the police have
asked the Housing Authority of Portland to assist
the residents in forming a residents' council. In
Hayward, the police have chosen to build on a
solid foundation of city-wide "Neighborhood Alert"
groups (i.e., a block watch group) in their effort
to educate the residents of the city about
community policing. Where such groups do not
exist, community service officers employed by the
police department attempt to create them.

Most residents in the eight INOP target sites
reported that the level of community organization
in their neighborhoods was only "average" or "low"
and that this had been the case for some time.
Most attributed the lack of active community
groups to fear and, as one resident put it,
"People here are just trying to survive
day-to-day. That's what life here is all about."
According to many respondents, the police had done
little to get target communities actively involved
in the project or in problem solving efforts.

Intragroup Conflict among Community Leaders and
Residents.  According to residents and police
officers, a common barrier to organizing residents
in the INOP sites was conflict among community
leaders and residents about issues to be
addressed, delegation of tasks, etc. In several of
the INOP sites, "personality conflicts" among
residents and community leaders was cited as a
major reason why more residents refused to become
involved with a block watch, residents' council,
or other civic association connected with the INOP
effort. Indeed, intra-group conflict among
community leaders was reportedly a significant
problem in Hayward, Houston, Portland and
Louisville. It is often forgotten in rhetorical
references to the "community" in the community
policing literature, that the community is often a
collection of competing groups. That people live
in the same ecological space and possess the same
racial and class backgrounds, is by no means an
indication that they define values and problems in
the same way. Even where the population targeted
by an INOP project was highly homogeneous, there
were ongoing conflicts among residents regarding
the direction they should take.

In Portland, for example, several key respondents
reported that a core group of residents, by
insisting on controlling each project undertaken
by the residents council, kept other Iris Court
residents from getting more actively involved in
the project:

Well, some people don't want to get involved
because of a certain individual that they cannot
get along with that's real bossy. That [issue] has
been addressed several times . . . [but] they keep
letting that person go on. . . . I don't think
that's a good idea. A lot more people would get
involved if that certain individual would step
down.

In an effort to encourage broader participation
among residents at Iris Court, the Housing
Authority of Portland has instituted training for
the residents council that will offer instruction
on resolving intra-group conflict. Because many
residents have never been part of a group
decision-making process like the council, the
training will offer basic instruction on things
such as running a meeting effectively. This form
of education or training would appear to be
essential for residents in areas targeted by
community policing projects. If provided by the
police in concert with other city agencies, as in
Portland, such training can make residents a more
productive and enlightened partner in the
community policing enterprise. In addition to
providing leadership training for residents, such
education should include instruction on the
community policing philosophy and the role of the
community in the implementation of community
policing.

What Does the Community Want? One of the things
that distinguishes community policing from "reform
era" policing is its recognition that policing
must be guided by the values and perceptions of
the community. A major task that lies ahead of
police departments engaged in a transition to
community policing will be how to determine the
values of the many groups that make up any given
community. Some of the INOP sites have used
surveys (Portland and Hayward, for example) of
residents in an effort to determine their
perceptions of quality-of-life problems. As many
critics of community policing have argued,
however, determining the "will" or "values" of any
given "community" will not be easily accomplished
(Mastrofski, 1988:64; Weatheritt, 1988) This is
particularly true of neighborhoods characterized
by a highly heterogeneous population.

For the purposes of the present research,
respondents were asked how they would improve the
INOP project and, more generally, how they would
improve community policing in their city. If the
respondent had never heard of their INOP project
or community policing in their city (common among
"ordinary" residents with no community group
affiliation), they were simply asked for their
recommendations on how they would improve the
quality of policing in their city. Across the
eight sites, a number of patterned responses
appeared.

Most residents interviewed, for example, told
researchers that they did not know their beat
officer or, if they did, complained that he/she
was rarely assigned to them for a sufficient
period of time. Residents said that the police
department should assign their community a regular
beat officer for an extended period of time.
Often, they argued they had been promised a
regular beat officer only to see that officer
reassigned without explanation. The Portland INOP
project, for example, had established a
"Neighborhood Response Team" consisting of two
officers who spent a great deal of time at the
inception of the project walking through the
public housing complex to which they were
assigned. During this time they were, by most
reports, successful in establishing rapport with a
large number of residents. However, according to
residents interviewed during the third research
site visit, the presence of these officers in the
area had declined dramatically, and other patrol
officers were seen only in the police contact
office -- they did not walk through the complex.
As one community leader in the complex said:

Officers regularly change here. Now, [two officers
assigned as Neighborhood Response Team] have
stayed here pretty regularly since the [Community
Policing] contact office started, but they are
also involved in some other community policing
sites . . . so we don't see as much of them . . .
but the regular beat officers, yes, they do change
quite regularly. And that is a problem especially
. . . the first two officers [assigned to the
housing complex] actually sat down and listened to
us as human beings, intelligent human beings . . .
They listened to us . . . we gave them information
. . . it gets more difficult as time goes by to
have to reestablish that trust relationship over
and over with [new beat officers] on various
shifts . . . It has been brought up as an issue.
Sometimes . . . they have to reassign people
because of the budget and because of the trouble
spots in the community and that's what I hear a
lot -- other trouble spots . . . they need to
reassign these officers. Now, most [beat officers]
come right in, especially at night, most of them
are just coming in to have lunch. They might write
their reports, but one of the things that I was
really hoping is that the officers would be
walking and talking among our residents. I think
that's one of the biggest differences between Iris
Court community policing office and what's going
on out at Columbia Villa -- those Multnomah County
Sheriffs, whatever shift they work, they're out
walking among the residents and getting to know
the kids . . . that hasn't happened here. [We've
voiced that as an issue, and the police response
has been] too much area, too little time, and we
seem to have taken care of 90% of the drug and
gang-related problems here ourselves, so "Gee,
nice job. And our officers will get their lunch,
do their report, and get out!'

Many residents in the eight sites had been told
that they would have a "regular" beat officer who
would be responsible for their community for an
extended period of time. Often, however, this was
not the case. Officers would be reassigned for a
number of reasons, or had beats so large and
covering several communities, that residents had
no idea who their beat officers were. Such actions
on the part of police departments (especially when
the explicit promise of regular beat officers has
been made) may undermine public trust at a time
when community policing needs to encourage it. It
must be distinctly understood that, for most
community residents, the beat officer is the most
visible and accessible symbol of community
policing. As was discussed in Chapter 3, residents
often define a program on the basis of their
relationship with one or two beat officers who, in
effect, "become" the program. It was common across
sites to hear residents distinguish between INOP
project officers who they defined as the "good"
officers (or "our officers") who attempted to open
lines of communication, and "other officers" in
the police department. When these trusted officers
are withdrawn with little explanation, any newly
assigned officers will necessarily spend a great
deal of time developing working relationships with
community residents. It is clear that community
residents take the problem of "revolving beat
officers" most seriously. If police departments
are uncertain of their ability to provide
communities with steady beat officers, they must
make clear to community leaders and residents the
reasons for this at the outset. The failure to do
this may result in a further weakening of an
already tenuous legitimacy for community policing
in the eyes of the community.

Thus, while many residents were happy to see more
patrol officers in their areas at the inception of
the INOP projects, they were less pleased when
those officers disappeared after a number of
months. Residents in most of the sites often
complained that during the late night and early
morning hours when high-visibility patrol would be
most welcomed by residents, there would be few, if
any, officers seen on patrol. Residents thus
argued for increased high-visibility patrol at
those times that problems most often occurred.

It is also apparent from interviews that community
residents fully expect police officers to be
"crime-fighters" above all else. Because they lack
sufficient information about what community
policing is, residents sometimes expressed concern
that a community policing approach would make
policing "soft" on crime and criminals. This, they
argued, was unacceptable. One community leader in
Hayward, for example, while a staunch supporter of
community policing, argued that the police
department's abandonment of its Tactical Narcotics
Team (TNT, a buy-and-bust enforcement tactic) was
a mistake and attributed its demise to the new
community policing approach:

R: Another thing was . . . TNT. Okay, that was a
wonderful outfit, I'm telling you! I saw them in
action! I think that they are necessary in an area
like our area.

I: Why did TNT stop operating?

R: Because the new COPPS program came and they
(i.e., the police) got more gentle and so on. TNT
-- it's rough! . . . They just jump out of nowhere
and all those hoodlums are taken away! . . . If
they didn't get them for drugs, nine times out of
ten there was stolen property or whatever.

I: If this was so effective, why was it disbanded?

R: . . . because the COPPS program came in.
Because TNT was aggressive on the street. The
COPPS program, we understand, is supposed to
assume that not everybody is a criminal, which is
true, but the criminals don't need nice cops!

The importance that community residents place on
crime-fighting is found in their responses to the
question, "How will we know if community policing
has been successful?" In virtually all cases,
residents defined the success of community
policing in terms of crime and fear reduction.
However, a great many residents also pointed to
other, and equally important criteria, as a
measure of success. One frequently-mentioned
measure of the success of community policing was
better relationships between community residents
and police officers. One resident in Portland, for
example, said:
The police will have a better image for one thing.
. . . The hostility towards the police. I would
love to see that come down . . . basically, I
would love to see a community policing where
people can go and talk to the police without being
in fear [of the police].

Better relationships between police and community
often seemed to hinge on the idea that long-term
beat officers would be assigned to communities.
Beat officers, many residents thought, would be in
the best position to improve relations with the
community. As we have already seen, it was common
for residents to define community policing in
terms of the beat officer -- certainly the most
visible manifestation of the community policing
approach. Indeed, the beat officer represents the
community policing ideals of personalized service
by providing close face-to-face interaction
between police officers and community residents,
and the police department's permanent commitment
to the community by having officers "permanently"
assigned to specific beats (Trojanowicz and
Bucqueroux, 1990:5). However, many residents were
dismayed that they did not really know their beat
officers, or if they did, these officers were
often transferred after a relatively short time.
Thus, the primary means for reestablishing good
police-community relationships -- the beat officer
-- was often negated. As several community leaders
in Hayward argued:

R1: You know, we're supposed to have the same beat
officers [over time]. I don't feel that yet. . . .
I don't know who to call! . . . I haven't a clue,
and I'm fairly tuned in!

R2: I think that what community policing is about
is the opportunity for local policemen to acquire
a beat that they feel comfortable with -- to get
an opportunity to feel comfortable with the
residents of that particular community -- so that
they can pretty much get a feel for the neighbor-
hood, the areas that are the potential problems
and some of the people that are the problems. And
they interact with some of the people that are
helping to prevent it and, therefore, put a lid on
things. . . . And also, I think, when an officer
is responsible for a particular area, he's more
prone to go into that area and look it over and
check it out. So you get a feeling that you have a
presence there . . . he's like, your personal guy.
You know, you feel like you have more confidence
that way.

