Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
367-372
All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A.
(1992)
Copyright
0047-2352/92
$5.00 + .OO
01992 Pergamon Press Ltd.
BOOK REVIEWS
Community
Policing:
A Contemporary
Perspective
by Robert
Trojanowicz
and
Bonnie Bucqueroux
The scholarship
of Trojanowicz
and Bucqueroux is prodigious, drawing not only upon
empirical
research but on fiction,
biographies, and the mass media. The writing is
straightforward,
unjargonized,
and filled with
vivid illustrations
and analogies that help to
make points clear. The only criticism I have
of the books presentation
is that it needed a
bibliography.
Readers interested
in further
information
must thumb through pages of
references given at the end of each chapter.
After a short foreword by George L. Kelling and a preface by the authors, the book
begins with a listing of The Ten Principles
of Community
Policing. n The substantive
discussion
is organized
into five sections.
Policing
Section One, What Community
Means, contains three chapters devoted to
an elaboration
of the basic tenets of community policing, its origins, and its relevance
to the changes in American society.
Section Two, What Community
Policing
Does, explains in two chapters why community policing,
as these authors have explained it, offers a more promising approach
to dealing, first, with the objective incidence
of crime and, second, with the debilitating
fear of it.
Section Three, What the Research Shows,
contains two chapters. The first, Methods
and Measures, is by David L. Carter, whose
presence in the book, curiously, is never explained. Belying the title, the chapter does
not examine how community
policing might
be evaluated but instead summarizes research
findings from the Presidents Commission
on
Law Enforcement
and the Administration
of
Justice, 1967 to the present time on the failures and shortcomings
of traditional
police
strategies. The second chapter discusses Trojanowiczs
initial and extensive
experience
367
368
Book Reviews
Baltimore
County, New York City, Madison, McAllen (Texas), Newport News, Edmonton
(Alberta,
Canada),
and Evanston
(Illinois).
Although the authors are well informed and
practical in much that they say about community policing, the hortatory tone of the book
often leads to what seem like inflated, or at
least unsupported,
claims for community policing. Not only is the argumentation
for particular benefits presumptive,
but community
policing seems to constitute all that is creative and promising in policing. One gets the
impression that if its smart, it must be community policing.
This impression
is encouraged
by the authors failure to distinguish
between community policing as they conceive it to be and
community
policing as it has emerged operationally in the real world. Faced with potential problems in community policing, such
as overselling it as a panacea, using it exclusively as a public relations slogan, or creating
the impression that enforcement is not needed,
Trojanowicz
and Bucqueroux simply dismiss
them as not being community policing. The
problems are defined out of existence, rather
than treated as impediments
to the institutionalization
of community policing that need
to be addressed. The authors do in fact know
better, but they often come across as being
uncritical about the process of implementation. I also think they work too hard to distinguish community
policing from problemoriented policing, which is part of the turf war
that has grown up around these conceptions.
Im one of those who mistakenly
think they
are identical, at least as a matter of practice
in the field (8).
Although the book refers to several evaluations of community
policing programs, it
never examines the strength of these efforts.
It uncritically
accepts evaluation results, as in
the Flint case, even though serious doubts have
been raised about them. It is even more surprising that the authors do not discuss whether
evaluation
really is a particularly
difficult
problem for community
policing,
as many
police officers believe-mistakenly,
in my
view. Altogether,
this sidestepping
of issues
of evaluation,
especially
in the chapter by
Book Reviews
369