Police agencies in Europe and the United States are becoming increasingly involved with alternative drug enforcement strategies. There are numerous government and community organizations that law enforcement can cooperate with to facilitate the social control of drug abusers without arresting them. The success of any CPOP program to adopt preventive measures will ultimately rest on its ability to forge interorganizational links. But drug courts assume that an arrest has already been made. CPOPs emphasize solving problems before they get to the overburdened criminal justice system.
More research needs to be done on community policing and drug enforcement.
At the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University, we will be conducting a survey of police departments in cities with over 100,000 persons and doing ethnographic case studies to assess whether community policing programs promise a shift in America's approach to treating drug use as primarily a criminal problem. We will be interested in whether community policing programs can successfully incorporate public health concerns within a broader framework of public safety, especially where alternative drug policies are concerned.