Our thesis is that policing in the mid-1980s was perceived to be in crisis and there was a strong sense that fundamental changes were needed in the way it was delivered. In contrast, police are considered to be performing well 20 years later by both practitioners and outside observers. Crime has been falling for almost 18 years and any new challenges, including terrorism, appear to be manageable without the invention of new strategies for the delivery of police services. Past experience contains the lessons needed for the future. In our view, this assessment may be mistaken, not because existing policies are defective in controlling crime but because the institutions that provide public safety are changing in profound ways that are not being recognized.
Drawn from recent proceedings of the International Police Executive Symposium (IPES), this volume explores major policing initiatives and evolutions across the globe and presents practical insights on how police are retooling their profession. The book discusses the trends in evolving police roles among democratic and democratizing states, the impact of community-oriented policing, innovations occurring in police training and management, and issues relating to ethics, technology, investigations, and handling public relations. The book also examines challenges to police practices, such as terrorism, decentralization, and the policing of indigenous and special population groups.
This in-depth case study of a mid-sized police department captures the dynamics, struggles, and successes of police change, revealing the positive organizational and community outcomes that resulted from a persistent drive to reinvent public safety and community relationships. The police profession in the United States faces a legitimacy problem. It is critical that police are prepared to change constantly, be adaptive, and adopt openness to self-reflection and external comparison, moving beyond their comfort zone to overcome the inevitable cultural, structural, and political obstacles. Using previously unpublished longitudinal data examining a 25-year period, Bond-Fortier offers a rich account of the complexity of police management and change within one particular mid-sized city: Lowell, Massachusetts. The multidisciplinary lens applied provides crucial insights into how and why police organizations respond to a changing environment, set certain goals, and make decisions about how to achieve those goals. The book analyzes the community and organizational forces that stimulated change in the Lowell Police Department, describes the changes that enabled the department to achieve national model status, and builds a nexus between influencing forces, interdisciplinary theory, and the creation of an adaptive 21st-century police organization. Organizational Change in an Urban Police Department: Innovating to Reform is essential reading for academics and students in criminal justice, criminology, organizational studies, public administration, sociology, political science, and public policy programs, as well as government executives, crime policy analysts, and public- and private-sector managers and leaders engaged in professional development and leadership courses.
This title brings together research on the development and operation of policing in the United States and elsewhere. Accomplished policing researchers Michael D. Reisig and Robert J. Kane have assembled a cast of renowned scholars to provide an authoritative and comprehensive overview of the institution of policing.
49% of the world’s population lives in small towns, villages and farms, yet until recent years criminological scholarship has focused almost exclusively on urban crimes. The Routledge International Handbook of Rural Criminology is the first major publication to bring together this growing body of scholarship under a single cover. For many years rural criminology has remained marginalized and often excluded from the mainstream, with precedence given to urban criminology: this volume intends to address that imbalance. Pioneering in scope, this book brings together leading international scholars from fourteen different countries to offer an authoritative synthesis of theoretical and empirical literature. This handbook is divided in to seven parts, each addressing a different aspect of rural criminology: Rurality and crime Criminological dimensions of food and agriculture Violence and rurality Drug use, production and trafficking in the rural context Intersections between rural and green criminology Policing, justice and rurality Teaching rural criminology Edited by a world renowned scholar of rural criminology, this book explores rural crime issues in over thirty-five countries including Japan, Sweden, Brazil, Australia, Tanzania, the US, and the UK. This is the first Handbook dedicated to rural criminology and is an essential resource for criminologists, sociologists and social geographers engaged with rural studies and crime.
Why the Police Should be Trained by Black People aligns scholarly and community efforts to address how Black people are policed. It combines traditional models commonly taught in policing courses, with new approaches to teaching and training about law enforcement in the U.S. all from the Black lens. Black law enforcement professionals (seasoned and retired), scholars, community members, victims, and others make up the contributors to this training textbook written from the lens of the Black experience. Each chapter describes policing based on the experience of being Black in the US, with concern about the life and life chances for Black people. With five sections readers will be able to: Describe the history and theory of law enforcement, policing, and society in Black communities Critically address how law enforcement and the nature of police work intertwine with race-based societal and governmental norms and within law enforcement administration and management Understand the variation in pedagogy, recruitment, selection, and training that has impacted the experience of police officers, including Black police officers, and Black people in the US Explore the role of law enforcement as crime control and crime prevention agents as it relates to policing in Black communities and for Black people Address issues related to race and use of force, misconduct, the law, ethics/values Assess research, contemporary issues, and the future of law enforcement and policing, especially related to policing of Black people. Why the Police Should be Trained by Black People brings pedagogical and scholarly responsibility for policing in Black communities to life, revealing that police involved violence, community violence, and relative lived experiences do not exist in a vacuum. Written with students in mind, it is essential reading for those enrolled in policing courses including criminology, criminal justice, sociology, or social work, as well as those undertaking police academy and in-service police training.
Policing Criminality and Insurgency in Africa: Perspectives on the Changing Wave of Law Enforcement provides critical insights into the trends and patterns of crime and insurgency in contemporary African society. In Africa criminals and insurgents are becoming more resourceful, smart, and connected, as criminal syndicates are increasingly deploying modern technologies to commit crimes in ways and manners that are profoundly daring, and on a transnational and global scale. Meanwhile, the capacity of local, state, and security forces to stem the tide of crimes and insurgencies is decimated by dwindling resources on the part of the state due to official corruption, down-sizing of public institutions and a fierce competition for resources between security and other developmental agencies. In this volume, the contributors, who are expert academics in policing and security in Africa as well as security practitioners, provide detailed explanations of the new wave of crime, characterized by cyber insecurity, terror financing, the proliferation of small arms and light weapons, and transnational networking among criminal syndicates. The volume forensically explores how these complex waves and emerging trends of criminality and insurgency impact on the socio-economic and political development of Africa. Editors, Usman A. Tar and Dawud Muhammad Dawud highlight how these factors affect and shape policing and law enforcement in an era of “smart crimes” and insurgency within the continent.
This topical book compares the implications of restructuring in the UK and The Netherlands, also in the USA, regarding police systems, policing paradigms and research knowledge. The authors argue for developing confident leadership and also provide a comprehensive paradigm to chart policing in the future while retaining trust.
Evidence-based policing is based on the straightforward, but powerful, idea that crime prevention and crime control policy should be based on what works best in promoting public safety, as determined by the best available scientific evidence. Bringing together leading academics and practitioners, this book explores a wide range of case studies from around the world that best exemplify the integration of scientific evidence in contemporary policing processes. Chapters explore the transfer of scientific knowledge to the practice community, the role of officers in conducting police-led science, connection of work between police researchers and practitioners, and how evidence-based policing can be incorporated in daily police functions. The Globalization of Evidence-Based Policing is written for both researchers and practitioners interested in ensuring that scientific research is at center stage in policing. Agencies (including law enforcement agencies, research centers, and institutions of higher learning) can look to these case studies as road maps to better foster an evidence-based approach to crime prevention and crime control. Those already committed to evidence-based policing can look to these chapters to ensure that evidence-based policing is firmly institutionalized within their agencies. Accessible and compelling, this book is essential reading for all those interested in learning more about and doing more to bring about evidence-based policing.
A plague of everyday violence lies beneath the surface of the world's poorest communities. Common violence-- like rape, forced labor, illegal detention, land theft, police abuse and other brutality-- has become routine and relentless. Basic public justice systems in the developing world have descended into a state of utter collapse. Haugen and Boutros offer a searing account of how we got here-- and what it will take to end the plague.