R3: What he just said, that's what the program was
all about, was to assign an officer in your area
for 18 months. But they keep switching them around
lately.

R2: And you can't get acquainted!

Another resident from Hayward observed that
community policing will be successful only if a
current trend -- police education of the public in
problem-solving and community involvement --
continues:

[Community policing] is working now! The police
are talking to people and educating them. It's
that people are now getting involved in trying to
sole problems. I think it's just going to grow!

Another Hayward community leader argued that the
level of community organization and communication
will be an important indicator of community
policing's efficacy:

[Another measure of success] will be the
networking or communications within the community.
The last ten years people have spent behind closed
doors not wanting to get involved. . . . I think
[community policing] is going to bring people back
closer together again like we were ten years ago .
. .

According to many business people interviewed,
another sign of community policing's success will
be the establishment of new businesses in
depressed areas of the city. As one Norfolk small
business owner said: "A higher percentage of
[home]owner occupancy and more new businesses
along the streets." Such economic indicators would
be a sign that crime and fear had declined in the
city because of the accomplishments of community
policing.

The communities involved in the INOP projects
(especially community leaders) also want police
departments to provide training on community
policing and the community's role in it. Interview
data with community residents show that ordinary
residents with no community group affiliation know
the least about community policing. Even those
residents who enjoy well-established relationships
with the police are often confused by what is
required of them under community policing. Many
community leaders and residents, therefore, argued
for a greater commitment on the part of police
departments to educate and train the public in
community policing. One community resident in
Norfolk, for example, observed:

[The police] came in with some kind of "community
services" day and that was a one-shot introduction
[to PACE]. If you are talking about understanding
all about what PACE is about, that is certainly
not adequate enough to make that happen. . . . but
I'm really concerned that many residents are still
in question [about the meaning of PACE and
community policing] because [the community service
day] gave them the impression that the police are
going to come in to save the day and, in fact,
everything but that has happened. But that
impression is still out there so it costs us . . .

Unquestionably, the education and training of
community residents and leaders will be a
Herculean undertaking. The transformation of
police department structure and the process of
educating police officers about community policing
will, in contrast, be a relatively simple under-
taking. Also, a remaining question is: what level
of community organization will be necessary to
make community policing a "success?" In a
community consisting of 5,000 households, will a
core group of 20 residents be "enough" to
accomplish what community policing sets out to do?
At the present time, however, police departments
have little choice but to develop effective
mechanisms for community education if community
policing is to realize its potential.

Toward that end, many residents and police
officers believed that the police need to help
organize the community in areas where organization
was a problem. Because the testing grounds for new
community policing programs in urban settings are
almost always in those areas where community
organization is poor, it is important that the
police department, with the help of other
appropriate city agencies, assist residents in
forming and maintaining community groups.

CHAPTER 6

Effects of the INOP Projects on Drugs, Crime,
Fear, Quality of Life and Police-Community
Relations

Introduction. As discussed in Chapter 2 (Research
Methods), because of both research design problems
and problems within the sites, it was not possible
to collect quantitative data on the "effects" of
the INOP projects. While it would be ideal to be
able to report statistical changes in say, drug
arrests or arrests for drug-related crimes that
could be attributed to the INOP projects, such
statistics were not available. For example, the
Hayward Police Department was unable to provide
any statistics for the entire research period
because of computer hardware problems. While the
NYPD intended to look at such numbers as part of
its local research effort, it is hard to conceive
of how such an analysis would be structured (since
the van in the 23rd precinct was moved and the
vans in all three precincts were often out of
service altogether, and most importantly, the NYPD
never defined the area in which one should expect
to find effects of the project). In Norfolk, the
INOP project was not really distinguishable from
the larger PACE program. In only about half the
sites (Houston, Louisville, Portland, Prince
George's County, Tempe) would it have been
possible to identify a geographical area within
which INOP effects could be measured. As a result,
the effects of the INOP projects were measured in
terms of perceptions of residents, police officers
and administrators, and other agency personnel, as
expressed in individual interviews and focus
groups.

The research had planned to measure the effects of
the INOP programs in terms of the goals of each
INOP project. In reality, however, these effects
were measured in terms of the respondents'
perceptions of both goals and outcomes. In each
instance, interviewees were asked to discuss the
effects of the program on drug use and drug
trafficking, drug-related crime, fear, quality of
life in the area, police-community relations, and
level of community organization and involvement.

Perceived Effects on Drug Use and Drug
Trafficking. It was the intention of the designers
of the INOP program that, despite differences in
project design and context, all the INOP projects
share a common goal, that of drug demand
reduction. It was not the intention of BJA,
however, that they also share a common problem --
lack of a clear connection between the
intervention and the expected results. But this
was a common flaw in the INOP projects; the
approaches taken by the projects to reduce the
demand for drugs were often so weak as to make any
measurable effect unlikely. This was particularly
true for the INOP programs in New York and Hayward
where the primary intervention was a motor home.
And Hayward had the added problem of being so late
in its implementation, that it was virtually
impossible for the Vera research to assess the
effect of the main component of the project. 

Nevertheless, in each city, police administrators
and officers, community residents and
representatives from other agencies were all asked
to discuss the effects of the INOP project (and in
some cases the community policing effort of the
city) on drugs, crime, fear, quality of life,
police-community relations, and community
organization and involvement. Some respondents
were quite negative, indicating that the program
had merely displaced the drug trafficking, either
physically, by moving it indoors or to another
neighborhood or temporally. Other respondents were
quite positive while also citing the same
displacement effects. But regardless of whether
respondents saw the displacement as a lack of
effect on the drug problem or a very positive
change, all indicated the change was temporary.

In all INOP sites, the police departments employed
a "broken windows" strategy, with heavy
enforcement as a first stage, intended to reduce
fear, and thereby increase the involvement of
community residents. The problem with this
approach is that according to residents, once the
police leave, things go back to the way they were
prior to the intervention.  The only type of
heavy enforcement effort that seems to work is
sustained heavy enforcement, for example, the
NYPD's Operation Pressure Point (Zimmer, 1987).

While the general impression in all the INOP sites
was that drug trafficking had been displaced
either from one area to another, from street-level
to indoors, or temporally, there were some
differences in perceptions among the sites. For
example, in Hayward, Houston and New York, there
were some people (both community residents and
police officers) who said the INOP project had had
no effect on drug trafficking. This is not
surprising because in these three sites the INOP
intervention was minimal. At the other end of the
spectrum was the perception in Portland and Tempe,
where both residents and police administrators saw
the project as extremely effective with regard to
drug trafficking. It was also in these two cities
that the INOP intervention was concentrated in an
extremely small geographic area. An administrator
in Portland argued that the lack of drug arrests
in Iris Court was not due to lack of attention,
but to a reduction in drug trafficking:

. . . the most dramatic drop off was in the drug
arrests cases and the gang activity and certainly
that is not generally the trend, because we have
been in Iris Court as police officers a lot more
because of the different things that are going on
there, and there have just not been the people to
arrest. So it wasn't like we just ignored an area,
and therefore the rest went down.  It is like
there has been a lot of police activity in there,
but there has just not been a lot of drug selling.
It was an open market place kind of environment
prior to this. We think the [police] presence and
the cul de sac concept had to do with it too . . .


Even in Tempe, where residents and police alike
thought the Beat 16 project had been very
effective in reducing drug trafficking, some
respondents indicated that the dealing continued;
it just wasn't as blatant as before the project.
One agency employee said, "Everybody still gets
exactly what they want; nobody is having
withdrawal symptoms, but it's not as open. They
think twice before they go out in the open to
sell. . . . I don't think that this project has
stopped anybody, any drug users from thinking
twice about continuing drug use."

The predominant view of both the police and
community residents in the other INOP sites was
that drug dealing had been displaced either to an
area receiving less attention from the project, a
few blocks within the same area, indoors, or in
time. As a PACE officer in Norfolk commented, "If
you move it from one area, it just goes across the
street and starts something, and basically, you
just move it. That's what you're doing, from one
area to another." A police administrator there saw
this same effect as very positive and indicated
that most open-air drug markets had been displaced
to other communities and some to other cities.

In Louisville some respondents believed drug
trafficking had moved to another police District
or to another area in the same District; others
said it had been displaced in time from the late
shift to the morning; while still others simply
said it was less visible. As one administrator
said:

. . . Now I would say that maybe we've impacted
drug trafficking . . . patterns. Maybe not
necessarily the amount of drug trafficking itself.
We made them operate differently. They hardly
carry smaller quantities. They don't operate as
openly as they had before. Whether we've dried up
anything, I would say not. The price of coke
hasn't gone up; it's cheap.

An officer involved in the program felt it was
simply time displacement:

"Now how much of a dent it's making I don't know,
except that I know that they've created so much
heat on a certain targeted area that they are
running, the drug traffickers from late, the late
shift, over to the morning. It's something that we
haven't had . . . displacement . . . It's time
displacement, yes it is, it's time displacement.
And I'm quite sure they probably made it uncom-
fortable enough for some of the guys that compete
over this little strip where they sell a lot of
drugs to move elsewhere."

One employee of a city agency saw the goal of the
project as displacement and felt the project had
been effective in reaching that goal, "I think the
primary function or the purpose was not
necessarily to stop it but to displace it, and
they have to an extent displaced it. We see them
two blocks away, because they don't want to give
it up because it's rich." A resident of the area
agreed, "I think you'll never get rid of drugs. I
don't care where it is, okay. So has it moved; it
went somewhere, you know, and so if it moves out
of the Fourth District, and it moves to another
District, I hope their District gets COP, you
know. But I think that it's moved. It's not as
prevalent."

Respondents in Prince George's County had similar
impressions, that drug trafficking had been
displaced. In a focus group of officers involved
in the program, there was a discussion of the
claim by the narcotics division that street- level
dealing had been eradicated:

R1: The narcotics section. They said we don't have
open air drug markets anymore.

R2: Is that right? Anywhere in the county?

R1: Anywhere in the county. . . .

R3: That's baloney.R2: Narcotics says we don't
have any open air drug markets anymore.

R3: That's baloney.

R4: As a matter of fact, you saw that one when you
drove by the other night. You're not going to tell
me that you don't have an open-air drug market.

R1: But I had a small amount of displacement, and
when I eliminated the open-air drug market, and I
allowed the activity to go further back into my
beat, which is another affair that I'm working on
right now to try to hopefully get these
knuckle-heads arrested once and for all so they
won't be there anymore. But there is some
displacement within my beat.

