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