Community Building Measures: How Police and Neighborhood Groups Can Measure Their Collaboration

摘要

Police and community residents share a common concern for maintaining safe, quality neighborhoods. Practitioners and researchers assume that the police and groups in the communities in which the police work can jointly produce certain public safety outcomes, such as feelings of safety or fear, levels of disorder and crime, and levels of trust and cooperation. There is sufficient research on policing impacts to suggest that the police, even working alone, can effect crime, disorder, fear, and satisfaction with the police, for limited periods of time. This same research indicates that police alone cannot maintain those temporary improvements in communities unless something else occurs in the neighborhood. The ultimate goal in police-community collaboration is getting that something else to occur.