Residents also felt that drug trafficking had been
displaced rather than eradicated. As one resident
put it, "Well, you know, it goes and comes. You
know, they run them from here and lock them up and
they may say from here, you know, leave here and
maybe go on to someplace else. And then they put
the heat on someplace else and then they come back
here."

Perceived Effects on Drug-Related Crime. It was a
bit more difficult for respondents to assess
whether there had been INOP project effects on
drug-related crime. Often they would indicate that
they didn't really know which crimes were drug
related and which were not.

Hayward respondents appeared equally divided on
whether or not the COPPS program had any effect on
crime. A police administrator pointed out that
because of computer problems, no statistics were
available, and even he had to rely on the
impressions of residents and officers. There were
no real differences in the perceptions of
residents and officers; as many of each group
believed crime had decreased as result of the
program as said there had been no change.

At the time of the second research site visit,
Houston respondents were about equally divided
with respect to the project's effects on crime.
But by the third visit, more respondents said
there had been no effect on crime than respondents
who perceived a positive effect. This change
probably reflects the passage of nearly eight
months since the end of Operation Siege. Just as
respondents perceived the project's effects on
drugs to be temporary, returning to normal after
the police left, so did they perceive its effects
on drug-related crime.

New York is the only INOP site in which
respondents reported no effects of the project on
crime. Even police administrators were unable to
report any effects. One administrator indicated
that he intended to do an epidemiological study
and look at crime statistics to determine the
project's effectiveness, but he did not appear to
have high expectations. "And hopefully we'll see
some, at worst we'll see some displacement. At
best, we'll see a decrease and see a little kind
of window open up around the places with the
vans." One resident indicated that, while he would
need statistical data to answer the question of
whether crime had increased or decreased, there
was no activity around the van itself:

"I would assure you, though, that this van parked
here does have its impact. Local guys are not
going to break into a car knowing there's a police
vehicle around. I mean, they're just not! Some
don't care; some are desperate. But they'll think
twice. So that it does have that psychological
impact on individuals who want to commit any kind
of crime, whether it's a robbery or burglary."

In contrast, nearly all respondents in Portland
believed the INOP project had made a tremendous
impact on crime in Iris Court. Residents of Iris
Court, police officers assigned to the project,
police officers not involved in the project,
administrators and other agency personnel all
indicated that there had been dramatic changes in
gang activity, violent crime, robberies, burgla-
ries, etc. Residents expressed the decrease as a
function of how it changed their lives:

R1: I've been a victim several times. Now, there's
nothing at all.

R2: But with the contact office located here, this
place has changed drastically. . . . The kids are
outside playing together, whereas two years ago
they weren't out there. You were afraid to let
them go out there because the drugs were out there
and the gang members. There's still gang members
that live here, but not as much, not as many
either.

R3: . . . I have to give them credit; they really
have cleaned it up. And you don't have to worry so
much any more about different things like drugs
and gangs and . . . noisy neighbors and stuff like
that, cause we keep it pretty much under control
here. . . .

R4: It has done a lot of good for this community,
for this area. The drug traffic has gone way down,
and violent crimes have gone down. We still have a
few mishaps, but it has made quite a difference.

R5: We don't have violence. There are no gangs
here anymore. There used to be a lot of gunshots,
but there aren't anymore.

Unlike respondents in Houston, Portland
respondents interviewed during the third research
site visit did not report a return to pre-project
conditions. Of course, the INOP project was
ongoing at that time. In fact, the same police
administrator reported a 64% decrease in reported
crimes in Iris Court (from the baseline data to
the second year data).

In Norfolk, the PACE program was perceived by
residents, police officers and administrators, and
other city employees, to be very effective with
regard to drug-related crime. In fact, while the
predominant impression of PACE's effect on drug
trafficking was that it simply displaced the
activity, drug-related crime was believed to be
way down. The view of the respondents was fairly
uniform across neighborhoods and across the two
research site visits. As one administrator put it,
"In the neighborhoods where PACE has gone, in the
PACE target areas, things are significantly better
in all of those areas, and in none of the areas,
including the earliest areas . . . have they ever
gone back to any degree of illegal activity and
crimes of violence that they had . . . prior to
PACE." Depending on which types of crimes were
perceived to be the biggest problems in the
various PACE areas, residents reported decreases
in these crimes:

Oceanview Resident: I particularly noticed a
tremendous difference in the prostitution, walking
the street, that type of thing.

Huntersville Resident: Before they had the sweep
and the PACE officers came in, it was
unbelievable. The shooting, you couldn't sit on
your porch. They would come by and throw bottles
on your sidewalk and your yard, and you're sitting
there. . . . Last summer for the first time, I was
able to sit on my porch if I wanted to.

Oakleaf Resident: We don't have as many break ins. 
But a few of them come out here and they're doing
that . . . But we know the fellas so we kind of
get him lined up for the police, I mean. First we
did have a killing. That boy was from another
place, but it was a boy out here that killed him.
But we haven't had no problems in quite a while,
since the first of the year.

Louisville respondents were more doubtful about
the effects of their COP program on crime,
especially at the time of the second site visit.
While some respondents indicated that crime was
down, at least one high level police administrator
expressed reservations about attributing that
change to the COP program:

Well, you know we have a tendency sometimes to
jump on the bandwagon and take credit for things
that aren't really ours. We went a whopping two
months without a single murder, which was
outstanding, and of course, that was one month
after the program finally got operational. So of
course, we kiddingly said, "Hey, we had a seven or
eight hundred percent drop in our murder rate in
the last month alone." I'm reluctant to jump in
and answer that with any sense of I guess credi-
bility, you know, it's like you take credit for a
crime reduction, and crime increases are because
people have more confidence in our ability to do
it. And it's a double-edged sword that I'd as soon
not play that game.

Another administrator echoed these sentiments at
the time of the third visit, and an officer
involved in the program indicated that nothing had
really changed. "We're still getting as many
shootings as we ever were. And the day we started
the task force, we were locking up people for
dope. And the day we ended it, we were still
locking up people for dope. Different set of
faces, same results in my opinion." Other officers
and residents were more positive at the time of
the third site visit, indicating that crime was
down in the housing projects.

In Tempe, where residents and police thought the
project had been very effective with regard to
drug trafficking, respondents also were generally
positive with regard to the effects of the Beat 16
project on drug-related crime. All but one of the
police administrators interviewed by the
researchers believed that crime was down in Beat
16. One of them indicated that the project had
affected all crime; this administrator mentioned
specifically graffiti, loitering, and burglary.
The other two administrators both mentioned
prostitution, burglary and robbery. The one police
administrator who was not positive about the
project's effects on crime indicated that he just
didn't know. Police officers involved with the
program were also enthusiastic about its effects
on crime, in particular, prostitution, burglary,
random shooting and gang activity. The area
residents agreed, but attributed the reduction in
prostitution to displacement. They believed that
the prostitutes were being displaced to other
neighborhoods along with the drug trade. At least
one resident thought that one effect of the
program was an increase in communication between
police and residents, leading to an increase in
reported burglaries, which did not reflect any
increase in actual crime:

"You know, I think you'd have to get your
statistics on that from the officers, but again,
the officers that I've talked to have said that
they have not actually seen a decrease in
burglaries, but they're getting more cooperation
from the residents. As before the residents would
say well, we got burglarized, you know; they can't
do anything about it, so they just wouldn't report
it. And now people, they get people who would
never before talk to them, are calling in and
reporting different incidences. So burglaries have
actually stayed about the same or the number of
reports have actually risen, but I think that's
because of the high visibility the officers and
the open communication between the residents and
Beat 16 officers."

Both police and residents in Prince George's
County believed that crime had gone down as a
result of the work of the COP program. All three
police administrators who responded to this
question referred to crime statistics as the basis
for their belief that crime had been reduced. This
drop in crime in the areas in which the COP
program had been implemented also received press
coverage and was acclaimed by the County Executive
as a major accomplishment. According to a police
department press release (dated June 8, 1992),
"The statistics show a 40% reduction in drug
related calls since its inception in the Seat
Pleasant District. And, in the same area, a 15.3%
reduction in violent crime in the first quarter of
1992." The County Executive claimed these
statistics demonstrated the program to be a "true
success," and one police administrator said, "I
cannot think of any program, project, or effort in
law enforcement in my 23 years that has had such a
significant impact on a crime rate in such a short
period of time." While residents of the area also
perceived that crime had been reduced, none
mentioned these statistics.

Perceived Effects on Fear. Most of the respondents
in the INOP sites believed that their INOP
projects (or their city's community policing
program in general) had had positive effects on
drug trafficking and drug-related crimes in the
target areas. While many of those interviewed
believed that the drug trafficking had been
displaced to other areas or indoors, they believed
that crime had been reduced in those areas.
Theorists in the area of policing suggest that
physical and social disorder and crime are linked
to fear of crime, which leads residents to
withdraw from the community (Kelling, 1992; Moore
& Trojanowicz, 1988; Skogan, 1986, 1990; Wilson &
Kelling, 1982). One would expect, then, that in
those areas where residents perceive that drug
trafficking and crime have been reduced, they
should also be less fearful (and perhaps, more
likely to participate in community organizations).

Thus, based on the perceptions that the INOP
projects had had little or, at best, temporary
effects on drugs and crime in Hayward, Houston,
and New York, one would expect there to be little
change in residents' fear levels. Most of the
respondents to this question in Hayward were
community residents, some of whom lived in the
area that received most of the attention from the
COPPS program and others lived outside the area.
At the time of the second research site visit,
residents from both inside and outside the target
area perceived there to have been very little
change in fear levels. The one group of residents
(who did not live within the target area) who
expressed some positive sentiments attributed this
to their own efforts at neighborhood organizing.
That is, some older residents were now coming out
of their homes to attend the neighborhood
meetings, but only because the other residents
were willing to walk them from their homes to the
meeting. Within the target area, most respondents
either said they didn't know whether fear levels
had changed or, again, attributed any positive
effects to their own efforts at community
organizing, which had been ongoing for many years.
The most commonly cited reason for lack of
involvement with neighborhood groups was fear of
retaliation from drug dealers.

People in the areas are fearful to get involved .
. . . they still, you can't get them in the
Neighborhood Alert program; you lose them because
they just don't think anything has changed. That
the druggies have the run of our street, and they
won't get involved. They just don't want
retaliation back on them and by getting involved,
this guy is going to know that they did it.
During a research focus group, one resident
pointed out that the COPPS program was unlikely to
have an effect on fear if the majority of the
residents were unaware of its existence, and he
(and the others in the group) believed that very
few Hayward residents knew about the program:
I don't think -- maybe I'm new and not aware, but
I don't know that there's that many people in
Hayward that are aware -- of a population this
size, I doubt that maybe more than 10 or 15% of
the population is even aware that it exists. . . .
Because there's nobody that I have ever talked to,
outside of this Neighborhood alert program, that
ever heard of it.

