Implementation Challenges in Community Policing.
Series: NIJ Research in Brief
Published: February 1996
68 pages
158,373 bytes

Implementation Challenges in Community Policing 
Innovative Neighborhood-Oriented Policing in Eight
Cities

by Susan Sadd and Randolph M. Grinc

Susan Sadd, Ph.D., was project director for the
NIJ-sponsored evaluation conducted by the Vera
Institute of Justice. She is currently director of
planning and analysis for the Bronx District
Attorney. Randolph M. Grinc, Ph.D., now an
assistant professor at Caldwell College, was a
research associate at the Vera Institute and deputy
director of the evaluation project. The update on
Tempe was written by Thomas J. McEwen, Ph.D.,
managing principal with the Institute for Law and
Justice (ILJ), and Edward F. Connors, president of
ILJ, on the basis of their evaluation report.
-----------------------------------

Issues and Findings

Discussed in this Brief: An NIJ-sponsored
evaluation of Innovative Neighborhood-Oriented
Policing (INOP) programs, which were established
with Bureau of Justice Assistance support in eight
urban and suburban sites in 1990. Distinguished by
their focus on neighborhood drug problems, the
programs used community policing techniques,
particularly police-community partnerships, to
attempt to lower the demand for illegal drugs.

Key issues: Implementation issues received special
emphasis in the study: the extent to which police
officers understood and supported the projects and
the degree to which other public agencies and the
community were involved. The study also examined
police and residents' perceptions of INOP's impact.
Because the evaluation was conducted relatively
soon after the programs were adopted, it could not
assess long-term effects. 

Key findings: Evaluation of INOP programs revealed:

o The major implementation challenges were
resistance by police offi-cers to community
policing and the difficulty of involving other
public agencies and of organizing the community. 

o With the exception of one site, the involvement
of other public agencies was limited.

o Police officers generally did not understand
community policing; saw INOP assignments as
conferring an elite status; perceived INOP as less
productive, more time-consuming, and more
resource-intensive than traditional policing; and
felt their powers, particularly to enforce the law,
were restrained.

o Average citizens had less knowledge than
community leaders about INOP and were reluctant to
participate; their reasons included fear of drug
dealers' retaliation and cynicism about the
perceived short duration of the project.

o The perceived effects of INOP on drug trafficking
were mixed; they resulted in geographic and
temporal displacement of markets. In the sites
where people thought INOP had reduced crime, fear
of crime declined.

o Most site residents believed their relationship
with the police had improved, even where the effect
on drugs, crime, and fear was believed to be
minimal.

o INOP's limited success in reducing drug crime and
fear may be related to the obstacles generally
encountered in transforming program ideas into
action--especially within the short timeframe of
this evaluation.

Target audience: Law enforcement officials and
administrators; city and county officials,
managers, and administrators; community
organizations; and researchers.
--------------------------------

Community policing could arguably be called the new
orthodoxy of law enforcement in the United States.
It has become an increasingly popular alternative
to what many police administrators perceive as the
failure of traditional policing to deal effectively
with street crime, especially crimes of violence
and drug trafficking. Although the concept is
defined in varying ways and its ability to meet its
goals remains largely untested, community policing
has gained widespread acceptance. According to one
source, about 40 percent of the Nation's larger
police departments have adopted it.1

Community-centered drug demand reduction 

If community policing has been a central aspect of
emerging police agendas in many jurisdictions
throughout the country, so has drug demand
reduction. Innovative Neighborhood-Oriented
Policing (INOP) is unique in drawing on the
principles of community policing and applying them
to drug demand reduction. One of these principles--
a major component of community policing--is that
partnerships between the police and the community
can be effective in reducing crime and fear. In
focusing on a particular issue, INOP also draws on
the principles of problem-solving policing.

Demand reduction can involve intensive local
street-level enforcement, which makes it more
difficult for buyers and sellers to link up with
each other and may dissuade new users from becoming
addicted. Beyond intensive enforcement, which is
the more common focus of police initiatives
directed at illegal drug use, demand reduction can
also include prevention and treatment. What is
unique about INOP is its attempt to supplement
traditional enforcement with long-term
community-based prevention, education, and
treatment referral. Combining all these components,
INOP projects approximate a comprehensive approach
to demand reduction. Ideally, all components are
represented in a given project. In the INOP
projects analyzed in this Research in Brief, each
contained some but not all the components.

