Proactive Policing Effects on Crime and Communities (2018) / Chapter Skim
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6 Community-Based Proactive Strategies: Implications for Community Perceptions and Cooperation
6 Community-Based Proactive Strategies: Implications for Community Perceptions and Cooperation
Pages 211-250
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From page 211... ...
. This is indeed the case, but even here the research on the community impacts of community-based interventions has concentrated heavily on two strategies: community-oriented policing and procedural justice policing, with much less attention to the community impacts of broken windows policing.
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From page 212... ...
For instance, some community-oriented policing interventions include practices typical of problem-oriented policing, broken windows policing, hot spots policing, or focused deterrence. As noted many times already in this report, this hybrid character of real-world interventions makes it more difficult to draw conclusions from evaluations of these hybrid interventions regarding the impacts of community-oriented policing, as a distinctive strategy, on community outcomes.
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From page 213... ...
However, it is not clear why that item has more in common with other outcome indicators used by the meta-analysis to assess perceived legitimacy (e.g., "police are fair," "trust in police," "treating people politely")
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From page 214... ...
to prevent crime," "evaluation of police," or "quality of police service." The last of these, "quality of police service," is a scale comprising ratings of items that seem good candidates for perceived legitimacy, not satisfaction: police politeness, helpfulness, and perceived fairness (Gill et al., 2014, p.
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A notable exception to the tendency to ignore high-intensity subgroups within a studied community is the evaluation of Chicago's community policing program across three different racial groups (Skogan, 2006b)
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The following sections outline what these studies show and what they are unable to show.3 Community-Oriented Policing's Impacts on Community Evaluations of the Police Studies of the impact of community-oriented policing on community evaluations of specific aspects of police performance have focused on citizen perceptions of disorder (e.g., severity of drug problems, social disorder) , citizen fear of crime, and citizen satisfaction with police performance)
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The authors concluded that there was "robust evidence that community policing increases citizen satisfaction with the police" (Gill et al., 2014, p.
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The most frequent measure of perceived legitimacy was confidence in the police (six comparisons)
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. Much of the available research on policing precursors of collective efficacy focuses on the degree of police crime-control effectiveness or perceived legitimacy (reviewed below in the section on procedural justice policing)
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To summarize, most of this small number of studies on communityoriented policing's record in promoting collective efficacy are cross sectional in nature. Given their designs, these studies can only establish whether there is the expected statistical relationship; they cannot distinguish how much of any association found is due to the effects of community policing on collective efficacy and how much is due to the effects of collective efficacy on community policing (the issue of potential reverse causality)
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From page 221... ...
The measures of community-oriented policing staffing did not distinguish between different approaches to community-oriented policing, nor did they consider the degree to which officers who were not community-oriented 7 We exclude from consideration here the research that examines the effects of procedural justice policing and perceived legitimacy on crime-reporting behavior, which we cover in the section below on procedural justice policing.
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From page 222... ...
And as is true with the literature on community-oriented policing and collective efficacy, this study was cross sectional, measuring all variables during the same time period. In summary, the available literature on the relationship between community-oriented policing and community behavior consists predominantly of studies of collective efficacy and crime reporting.
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From page 223... ...
Whether neighborhoods that have experienced several years of positive police outreach are more responsive to a new community-oriented policing program than those for whom there is no history of such outreach is an open question. Neighborhoods with a history of fraught relations with the police may take longer to respond positively than neighborhoods with a more positive history.
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From page 224... ...
Such changes are driven in part by changes in policing, but it remains the case that the long-term goal of broken windows policing is to enhance the ability of the community to exercise informal social controls presumed to play a central role in the nature and extent of community order and safety (Weisburd et al., 2015; Wilson and Kelling, 1982)
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, social and physical disorder are key factors in the decline of communities. As discussed in Chapter 2, broken windows policing, with its focus on reducing disorder, is expected to reverse the decline of collective efficacy in communities, thereby preventing a breakdown in community social controls.
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From page 226... ...
However, a randomized experimental evaluation of the impacts of broken windows policing in three cities in California, designed in part as a follow-up to the Police Foundation study, found that a 6-month police intervention that focused on reducing social and physical disorder but encouraged police use of discretion (see Kelling, 1999) had no impact on fear of crime or collective efficacy (Weisburd et al., 2011)
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From page 227... ...
This is due in part to the surprisingly small number of studies that examine the community outcomes of broken windows policing and in part to the mixed effects observed. The committee notes how little attention has been paid to community processes in this area, given the emphasis on enhancing community social controls in the original logic model for this strategy as proposed by Wilson and Kelling (1982)
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Perceptions of police legitimacy are subjective and must be studied by interviewing people and discerning their orientations toward the police. Hence, by definition, efforts to understand perceived legitimacy need to focus on people's perceptions about the police and their subjective reactions to police actions.
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Therefore, it must be studied through interviews with members of the community. Antecedents of Perceived Legitimacy Within the psychological literature on the antecedents of perceived legitimacy, a number of studies suggest that perceptions of the procedural justice of police actions are strongly related to perceived legitimacy.10 Procedural justice in policing refers to an interrelated cluster of evaluations of different aspects of the way police officers behave when dealing with the public.