By the time of the third research site visit, more
residents believed that fear had decreased. One of
these, who was very active in community organizing
in a drug-infested area, attributed this to a
change in police behavior, resulting in more order
on the streets. She believed that in the past the
police had not treated residents well, "Even with
us, they would talk badly. Now they are more
human, not that macho stuff. In general, they talk
to people . . ." Another area respondent also said
that fear was down and based this judgment on the
willingness of people to go to neighborhood
meetings and visit the INOP van the one day it was
on the street. But another area resident believed
that this fear reduction was a temporary effect,
related to the presence of the van:

I think initially when the van left, that is the
following next morning, people still had a little
of that euphoria left, still feeling a little
safe. As the day lingered on and it approached
night and the van didn't come back, then they,
then [an area leader] and I started hearing
questions, because we're in charge, and the people
know we are on the street. "Well, when's the van
coming back? It's not coming back tonight. Is it
going to be back tomorrow? Is it going to be back
by the weekend?" Anxious, they wanted the van
back. . . . I think that's the most uncomfortable
feeling is that they don't know when it's coming
back. We don't even know when it's coming back;
we've just been assured that it will come back.

In Houston, where effects on drug trafficking and
drug- related crime were perceived to be only
temporary, there was very little evidence of fear
reduction. Police officers and residents alike
agreed that fear levels in Houston were high. One
officer thought that fear might be "at its highest
level since I've been here, or thereabouts, I
don't know." The only perceived fear reduction
effects of Operation Siege were in relation to the
target-hardening hardware that was installed for
elderly and low- income residents. Several
residents indicated that they felt more secure in
their homes, but were still afraid to go out,
especially at night.

As was discussed above, the New York INOP site was
different from the rest: its intervention was
minimal (vans only), and the vans were parked on
non-residential streets. The only "residents"
available to talk to the research staff were the
volunteers, who lived within the precinct, but
would not be directly affected by the presence of
the van. Very few respondents addressed the
question of project effects on fear, and those who
did had very little to say. One administrator
declined to answer the question, saying that since
he was not in the area, he wouldn't really be able
to make such an assessment. An officer who was
involved in the program believed that the presence
of the van deterred drug activity in front of the
school, which allowed people to use the services
in the school. One of the volunteers was of a
similar opinion:

Sometimes it's good for them not to know [that the
vans are there for information and referral only];
they're thinking they're some paddy wagons and
they do something wrong. . . . So the mere
presence of the van will sort of give us a feeling
of safety in the area. And I think it's needed.

In general, however, there was little evidence
that the INOP project had any effect on fear in
the neighborhoods in which the vans were located.

As would be expected from their perceptions of the
effects of the Iris Court project on drug
trafficking and drug-related crime, Portland
respondents were overwhelmingly positive about the
project's effect on fear in Iris Court. The great
majority of respondents in interviews conducted in
both the second and third research site visits
were residents of Iris Court; respondents in 13 of
the interviews (some of which were focus groups)
were quite positive about the project's effect on
fear (only two respondents expressed
reservations). All the other respondents -- police
administrators, personnel from other agencies and
police officers -- believed that the INOP project
had reduced fear among both Iris Court residents
and police officers working in the housing
project. Residents most frequently expressed their
fear reduction in terms of feeling comfortable
going out after dark or letting children play
outside without fear that they would be hurt:

Seniors . . . some of them just started getting
out since we had this; they feel more safer now
than they did. I feel more safer now than I did
when I first came over. I wouldn't even let my
kids come out, but now because we have the police
and things, I be glad. I love to get out this
door. Now it is nice to be a family here now
instead of, just you stay here and I stay here.

I used to be scared to go out, but not any more.
Now you can sit outside and not have to listen to
fighting and screaming all night.

Now we can go out and get our seniors and they
will come out. We don't have any fear of people
bothering us. We used to have fear of the gangs,
but that's over. I used to be afraid to let the
kids go out front, but now it's not a problem.

A police administrator believed that the project
had had a tremendous impact on fear as a direct
result of the community policing style. That is,
the police had been in Iris Court prior to the
INOP project, responding to calls and making
arrests, but since the project began, this admin-
istrator believed that attitudes toward police
officers had changed:

Well, I think, and I have to really sort of say
this because I think this statement is true, and I
think that police officers would agree with this
too, that it's having as a result of the community
and community policing, residents who are not
afraid, residents who are participating, because
we've had police officers all along and seeing
them in a more reactive posture, making arrests.
But now that we have them that are getting
involved in the community, that attitudes about
police officers have changed, and people don't
have any problem with approaching them now. And
they understand and they get to know them on a
first name basis, and that's the beauty I think in
community policing as it relates to Iris Court is
that we're a small development, and they know the
officers by name. They obviously know me, and it's
more like family. I see it as an extended family
now, people coming together to try to fight a
common foe, and that foe is crime.

In Norfolk, where respondents believed drug
trafficking had been displaced and crime had been
reduced, respondents interviewed at the time of
the second research site visit believed that
residents were less fearful. At that time police
administrators and officers involved in the
program and residents of the PACE target areas
were generally positive about the program's
effects on fear levels. They believed that fear
was reduced as a result of the police presence in
the area and because the drug traffickers were not
there, or at least less visible. As one officer
put it:

Now you come through there now, the juveniles are
not hanging like they used to, because I went out
there and attacked that problem. I removed their
element. So by removing that element, it made it
easy for the people to come out more. They're not
trapped in their house like they used to be, and
this is what they felt was their number one
problem: "I can't go to the store; I can't sit on
my front porch." They could care less about drugs
at night because they're not going to be out there
anyway. Their main concern was being able to enjoy
their property, be able to sit out on their front
porch, be able to walk down the street, and not
have to worry about a bunch of guys hanging in
there that they're going to snatch my purse, or
they're going to knock me down, stuff like that.
So there is a positive aspect I have seen, and
then I have seen the people are now becoming more
approachable, and we are being more approachable
while we're getting more information over this
other point.

The residents agreed:

Well, you know, certain ones don't like the
policemen hanging around too much. You have a few
of them. Then we have a few that's glad they're
around, and this means you can really feel com-
fortable setting out . . . you can feel so much
more comfortable with them riding through every
once in a while. To me it's fine, and I have
plenty of neighbors that's glad they're out here.

PACE came out there and knocked hard, and . . .
gave us our park back. I'm just going to say that.
It really gave us our place back because one time
we couldn't sit on the cobbles because we saw buck
shots come across our head. And . . . it's quieted
down a whole lot.

Well, I can only speak for myself. As I say, it
gives me a little more of a secure feeling by
their presence, and I know I can reach some of
them. And then I see them passing. So that's the
way it makes me feel.

Put it this way, if you take it on a ten scale,
I'll give it a nine. Because you used to not hang
out, because you used to couldn't do anything. But
you can now. . . . Say for instance, around 3:30
[a.m.] I was out hanging clothes. Yeah, I always
get up early. I was hanging out clothes, right?
The police rode by.  I wave. He wave.

By the time of the third research site visit,
however, residents were a little less positive
about the effects of PACE on fear. One of the
things that changed between the two research site
visits was that the PACE program had expanded
considerably and added a number of target areas.
As seen in the chapters on "Police Issues" and
"Community Involvement," both police
administrators and officers felt that one of the
problems with the program was that their resources
were being stretched thin because of the rapid
expansion. And residents of the target areas
agreed. The same residents who were very positive
about the PACE program in January 1992 were angry
in July of that year; they no longer saw "their"
PACE officers very often, and this made them feel
less safe.

In Louisville, police administrators and officers
involved in the COP program believed that fear had
been reduced in the housing projects that were
their target areas. Most of these respondents
indicated that their perceptions were based on
what the residents told them. As an administrator
put it:

The residents tell us that they feel safer over
there at these meetings. They say they just feel
safer over now on the street at night than they
used to. And that's a common theme at all the
meetings we've been to.

An officer assigned to the target area echoed this
sentiment:

And so many adults came up to me, and I'm sure I'm
not the only officer, and said, "God, this is
great. We feel safer. I can come to the park. I
can send my child to the park to play now, and I
feel better because I know you all are up here."
And that went over big. That went over big.

The residents seemed less certain, however. As one
resident of the public housing area said, "I don't
think they're more afraid. I think they're a
little more relaxed than they used to be, but
they're still leery." The residents did seem to
like the road blocks (part of the "zero tolerance"
activities) and said that those types of
activities made them feel a little bit safer, but
they did not express the positive feelings heard
in some of the other sites (e.g., Portland).
Respondents in Tempe, who were positive with
regard to the Beat 16 project's effects on drug
trafficking and crime, also believed that fear had
decreased since the project began. Police, other
agency personnel, and residents interviewed during
the second and third research site visits agreed
that the area was safer and that residents were
now more comfortable using the parks and letting
their children play outside. One of the reasons
they said they were more comfortable was that
there were now lights in the park and people
playing baseball. As one resident put it:

. . . the lights are always there; so me and my
husband do a walking at night, and to me it's not
scary. I guess if it were dark, like there's times
when we come by and the lights are off, and it's
scary when the lights are off in the park

Prince George's County respondents were
overwhelmingly positive about the COPS program's
effects on fear in the target areas. Residents
attributed the fear reduction to the reduction in
drug dealing and crime. While they recognized that
drugs and crime (and fear) would never be
completely eliminated, they felt things had
improved:

I don't think we'll ever get completely get it all
packed up. But we can walk the streets, thank the
Lord. Because, for a while there, we had senior
citizens who were afraid to walk to the stores and
whatnot.

Now, they had a drug house on this street, and
people were afraid to walk. But now, since it's
gone, they take walks here every day. They don't
have any fear anymore, and they're coming out now
to meetings and expressing their feelings. . . .
People are not afraid anymore because in one
street there was two drug house, a block from the
other, and the people got tired. So now, there's
no fear now.

Reported Effects on Police/Community Relations.
Proponents of community policing contend that one
of the advantages of community policing is
improved relationships between the police and the
community in which they work. Community police
officers (CPOs) in New York City reported that one
of the things that had changed since they had
become CPOs was their attitude toward the
residents of the community (McElroy et al., 1993)
. They attributed this change to being exposed to
"the good people" as part of their new role. In
traditional policing, officers respond to calls
for service and deal with the victims of crime,
who are likely to be upset and unhappy, and
officers also interact with "the bad guys." But
for the first time, as CPOs, these New York City
officers reported that from walking their beats,
they got to know the community residents as people
and not just in crisis situations.

