Besides these special units, a number of police departments also expect all of their officers to embrace the principles of community policing and to undertake at least some community problem-solving activities" (Rohe et al., 1996, p. 78).
Constraints to Implementation study by Sadd and Grinc in 1994 concluded that, of all the implementation problems these programs faced, "the most perplexing... was the inability of the police departments to organize and maintain active community involvement in their projects" (p. 442). Hartnett and Skogan suggest that because every community is unique, the implementation problems will likewise be local in nature but there have been some consistent problems reported with implementation across the country that can serve as a guide for future such efforts. According to Trojanowicz and Bucqueroux (1990), community policing initiatives cannot be successful without a concomitant sea change in the way front-line police officers view the profession itself. In this regard, Kenney and McNamara report that a review of the community-policing initiatives to date suggests that two major dimensions of organizational change are involved in the analysis. "These two dimensions represent different domains of change," they say, "namely, externally focused innovations and those which are internally focused" (p. 266). These authors note that the externally focused innovations include efforts targeted at reorienting police operations and crime-prevention activities to improve an organization's influence and improve its relationship within the external environment. These externally focused innovations are also fundamentally different from most such public sphere efforts involving law enforcement because of the nature of the community policing program and its requirement that police officers become more familiar with their assigned communities and make themselves more accessible to the citizenry. For example, Meares (1998) emphasizes that, "The mutual distrust between African-Americans and law enforcement officers makes it less likely that African-Americans will report crimes to the police, assist the police in criminal investigations, and participate in community policing programs that lead to greater social control of neighborhoods" (p. 192). Ironically, it is this very distrust that community policing initiatives are largely designed to address. For example, according to Kenney and McNamara, "Different from the bureaucratic model that emphasizes the separation of police agencies from their external environment, community-policing innovations highlight the interactive role of the police in a complex and changing world" (p. 266).
Some typical examples of externally focused community-policing programs involving the reorientation of operations and prevention include foot patrol programs aimed at direct involvement with the community, special task-force units to address unique local problems, storefront police stations, community crime-prevention newsletters, the assignment of specially trained community-policing officers to schools and neighborhoods, and the deployment of police resources to promote crime prevention among specially targeted subpopulations, such as at-risk youth (Kenney & McNamara, 1999).
By contrast, internally focused innovations primarily involve changes in police management. Central to this argument is that the bureaucratic style neglects the development of employee motivation and suppresses human potential in organizations. In its place, community policing emphasizes cross-level communication and the empowerment of employees in an effort to deliver more valuable public services (Kenney & McNamara, 1999). Some recent studies have confirmed instances of internally focused organizational change. For example, Wycoff and Skogan (1994) undertook a three-year study of community-policing programs in Madison, Wisconsin; this study determined that a participative and decentralized management style increases job satisfaction among community-policing officers. In addition, community-policing administrative innovations that have been directed at changing a police department's paramilitary organizational structure have been demonstrated by recent innovations such as the creation of a master police officer rank, the institutionalization of management styles, and the increased hiring of civilian employees (Kenney & McNamara, 1999).
While these initiatives have been underway, one issue that emerged in this regard is whether these attitudinal and behavioral changes at the police officer level have been supported by requisite structural changes in the police organization as well. According to Davis and Gianakis:
Conventional wisdom in organization theory holds that an organization's structure should be designed to optimize the functioning of its operational technology; it is possible that the '911' emergency response function, though, will continue to drive the structure of the police organization, and the community policing model will be forced to find its place within...
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