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Trustworthiness. Police actions require discretion.
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coded officer conduct in the areas predicted to influence perceived procedural justice that fall into the category of "police practices" in the logic model portrayed in Figure 5-1.
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. Given the relatively recent interest in the procedural justice model of proactive policing, there is, as we note below, a limited literature that examines whether perceived procedural justice is a key factor in explaining perceptions of legitimacy.
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, their lack of measurement of perceived legitimacy as an outcome of personal experiences, and -- in the context of this report -- their lack of focus on the police. The theoretical elements in the psychological literature on procedural justice have been reviewed by Miller (2001)
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In many respects, it is similar to the concept of perceived legitimacy in a management context. This type of mediating role has also been identified in more recent studies 11 Studies of procedural justice in organizational settings often use the term "organizational justice" to consider three interrelated aspects of what is here being called "procedural justice": organizational justice, interactional justice, and informational justice.
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In recent years there has been a series of studies of the association of procedural justice with the perceived legitimacy of the court system. Several studies deal with the courts.
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The Specific Features of Procedural Justice That Shape Perceived Legitimacy The large literature in social psychology establishes that it is possible to create settings that reliably influence perceived procedural justice (Lind and Tyler, 1988)
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From page 237... ...
want to craft solutions that will not be resisted and undermined by the two opposing parties, so they benefit from following the principles of procedural justice. There have been studies of the features of mediation and other alternative dispute resolution procedures that lead to their perceived fairness in the eyes of all of the parties in an interaction (Tyler, 1989)
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From page 238... ...
The workplace literature (see, e.g., DeCremer and Tyler, 2005) also identifies individual characteristics that are reliably associated with variations in perceived procedural justice.
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From page 239... ...
variables remain open questions, a number of studies that measure associations among perceptions, either through a cross-sectional design or using panel designs involving interviews with members of the public, find statistically significant correlations between perceived procedural justice, perceptions of legitimacy, compliance, and cooperation.14 Several studies of policing suggest that procedural justice policing is 14 There have been a wide variety of approaches used to assess compliance, with most s tudies relying upon self-report of behavior. Cooperation has also been studied in a variety of ways.
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These studies do not at this time provide a clear conclusion regarding whether procedural justice policing improves perceptions of police legitimacy and cooperation. Mazerolle and colleagues (2013b)
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From page 241... ...
The study found no significant improvements in general trust in the police or in perceived police legitimacy.16 Similarly, a recent experiment using traffic stops in Turkey (Sahin et al., 2016) found that officer behavior during traffic stops shaped views about the particular police officers involved but did not generalize to overall perceptions about the traffic police as an organization.
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From page 242... ...
argued that it is investigatory street stops, not traffic stops, that are central to creating feelings of injustice among community residents, since traffic stops are routinized and linked to understandable violations of known laws, whereas citizens stopped on the street are often confused about what, if anything, they have done to justify the stop. Hence, traffic stops are much less likely to create variations in perceived unfairness in treatment on the part of civilians who have contact with police officers and hence are less likely to have an impact on perceived legitimacy.
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From page 243... ...
conducted a national survey and found that procedural justice and perceived legitimacy of policing are associated with identification with the community, collective efficacy, and behaviors, such as likelihood of shopping in the community and participating in local politics. These findings suggest that the perceived fairness of policing has an impact beyond the arena of crime and criminal justice -- it more broadly affects communities and their well-being.
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Interestingly, the Worden and McLean (2014) findings also indicate that people's judgments about the propriety of police action are correlated more strongly to perceptions of the procedural justice of police actions than to the actual legality of officers' behavior.
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Procedural Justice and Police Practice As this review has noted, there have been very few studies in the area of policing that connect police policies and practices and/or the actions of police officers to the perceptions of people in the community about the police. Despite the current lack of direct evidence in the policing arena, evidence exists in other literatures that suggests that developing procedural justice approaches may be possible in the arena of policing.
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From page 246... ...
. CONCLUSION The research literature on interventions that take a community-based approach concentrates on three main strategies for proactive policing: community-oriented policing, broken windows policing, and procedural justice policing.
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Broken windows policing is often evaluated directly in terms of its short-term crime-control impacts. We have emphasized in this report that the broken windows policing model seeks to alter the community's levels of fear and collective efficacy as a method of enhancing community social
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CONCLUSION 6-3 The committee is not able to draw a conclusion regarding the impacts of broken windows policing on fear of crime or collective efficacy. This is due in part to the surprisingly small number of studies that examine the community outcomes of broken windows policing and in part to the mixed effects observed.
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From page 249... ...
, the committee stresses that a finding that we did not have evidence to support the expected outcomes of procedural justice policing is different from finding that such outcomes do not exist. The extant literature in this area is sparse and has only begun to develop in recent years, and the evidence from this small group of existing studies is simply not consistent enough for the committee to draw a stronger conclusion.
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