Most of the respondents in the INOP sites also
reported improved relationships between the police
and community residents. Even in those sites where
perceived effects on drugs, crime and fear were
minimal (Hayward, Houston and New York),
respondents believed that the relationship between
the police and the community had improved. Some
respondents qualified their responses, however.
One administrator in Hayward said that relations
had improved with that portion of the community
that chose to get involved with the police, but
not necessarily with the community as a whole.
Other respondents indicated that relationships
between the police and the residents had generally
improved, but that among some ethnic groups, the
barriers were much greater. This was thought to be
a function of poor treatment from the police in
their country of origin, which led these residents
to expect the police in Hayward to behave
similarly. One administrator expressed the
belief, shared by others, that attitudes were
changing among both officers and residents, but
that it was a slow process:

"It think that transition's happening with the
officers; some are further ahead than others, but
with the community it's a lot slower. In fact, I
think we've had a little bit of a set-back in the
fact that . . . a lot of the neighborhoods we're
dealing with, I guess the overall . . .
sophistication of the neighborhood is less, and
probably just the overall organization here . . .
and when we started talking about community
policing, I mean to this day, we still go out
there; we talk to them. We say it's a change in
attitude; it's not something where it's a program
where we put it on the table, plug it in, and turn
it on and watch it work and all of a sudden, all
your problems are going to go away. And we keep
harping on that, but we still constantly get the
complaints from the community that, well, you guys
have been doing this now for six months, and I
don't see anything better. Well . . . that's not a
realistic expectation, and . . . I think we've
lost a few people as far as their enthusiasm
because they thought, all of a sudden, boom,
everything's going to be better. And it's a slow
transition; [but] I think things are starting to
improve down there. So, I think those people are
starting to say, "Yeah, I do see some
improvement." I think people are a lot more
comfortable with being involved with the Police
Department. I think their rapport with the
officers out there is a lot better."

This administrator went on to say that he thought
that the community was beginning to understand the
role of the police and to have more realistic
expectations of what they could do. He also
thought that the officers "are having some
realistic expectations of the community. And a lot
more empathy towards some of the problems down
there. And I think that empathy is really key,
because, without it, I don't think they're really
going to go that extra step."  Residents in
Hayward were quite positive about the officers and
credited the COPPS program with making the
officers more available to them:

"You find out that these cops are human beings,
they do have families. They do have their own
problems. They didn't do nothing for us, and I
sure in heck wouldn't have gave them a smile
back."

"I think its had a real positive effect; I think
it makes our police department a little bit more
human. Residents realize they're more human, and
like I said before, they're a little bit more
aware of what their limitations are and what the
reality of their situation is."

"The nice thing about this is that I've never had
a relationship with the Police Department on this
level. These guys call on you to say, "Hi." If I
have something to say, they're happy to listen."

"As far as I'm concerned, the police are more
accessible. Relations are better. It's not as if
you have to wait until you have a problem and go
down to the precinct. They come and see you to
exchange information. They communicate with you
now."

In Houston, officers and residents from both the
BOND area and Frenchtown were generally positive
with regard to the effects of Operation Siege on
the relationship between the police and the
community. Officers involved in the program
thought that the program had improved rapport
between the two groups because it allowed the
police to "get out there and to show them, this is
what you wanted; this is what we are doing for
you. And they saw that and said, 'Maybe you are
for real.' And they started becoming more involved
with you." Another officer agreed that it was
because the residents found the police to be
receptive, willing to change and willing to help
them, rather than coming into the neighborhood
just to harass them, that their attitude had
changed for the better. While residents generally
agreed, at the time of the third research site
visit, some complained that they no longer saw the
police in the area very much. (See Chapter 5 on
community involvement.) Others indicated that
knowing their officers helped, increased trust in
the police, but that the constant rotation of
captains in the precinct was a problem.

One group of residents in the Frenchtown area
expressed dissatisfaction with the police and the
way they treated area residents. They indicated
that there were many Latino residents who were
afraid of the police. Some residents felt that the
problem was partially attributable to a lack of
African American and Latino officers in a
predominantly African American and Latino
neighborhood. But others were of the opinion that
the officers' ethnicity or race wouldn't matter,
as long as they were approachable and friendly.
But the biggest problem, according to the
residents interviewed, appeared to be that the
officers just weren't in the area enough:

I would say like this, on getting along with the
people in the community: I wouldn't say they get
along bad, and I wouldn't say they get along good.
Because in order to know how people get along, you
have to associate with the people. And that's not
being done. so you can't say, "Me and you get
along well" if me and you don't meet . . . So, we
never know how the relations are, unless we get
together.

Respondents interviewed in New York were generally
positive about the effects of the INOP project on
police-community relationships, although they were
not as certain as in some other cities. One
administrator interpreted an increase in the
number of people coming to the van as an
indication that the residents understood that,
although the van was a police vehicle, it was not
a "war wagon." An officer (who was not involved
with the program) felt that it had improved
relationships between the police and a certain
group of community residents, but that other seg-
ments of the community remained unmoved:

Well, it's had an effect on like the community
council, people who are already volunteers. A vol-
unteer will always be appreciative of something
like that, because it's something for them to do.
The people that, they go, "Oh, I see the city
wasted some more money." There are people walking
the street . . . they go, "Eh, what's that
supposed to be?" They just look at it like the
city's wasting money because they see no one's
using it.
The residents who were interviewed (who were all
volunteers for the van) believed the project had
enhanced relationships between the police and the
community, and they attributed this improvement
both to the community patrol officers assigned to
the area and to the presence of the van.

Respondents in the Iris Court project in Portland
were generally quite positive about the project's
effects on relationships between the police and
the community, although there were a few residents
who had complaints. Most of the residents
expressed sentiments similar to those expressed in
Hayward (i.e., that the police now seemed more
human, more accessible):

I think you find the policeman is a human being;
he has problems too, and he is considerate. And
they listen to you and help you if you need help,
and you really need them sometime. People talk
about the police and . . . but they are the main
ones to call upon; you need them sometimes to help
you with the situations that are going around. You
can't handle it yourself; you don't want to get
hurt or anything. Not that you want to get them
hurt, but you don't want to get hurt or anything
trying to stop something. They are good to have
around. . . .

What I think is nice is that the patrol car can be
going through, and if you are standing out on the
street, the officers will actually stop and talk
to you. They don't stop and hassle you any more;
they stop and they talk to you. It is really nice
you can stand there and talk to the officer for
five or ten minutes, and then they go on their
way. . . . it was one time if you talk to the
police, you had to be a sneak. You was wild for
talking to the police. Now I don't care what
people call me; I am trying to better myself, and
I am trying to better this community for myself
and for the rest of these people's kids around
here. . . . This ain't no ghetto no more, because
everyone is trying to move out. Ever since the
police department done been here, seems like
everybody done blew up their self esteem and build
up theirselves.

While most residents indicated that the police
were more responsive since the inception of the
project and believed that this had improved their
relationship with the community, not all the
residents agreed. One resident complained about an
incident in which there had been a shooting in the
complex and no police officer responded for 10
minutes. According to this respondent, there was
an officer in the contact office, but he claimed
not to have heard anything. In addition, some
participants in the Landlord Training program felt
that they needed more support from the police. One
of them said that, even though there were between
20 and 40 cars visiting a particular drug house
each day, the police apparently would not take
action. As a result, this respondent felt that the
police didn't really want to deal with the
problem. Some Iris Court residents also complained
that the police did not respond to calls regarding
speeding cars, drug dealing, gun shots, etc. And,
like the residents in the Houston target area,
they were unhappy with what they perceived to be
the constant rotation of officers in and out of
the area. These comments were in direct conflict
with the perception of some administrators who
thought that the residents knew their officers by
name.

Despite the concerns expressed by some Norfolk
residents that they no longer saw their PACE
officers as often as they had previously, they
were generally quite positive about the effects of
the program on relationships between the police
and the community. One administrator attributed
the improvement in relationships between the
police and the community to a change from a
platoon system to a sector system of deployment of
officers. The change was made at the time PACE was
implemented in January, 1991, giving a supervisor
responsibility for everything that happened in his
sector, 24 hours a day. According to this
administrator, prior to implementation of the
sector system, there was no contact between police
administrators (precinct commanders and platoon
lieutenants) and the community leaders. Another
administrator agreed that increased contact
between the police and community residents was
responsible for the improvement:

Well, our officers attend civic leagues; it's a
policy that we have. The patrol officer on the
District attends civic leagues, and that has built
up a relationship between the police officers that
work that District and those living in that area.
And as they come to know each other, they become
more honest with each other, willing to speak and
the problems that, in the past used to perhaps lay
there and fester until the police became aware of
it and tried to do something about it or the civic
leagues or the folks living there would get so
frustrated they would then call me or have some
big problem before we all got a resource of the
other and tried to solve the problem. But now the
folks in the community talk directly to the
officer who's working that District, and many
times he'll be at that meeting and go right out to
where that problem area is and handle. And then,
the next meeting he would meet through them again,
and reports back what he has done. And that has
enhanced the relationship among the folks living
in the area and the police officer.

The residents of PACE areas who were interviewed
by the researchers generally agreed with the
assessment offered by the police. They indicated
that prior to PACE there was no communication
between the residents and the police, but that
since the program was implemented, the lines of
communication had opened. They believed that
officers were responsive to problems raised at
civic league meetings. Like the residents of Iris
Court in Portland, residents of PACE areas liked
the fact that the officers would stop and talk,
"And it's not that they're making any arrests or
anything like that, just talking." They also
indicated that getting to know their police
officers increased trust between the police and
the residents:

Because if you get acquainted with them, some
policemen, they don't know you and you don't know
them, and you go to talk to them, and they don't
know if you're a good guy or a bad guy. . . But
having a policeman that you can deal with on a
daily basis, . . . they know how to deal with you.
It's more comfortable then it's a lot of thing
that maybe people want to talk to the police
about, but policemen are human too, and some of
them are scared that they might get hurt or they
might say, someone told me this. But when you've
got someone that you deal with on a daily basis .
. .
Respondents in Louisville generally believed that
relationships between the police and the community
had improved as a result of the COP program; this
included police administrators, officers involved
in the program, representatives of other city
agencies and residents. At the outset of the COP
program, residents of the housing projects were
quite hostile to the police. These people felt
that the police were not responsive to their
needs; that when they came into the project, they
harassed the residents; that when they did respond
to a resident's call for service, they would come
to the door (which would tell the drug dealers who
had called the police). There was also a history
of racial problems between the predominantly white
police officers and the black residents. As a
result of these tensions between police and
project residents, at the first meeting between
the two groups, held to explain the tactics the
police planned to use to deal with the drug
problem, as one officer put it, "the community
attacked the police." The residents were so
pleased with the results, however, that at each
subsequent meeting the residents expressed more
positive feelings toward the police and the COP
program. As one administrator put it:

The officers were complaining that they couldn't
see the community support, so I got kind of mad
about it. So I started dragging them to every
meeting that I had to go to. And we went over
there, and I remember the first meeting we had
with the Cotter Homes building captains -- it was
a fiery meeting. There was cussing and all kinds
of stuff going on. And the officers were upset
when we left the meeting, and I'm sure the
residents were too. When we had our second meeting
was after the roadblocks had gone into effect. And
when we had our second meeting, they actually
applauded the officers. Yeah, and that applause
went all over the District because they couldn't
believe it. And the third meeting we had over
there, they had a larger group because everybody
started questioning, well this was a small group
of people. And we had a much larger group, and
they were applauded again.

The residents echoed these sentiments, indicating
that there was a history of distrust of the
police, resulting from what they perceived to be
poor treatment and lack of response to their
calls. The COP program, they said was beginning to
change these feelings:

The COP program has been nice for the people
because they feel like the things they're telling,
someone's listening to them. It's like they really
understand that the police can do only so much,
and they have to do so much. Like getting license
numbers and knowing, like if they call and say,
"These people are dealing drugs," that's not
enough. You're gonna have to say what you see, who
you see coming in, where, and where are they
putting them. . . . And they feel now like they're
not gonna be, you know, they're not gonna let the
world know that they told on them, and so it just
gives them kind of a secure feeling. More trust.

As would be expected from their perceptions of the
Beat 16 project's effects on drugs, crime and
fear, respondents in Tempe were quite positive
about its effects on relationships between the
police and members of the community served by the
project. Residents and police alike attributed
this change to the fact that the same officer
works the area all the time. This increased the
trust the residents felt in the police and made
the police feel more comfortable about working in
the area. As one administrator put it:

Prior to beginning this project, we the police
were not comfortable in that area at all, even
going inside the area for anything. Now that the
project's been running for six, eight, nine
months, the officers are very familiar with the
residents, very comfortable. The fear of the
officers has been reduced quite a bit in the area.
So I think the relationship has been bettered.

Some respondents indicated that although they
believed relationships between the police and the
community had improved, this change was
attributable to the personality of specific offi-
cers rather than to the structure of the program
(see also, Chapters 3 and 5). A group of employees
of city agencies discussed this issue:

R1: I think a lot of it has to do with, not the
police department, but some of the officers who
are on the team themselves, because of their own
personality and because of how they are
approaching their job.

R2: I think the officers who are out there are the
key to it. I know five cops in the city, if you
put them out there, you'd have riots in about a
month. So you know . . . whoever assigns those
people out there have got the right kind of people
out there. They're the ones who are making the
program. I think that even if you continued the
program, and you put the wrong people in, it
wouldn't work. You've got to have the program and
those kind of people.

Only one respondent, a community resident,
reported a lack of positive impact on these
relationships. While his own relationship with the
police had improved and he had seen other people
behaving more positively toward the police, he
believed that among Latinos, there was still a
general fear of government and a lack of openness
to the police. This sentiment is similar to that
expressed in the Frenchtown area of Houston.

Prince George's County respondents were also
generally positive regarding the effects of the
COPS program on police/community relationships.
Police officers involved in the program felt that
they had become more approachable, "People wave at
you. Even if they don't know you personally,
they'll wave at you or say hi to you." Officers
not involved in the program agreed; although all
these officers talked about greater trust and
communication between the community and the COPS
officers; none of them said that they, personally,
had experienced greater communication with
community residents.  And like some of the
respondents in Tempe, some people attributed the
success of the program to the personal commitment
and qualities of specific officers. As one
resident said, "They're a very special breed.
There's something unique about the COPS officers
that makes them COPS officers. But there's a
special type of people volunteering."

This perception, that particular officers are
responsible for improved relationships between the
community and the police, could be a problem for
departments that are trying to expand their
community policing efforts. As community policing
becomes a department-wide phenomenon, involving
officers with a variety of personalities and
styles, these positive impacts may be less
evident. Another potential problem for expanding
community policing is that in most cities,
residents were most likely to talk about the
positive effects of seeing the same officer
regularly; if rapid expansion results in residents
seeing less of "their officer," as was the case in
some neighborhoods in Norfolk, Portland, and
others, the result could be an erosion of the
enhanced police/community relationship. These
problems are discussed in greater detail in the
sections on police and community.

Perceived Effects of the INOP Programs on
Community Organization and Community Involvement.
Respondents generally had more trouble assessing
the effects of the INOP programs on community
organization and involvement than they did on
drugs, crime or fear. This may be because they
were simply not sure if changes in levels of
community organization were attributable to the
programs; however, most respondents were not that
sophisticated in their judgments. In most sites,
most respondents who answered the question
indicated that levels of community organization
and community involvement had increased since the
start of the INOP program.

This was certainly true in Hayward, which had the
most well-organized citizens' groups of the eight
INOP cities. Although the respondents tended to
attribute the increased organization to the COPPS
program, it appeared to be a grass-roots effort
that predated both COPPS and INOP. Nonetheless,
police administrators, officers and community
residents all indicated that more Neighborhood
Alert groups had been formed and attendance in
existing groups had improved since the community
policing effort had begun. One group of
community activists expressed the sentiment that
although the driving force behind the increased
number of Neighborhood Alert groups was concerned
citizens, the attendance of police officers at
these meetings made people feel more comfortable
about going themselves. However, one factor that
was cited as a problem in Hayward was the very
ethnically diverse nature of the city. Racial
tensions were not the problem with this diversity;
rather, respondents mentioned problems with
communication because of language barriers and
cultural differences.

In Houston, where the effects of Operation Siege
on drugs, crime and fear were perceived to be
temporary at best, respondents were mixed with
regard to its effect on community organization and
involvement. One group of city employees felt that
the project had improved attendance at meetings
and strengthened networking, but also believed
that once the project ended, it's impact would
diminish significantly. Officers involved in
Operation Siege were less positive and indicated
that in the Frenchtown community, most of the
residents were renters who had little stake in the
area and were not likely to become involved.
Residents in the Bond area felt that community
involvement had increased, but attributed this
effect to the Bond organization itself, rather
than to Operation Siege. Members of the Frenchtown
community organization felt that the presence of
police officers directly increased attendance and
participation at their meetings.

There was virtually no response to this question
in the New York INOP sites. One administrator
indicated that there had been a big recruitment
drive for volunteers in one precinct and that the
people in that community were beginning to look
more favorably on the van. And a community member
in another precinct also thought that people were
beginning to get more involved. This lack of
response to the question regarding community
involvement and organization is illustrative of
the inability of New York's INOP program to
involve the larger community. The few residents
who volunteered in the vans in the two research
precincts are the same people who are involved in
many other precinct activities. Despite some
efforts to involve other residents in the project,
implementation problems (e.g., the very limited
hours of operation and numerous mechanical
difficulties) and fear of retaliation by drug
dealers or of traveling at night just to get to
the volunteer training, limited involvement to a
very small group of community activists. In
addition, the project seemed unable to attract
many people to use the services available on the
vans. Indeed, participation by residents was so
limited in New York, that the only community
residents identified for the research staff to
interview were those involved as volunteers.

In contrast, respondents in Portland (who were
mostly residents of Iris Court) were very positive
about the project's effect on the level of
community organization and involvement. According
to residents, prior to the start of the Iris Court
project, there were no meetings. Now, the tenants'
council meets regularly. While one resident
indicated that those not on the residents council
are willing to help if asked, most respondents
focused on attendance at holiday parties in
Norfolk, where there was little evidence of
community organization or involvement in the PACE
project, police officers and administrators were
generally quite positive about the project's
effects on the community. Residents, on the other
hand, had mixed views. One community leader
believed he had seen about a 20% increase in civic
league attendance since the PACE program began,
and he attributed this increase to an increased
feeling of safety in the area. In contrast,
residents in other PACE areas did not believe
attendance had increased at all. One respondent
suggested there was a need for two different types
of civic leagues -- one that would meet during the
day time for senior citizens who were afraid to go
out at night and the other that would meet in the
evening for people who work during the day.

Police administrators and officers were more
likely than residents to respond in terms of
involvement and mean involvement in fighting
crime. Officers involved in the PACE program
attributed this increased involvement to the
availability of cellular phones; this enabled the
residents to call the officer directly, without
going through the dispatcher. Residents liked
calling the cellular phones because they knew they
could do so without having their address displayed
(which would put them at risk of having an officer
come to their door).

Respondents in Tempe were generally positive about
the Beat 16 project's effects on community
organization. One administrator saw the function
of the project as coordinating and facilitating
communication among pre-existing community
organizations, and also thought some new
organizations had been formed and involvement in
existing organizations had increased. Other police
administrators and officers mentioned some
community involvement in area clean-ups,
attendance at parties, and use of the recreation
center. One resident also mentioned increased
communication on the level of individual residents
as a result of the project. One of the few
respondents who expressed any negative views about
the project's effect was a police administrator
who indicated that the design of the Beat 16
project "lumped together" two distinct
neighborhoods, with different concerns and
different problems. This made it difficult to
organize the community, and he felt that these two
neighborhoods should have been treated as
individual areas. By the time of the final
research site visit to Tempe, however, most
respondents agreed that community support and
involvement had declined dramatically.

Respondents in Prince George's County were also
generally positive about the effects of the COPS
program on community organization and involvement.
Some of the respondents referred to the Mini
Planning committees and how they had increased
community involvement in problem solving. As one
officer put it:

"We're going to have our meeting at Seat Pleasant
Town Hall this time . . . and each member of the
committee is going to bring members of their
community organizations to this meeting. And what
I'm doing now is getting the community more
involved in decision making so that
decision-making burden or the problem solving will
not be my main priority. In other words, I'm
getting input from them. I'm getting ideas from
them. We're dealing with the SARAs. Now, instead
of me doing the SARAs and responding in the
assessment, they're providing me with input.
They're brainstorming with me. So this is a new
approach, and I'm finding it to be very helpful."

Other officers agreed with this assessment, as did
some of the residents. One resident of a housing
complex said that prior to the program, there were
no building meetings in her complex, but that once
the officer was assigned to the area, he was able
to mobilize the tenants.

Respondents in Louisville also believed their INOP
program had increased the involvement of the
community. Attendance at tenants meetings was
reported to have increased. One police
administrator noticed that the number of calls for
service had increased in targeted areas, and he
attributed this to increased involvement of the
residents. Another police administrator said,
however, that although community organization had
increased, this could not be interpreted as solely
due to the COP program. Rather, he believed it was
due to a confluence of programs in the District:
the Housing Authority had received a HUD Drug
Elimination grant and the school system had
received money to create family resource centers:

"I'd like to say, "Yes, and it's all to do with
the COP program." But a lot of things have been
happening that are working together; they seem to
be working and helping each other . . . A lot of
things seem to be going together at the same time,
and that's helping the people in the neighborhood
feel like there is some interest in them and that
this is the time to be on board and participate."

This Louisville administrator may have identified
a critical explanatory factor in the perceptions
of respondents in the INOP sites in general. If
the nature and extent of the interventions of the
INOP programs are considered objectively, one
would expect there to be little effect on drugs
and crime in these cities. And to some extent this
was the case -- most respondents who perceived any
effects on drug dealing saw them as displacement
effects or as reductions in visible drug
trafficking. But most respondents in the INOP
sites thought the programs were effective in
reducing drug-related crime and fear, had improved
relationships between the police and the
community, and had increased community
organization and involvement. Why? Perhaps it is
because, for many of these neighborhoods, this is
the first time the police have paid any
"attention" to them. And people often feel that
any intervention is better than no attention at
all. In addition, other research conducted by the
Vera Institute has shown that community residents
often respond positively to police programs and
will demand that they stay in the area, even when
these same people perceive the programs to be
ineffective (McElroy et al., 1993; Sviridoff et
al., 1992). Why do the police in these cities
perceive their projects to be effective? Part of
the reason is probably that they have a vested
interest in demonstrating that their programs are
effective to continue to receive funding.
Additionally, service providers in all fields want
to believe that what they are doing is effective
and therefore, are more likely to focus on the
positive outcomes of their programs than they are
on the negative outcomes.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusions and Recommendations

Given the proliferation of departmental
transitions to community policing, it would not be
incorrect to call community policing the new
orthodoxy of law enforcement in the United States.
A recent survey conducted by the FBI and the
National Center for Community Policing showed that
in cities with populations of 50,000 or more, half
of all police officials indicated that they had
already implemented community policing, and
another 20% reported that they were planning to do
so within the next year (Trojanowicz, 1993).
Indeed, the allure of community policing and its
promise are almost irresistible. Proponents
emphasize that under community policing, the
community and the police will share the
responsibility for improving public safety and the
quality of life. In fact, one of the features of
community policing that distinguishes it from
traditional policing is that it actively
encourages community residents to participate in
the problem identification and problem solving
process. This is in contrast with traditional or
professional era policing, which actively sought
to exclude the public from such participation.

Community policing is also attractive for other
reasons. For example, it promises to shift the
responsibility for decision making to patrol
officers who are assigned to beats for periods
long enough to learn about the concerns of
residents, foster trust and engage residents to
participate in the problem solving process.
Another promise of community policing is that,
because officers are assigned to one beat for so
long, they become more concerned about the
communities they police, and because they are such
a visible presence, they are more accountable to
the community they serve. The hope is that
community policing will reduce fear and increase
citizen satisfaction with police services.

This new orthodoxy is being embraced, however,
with virtually no systematic research to
demonstrate that it is a more effective form of
policing than the more traditional approaches. As
Skolnick and Bayley (1988) have argued, "Community
policing is advancing because it seems to make
sense, not because it has been shown to be
demonstrably superior." Yet, if community policing
is to be granted any legitimacy by the public, its
proponents ultimately will have to demonstrate to
community residents that their approach is
superior. For an impatient public, the face
validity of the community policing approach will
not be sufficient for long.

The INOP projects have provided Vera researchers
with a unique opportunity to help fill this gap in
evaluation research by studying the implementation
of community policing in eight distinctly
different cities. The programs differ greatly in
their approach to drug-demand reduction. Portland,
for example, relies heavily on social service
delivery to 159 residents of one public housing
complex, while Houston relies almost exclusively
on heavy, traditional law enforcement efforts in
two large communities. In addition, the sites vary
in their experience with community policing. New
York and Houston each have nearly a decade of
experience with community policing, and the INOP
projects represent only a small portion of their
existing community policing base. By contrast, for
cities such as Tempe and Hayward, the INOP program
represents a pilot project in community policing.
The downside to this variability is that because
the programs are so highly differentiated, it was
impossible to compare them directly.

However, the analysis of observational and
interview data revealed that the eight sites had a
number of implementation problems in common. The
problems of implementation experienced by the
eight sites fall into three categories: problems
in overcoming patrol officer resistance to the
principles of community policing; problems in
generating interagency support for and involvement
in community policing; and problems in generating
active community involvement in community
policing. Vera researchers concluded that a
description and analysis of these problems would
be useful to the many jurisdictions contemplating
the implementation of community policing. If these
problems are considered before the implementation
stage, these jurisdictions may make their
transitions to community policing more efficient
and productive.

Implementation Issues within Police Departments. A
major impediment to the successful implementation
of community policing is getting patrol officers
to accept the principles of the community policing
approach (that is, getting them to "buy into" the
community policing approach). Patrol officers are
particularly resistant to community policing
because it promises to alter their role
substantially and because the police bureaucracy
has produced a well-documented antagonism between
line officers and police management. For example,
most of the INOP sites had a very difficult time
convincing officers to volunteer for their INOP
programs. In most cases, the responses to the
posted job vacancies were paltry. This can be
attributed, in part, to the lack of adequate
understanding of the principles of community
policing among patrol officers due to insufficient
training (many officers in the INOP projects had
not received any training in community policing).

In addition, many officers not participating in
the INOP projects defined community policing
strictly in terms of its community outreach and
partnership components and rejected the concept of
community policing on this basis. Many such
officers argued that community policing is not
"real" police work because it appeared "soft" on
crime. The lack of enthusiasm is, in part, the
product of insufficient training for officers in
the community policing approach. By not providing
officers with adequate training in problem-solving
community policing, police managers make it easier
for officers to reject the approach out of hand.
Because it is the patrol officer that community
policing seeks to elevate to a position of such
great importance, it is ironic that so few
officers embrace the approach. Police officials
who envision the transitions of their own
departments to community policing must make a
commitment to training. If patrol officers do not
understand the principles of community policing,
they should not be expected to implement it.

Other jurisdictions contemplating the
institutionalization of community policing should
also consider that the "special unit status"
accorded many of the INOP project officers often
serves to exacerbate the conflict between the
reform agenda of community policing and the
paramilitary structure of police departments.
This, in turn, produces resistance to community
policing from patrol officers and perpetuates the
distrust between management and patrol officers.
In addition, it increases the resentment between
traditional patrol officers and community police
officers, which runs contrary to the goals of
community policing. In many of the INOP sites,
this intradepartmental rivalry created
difficulties in the form of resentment of and
resistance to community policing.

Another problem experienced by the INOP sites was
the common belief that community policing is a
drain on resources and a "do-nothing" assignment
and that community policing is unproductive. 
This perception is partially the result of
community police officers (in many cities) not
being required to answer 911 calls for service.

Historically, the road to advancement in policing
is generally not in patrol, but in special units
(e.g., detectives). The effect of this is to take
the best stock out of patrol. For community
policing to be successful, it must be an exception
to this rule. That is, if community policing is to
attract the most talented personnel, patrol
officers must see it as part of the career path.
In the INOP sites (and other community policing
programs around the country), the primary
incentive for volunteering is not career
advancement, but steady hours and weekends off.
This too is a source of resentment from other
officers.

A very commonly expressed sentiment by patrol
officers, both among those involved in the INOP
projects and among those not involved, was that
community policing is not really new or
innovative, just "good old-fashioned" policing.
This characterization allows resistant officers to
make a case for continuation of the status quo. A
related source of resistance to community policing
among officers is their experience that so-called
"new" police programs are short-lived, and come
and go with each new police chief. Their
perception that community policing will be just
another of these fleeting programs results in a
lack of credibility for the program.

A major source of resentment among patrol officers
is the failure of management to include officers
in the planning of the community policing effort.
In fact, many officers perceive that police
management is more interested in the opinions of
the community than in those of their own
employees. Some officers expressed the notion that
while they had no real problem with the concept of
community policing, they resented having it
"shoved down their throats."

While officers involved in the INOP programs
complained about how the programs were
implemented, the biggest stumbling block to
acceptance by non-involved officers was the
perception that community policing results in a
loss of enforcement abilities. These officers, who
characterize community policing as "smile and
wave" or "social work," rather than "real"
policing, believe that the responsibility to
interact with the community, to do
problem-solving, precludes them from carrying out
aggressive enforcement strategies. This perception
was also held by some community residents who
worried that community policing might be too
"soft" on crime.

For a some of the INOP projects, it appeared that
the continued existence of the program rested on a
single officer or administrator, and that if that
individual were to leave the department or be
transferred to another position, the program would
cease (or continue in name only). In other sites,
the problem was not quite this extreme, but the
nature of community policing makes it very
susceptible to variations in supervisory style,
and in some sites, the extent to which the program
was implemented varied by shift. Furthermore,
because of community policing's emphasis on
interaction between the police and the community,
the public's perception of a program may be highly
influenced by a single individual. If the officer
in a particular beat is especially talented and
personable, for example, the residents of that
area may become very favorably disposed toward
community policing. In contrast, if the only
contact area residents have with community
policing is with an officer who does not buy into
the concept, does not include the residents in
his/her problem-solving efforts, etc., the people
who live in that area may develop a negative
impression of community policing in general. Thus
it will be important for police departments to
devise new recruitment strategies that will help
them select candidates who will be committed to
the ideals of working with and for community
residents.

Finally, a problem common to virtually all police
departments is the overwhelming demands of
answering 911 calls, which comes in direct
conflict with their desire to do problem- solving.
Virtually all the INOP sites experienced (to some
degree) the conflict between trying to implement a
community policing program, which is inherently
resource-intensive, and the need to answer what
seem to be an ever-increasing volume of calls for
service. This was a sore spot for officers not
participating in the program, who felt that the
burden on them of running from call to call was
increased by the diversion of manpower to
community policing.

Issues of Interagency Cooperation. Interagency
cooperation may be the least discussed and least
well-implemented component of current community
policing agendas. This was the case in virtually
all the INOP sites.  The theory of community
policing recognizes that the police cannot do very
much about improving the quality of life in
neighborhoods without the assistance of residents
and other public and private agencies. In
addition, problem-solving community policing
recognizes that many problems cannot be solved by
traditional law enforcement methods and thus
require the involvement of other city agencies.
However, when officers in the INOP sites did get
other city agencies involved in problem solving,
they most often relied on personal contacts within
those agencies. The problem with this approach is
that if officers should lose those contacts, they
must cultivate new ones.

This is symptomatic of a bigger issue: community
policing is almost always implemented as a police
department phenomenon rather than as a city
agency-wide phenomenon. Among the INOP sites, only
Norfolk mandated that every city agency be
involved in the transition to community policing.
Thus, in Norfolk, personnel from other city
agencies received training along with the police
on their roles in the community policing effort.
In contrast, in most of the other INOP sites,
researchers spoke with representatives from city
and county agencies that were supposedly involved
in the INOP efforts, only to discover that the
agency officials knew virtually nothing about INOP
or community policing. In some instances,
high-level agency officials had not even heard of
their city's INOP project.

Because community policing theory acknowledges
that the police cannot hope to solve
quality-of-life problems without the help of the
community and other appropriate city agencies, it
is important that other city agencies be
incorporated into the transition to community
policing from the beginning. Such an effort will
be difficult as most police departments do not
have the resources to train adequately even their
own personnel in the principles of community
policing. At the very least, employees of other
city agencies should understand how they can
contribute to problem-solving; in short, they must
be instructed in their role in community policing,
which is no less important than those of beat
officers or concerned community residents.

Implementation Issues Surrounding Community
Involvement.  The final, and most difficult,
challenge facing community policing is creating
community partnerships. Indeed, INOP project staff
in all eight sites argued that building community
partnerships was their greatest problem.

Interviews with community residents demonstrated
that level of knowledge about the INOP projects or
community policing was closely related to the
individual's status in the community. Community
leaders who had close and frequent interaction
with the police had far higher levels of knowledge
than did ordinary residents who belonged to no
organized community group. Even the most
knowledgeable community leaders in most of the
sites, however, had only a limited understanding
of the goals of the projects or, most importantly,
their role in community policing. Many community
leaders were baffled by the idea of "partnerships"
and could not explain what they were expected to
do in these partnerships. The most common response
to the question, "What do the police mean when
they ask for the community's help?" was that the
police expected residents to call them with
information regarding criminal activities.
However, this is what the police have always asked
the public to do. Only the most enlightened
community leaders mentioned the role of the
community in the problem identification and
problem solving process.

Many community leaders argued that most ordinary
residents in their cities were not aware that
community policing was being implemented.
Community leaders in many of the sites also
suggested that the police were not doing enough to
educate the public about community policing and
the role of the public. Given that police officers
in most of the INOP sites had only limited
knowledge about problem-solving community policing
themselves, it is not surprising that community
residents knew little about it.

One common community outreach technique in nearly
all the INOP sites was to have "parties,"
"barbecues," "job fairs," and "picnics." The
primary function of such events is to bring
residents together in a casual setting with the
hopes that they will get to know one another
better as a first step in building a sense of
solidarity in the community. Such events also
allow residents to meet police officers in a
non-threatening situation. The importance of these
events is undeniable. In fact, when residents in
communities affected by the INOP projects were
asked to tell researchers about the project, most
would define the INOP project in terms of the
picnics, parties, etc. Unfortunately, however,
they knew virtually nothing of the substance of
community policing or their INOP project. In
short, when used as a primary source of outreach,
such events do virtually nothing to educate the
community about community policing or their role
in it.

When questioned about INOP's effect on levels of
community organization, residents tended to
mistake large turnouts for block parties and
barbecues as manifestations of solidarity.
Community leaders and residents involved in
community organizations, however, reported that in
most instances, the INOP projects did not increase
the level of community organization.

There are a number of reasons why more community
residents did not get involved in the INOP
projects. Many respondents argued that fear of
retaliation from drug dealers is a major reason
that more people do not attempt to help the
police. Respondents in some cities indicated that
they would not call the police to report drug
activity because the police would then appear on
their doorsteps to question them while drug
dealers looked on. While residents applauded
intensive law enforcement efforts to arrest and
harass drug dealers and buyers in many of the INOP
sites (sweeps in Norfolk and Tempe, for example),
they also thought that the effects of such
operations were short-lived, at best. Such heavy
enforcement tactics do little to reduce the fear
of crime in the long term.

Another major reason that community residents were
not enthusiastic about getting involved with the
INOP projects and community policing in general,
is the historically poor relationships between the
police and the community. The INOP projects, and
community policing projects in general, are almost
always implemented in areas of cities inhabited by
poor, minority residents. Such areas have
historically borne the brunt of police abuses, and
these abuses will not soon be forgotten, according
to community residents. It is because of the
generally negative perception many residents of
poor areas have of the police, that effective
community outreach and education become so
important to the successful implementation of
community policing.

"Apathy," according to many police and community
respondents, was another major reason that
residents were not involved in the INOP projects.
Many officers criticized community residents for
being apathetic and not acting on an opportunity
"to better their own lives" through community
policing. This perspective, however, fails to
appreciate the depth of the distrust and fear of
the police among residents living in minority
communities. Taken in an historical perspective,
the apparent unwillingness of residents to involve
themselves in INOP or any other community policing
initiative, may be less a product of "apathy" than
of fear and suspicion of the police grounded in
the largely negative experiences residents have
had with the police in the past. In addition,
residents of poor areas have seen a continuous
stream of police and other city agency "projects"
come and go with little effect on their quality of
life. Residents have developed a healthy
skepticism about government projects that are
designed to "help" them.

The lack of effective outreach also contributed to
a lack of knowledge and understanding of the role
of the community in the community policing
enterprise. Even many community leaders were
unsure of what the police want them to do in the
"partnerships" that community policing proposes to
develop.

Finally, the concept of "community" is itself
problematic in the implementation of community
policing. The INOP data show that within those
areas the police define as "communities," there
are often a number of groups competing for scarce
resources. Very often, the rivalries between and
within community organizations keep many residents
from becoming involved in these organizations and,
consequently, from becoming involved in community
policing.

Recommendations. That the INOP sites were
generally unsuccessful in stimulating community
organization is not surprising, as the police have
little experience in doing this. It is, however, a
skill that police departments must develop if they
hope to stimulate community involvement. If police
departments can involve other city agencies in the
implementation of community policing from the
beginning of the process, rather than as an
afterthought, these agencies could be of use in
stimulating community involvement through their
attempts to educate the public about community
policing. If cities continue to implement their
new community policing efforts as isolated police
department phenomena, they will surely limit
whatever potential community policing may have for
improving the quality of life in our cities.

By the same token, police administrators must come
to see police training and education and community
education and training as equally important.
Existing community organizations and community
leaders are the logical first target of such
education and training, but it must be remembered
that in those areas that almost always serve as
the sites for community policing projects, very
often there are few functioning community groups.
The police, in concert with other city and private
agencies, must seek to create organization where
it does not exist. If cities fail to do this in
their community policing efforts they will neglect
their most important audience -- the average
resident. While it could be argued that a high
level of community organization is not necessary
for community policing to function effectively, it
may also be argued that communities that have high
levels of organization and solidarity are far more
likely to be able to help "police themselves" --
one of the principle goals of community policing.
This is not meant to suggest that the education of
the community will be an easy undertaking, for it
will prove far more difficult than the training of
police officers. It is meant to suggest that if
police departments are unwilling or unable to
organize and educate ordinary community residents
in their role under community policing, the
experiment cannot help but fail.

One of the things that police departments must do
before instituting community policing is gauge as
accurately as possible the resources necessary to
do community policing, whether they are planning
on implementing community policing city-wide or in
smaller areas of the city. The reason this is such
an important prerequisite is that almost all INOP
sites promised communities regular beat officers
who would be there "permanently" (meaning at least
18 months to two years). Yet, in most cases
residents complained that beat officers were
rotated; they didn't know their officers; they
didn't see their beat officers as often as they
did when community policing was first introduced
in the area; etc. If police departments keep
making promises that they are unable to keep
because of inadequate resources, they will lose
all credibility.

For example, even though community policing is so
politically popular among community residents and
politicians, police departments must be wary of
expanding community policing efforts too quickly.
When expansion is too rapid, community policing
enters an area and makes people feel good for a
while; but then the police are withdrawn, laying
the burden for the maintenance of whatever gains
may have been made on communities that do not have
the capacity to maintain those gains. Thus, if
police departments choose to make community
policing a city-wide effort, they must make
certain that the resources needed to implement it
are available to them. The other alternative, as
was the case in most INOP sites, is to make a
concerted effort in a reasonably sized target
area. This approach will enable the police
department to gauge the amount of resources needed
to implement community policing on a larger scale,
and will also allow them to test in the future the
efficacy of community policing.

Police departments must be very careful not to
overestimate the effects of community policing. If
they fail to exercise caution, they risk losing
credibility with both line officers and the
community, two groups that are critical to the
success of community policing. Despite the lack of
impact on the demand for drugs, community
residents in most sites believed that their INOP
program had fostered better relationships between
the police and the community. This may be because
target area residents enjoyed being the focus of
police attention and believed that, given time,
the program would eventually be more effective. As
time passes, however, if these programs do not
begin to achieve the goals they set for
themselves, the community will lose faith and may
become even more alienated from the police than
they were prior to the program's inception.
Certainly many residents of these neighborhoods
look upon community policing programs with a
healthy skepticism even from the beginning, and if
police departments set unattainable goals for
their community policing programs, the community
will soon realize it.

In the same vein, cities that are implementing
community policing must keep in mind the
importance of the community "partnership" aspect
of community policing and know that community
leaders and residents will quickly discern the
difference between a department that wants a
genuine partnership with the community and one
that pays lip service to the idea. In some of the
INOP sites, the participation of interested
community members was limited to "rubber stamping"
strategies developed by the police to solve
problems identified by the police. If community
involvement in the effort is to be maintained, it
must include problem identification by the
community and community involvement in developing
and implementing strategies. This is not to
suggest that community members should be part of
every decision-making process or that they should
have access to sensitive information. 
However, they certainly can be called upon to
suggest strategies and to participate in their
implementation (at least to some extent). If
"help" means simply providing information on
crimes, then community policing does not provide
the new role promised for community residents, and
they will soon come to recognize this. Given the
monumental nature of the tasks involved, the
transition to community policing will take a
considerable amount of time. It remains to be seen
whether an already impatient public will accept
this fact. In large cities with extremely diverse
populations and overwhelming police bureaucracies,
the process will undoubtedly take far longer.
However, the transition may be made faster and
more productive if cities make a commitment to a
transition that places equal importance on the
training of the police, the public, and workers in
all city agencies. Because it will, at least
initially require more resources, cities will have
to commit themselves to larger budgets in an
increasingly difficult fiscal climate. If,
however, community policing remains an isolated
police department phenomenon, it is difficult to
see how the problems of implementing community
policing can be overcome.
-------------------------------

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NCJ 157933