The INOP program

INOP was designed in 1990 by the Bureau of Justice
Assistance (BJA), U.S. Department of Justice, as a
demonstration program to further the National Drug
Control Strategy by focusing on and broadening the
scope of community-based approaches to drug demand
reduction. INOP projects are based on the notion
that crime and drug problems must be addressed by
the entire community, not just by the police
department. Because of the nature and extent of the
drug problem, traditional police tactics are
limited in their ability to control it. Proactive
and interactive approaches by communities and the
police have thus become essential to accomplish
both law enforcement and community objectives.
INOP's goal is to develop strategies for demand
reduction that are centered in the community and
anchored in the police-community partnership.
Police departments are to act as catalysts for
developing and sustaining a coordinated network of
neighborhood services.2

Eight jurisdictions were selected by BJA as the
sites of initial INOP demonstration projects. Each
site was awarded between $100,000 and $200,000 for
the first year of its program.3 The sites differed
greatly in population size and consequently in the
size of the police agency that served them. They
also differed in their relationships to other
neighborhood-oriented policing initiatives within
the jurisdiction. In several, for example, the INOP
project was the police department's first effort at
implementing a neighborhood-oriented style of
policing. In others, it was a relatively small
component of a larger, citywide
neighborhood-oriented policing initiative that was
either new or well established.

In general, the projects shared a police
enforcement component (except in New York), a focus
on target neighborhoods, community involvement, and
interagency planning and partnerships. Drug demand
reduction was the goal shared by all, but the
approaches differed substantially. Some sites
featured components that met particular community
needs, such as an extensive public advertising
campaign or reliance on volunteers.

Evaluation issues and methods

The INOP projects were evaluated by the Vera
Institute of Justice under National Institute of
Justice (NIJ) sponsorship, about 1 year after each
had been launched. The process evaluation presented
indepth descriptions of the sites and cross-site
comparisons of program structure and operations and
expectations of the various groups--police
personnel, municipal and community leaders, and
others--who had roles in the projects.

Measuring effects on crime. The impact evaluation,
which is discussed in this document, examined the
effects of the INOP projects on drug demand, public
safety, and the quality of life of the communities
and identified the characteristics of the projects
that contributed to (or tended to detract from)
program effectiveness.

The effects were measured in terms of the
perceptions of the people involved in the projects-
-police officers and administrators, other police
agency personnel, residents, and business people.
Effects were measured both within each site and
across the sites. Specifically, the individuals
interviewed (a total of 552 in the eight sites)
were asked for their views of the effects on drug
use and drug trafficking, drug-related crime and
other crime, fear, quality of life in the area,
police-community relations, and level of community
organization and involvement.

Implementation issues. Another part of the
evaluation analyzed project implementation based on
comparisons among all sites. The research conducted
for this analysis employed a variety of methods:
interviews, focus groups, field observations by the
researchers, and review of evaluations conducted
locally when these were available. The
implementation issues included police acceptance
of/resistance to INOP, extent of community
organization and involvement, and extent of
involvement of public agencies other than the
police.

One of the most significant findings--but one that
may come as no surprise--was that early stages of
implementing community policing are not easy. This
was the experience in all eight jurisdictions. For
one thing, it was difficult to convince police
offi-cers to accept the new roles and behaviors
required for community policing. Citizen
involvement--the linchpin of community policing--
was particularly challenging. Despite
acknowledgment by some residents (largely community
leaders) of community policing as valuable,
activism was generally confined to a small group of
dedicated individuals. The comprehensive approach
that is another hallmark of community policing was
not carried out to the extent it might have been
because the involvement of agencies other than the
police was, at best, limited at most sites.

Evaluation timing. The timing of the evaluation
goes a long way to explain the findings regarding
implementation difficulties. The evaluation began
in mid-1991, with data collection ending about a
year later. (The timing of the evaluation was
determined by receipt of funding from NIJ.) Most of
the projects were launched in mid-1990--only a year
before the start of the evaluation. These dates are
important to keep in mind because they indicate
that the INOP projects were at varying stages of
implementation, most of them up and running only a
short time before they were subjected to
evaluation. In other words, they did not have much
time to become fully operational.

The project in Hayward, California, is one example.
It began fairly late--in 1991--and its central
component, a mobile van, was not put into operation
until the researchers' final site visit. The
projects continued to progress after the
evaluations were completed. In Tempe, Arizona,
followup through mid-1993 revealed the extent of
progress achieved. (See "Recent Developments in
Tempe, Arizona.")

Because the INOP projects had little time to
establish a "track record," it is not possible to
come to any definitive conclusions regarding
long-term outcomes. Many of the difficulties the
projects encountered need to be considered in light
of this timeframe. For this reason, the evaluation
is best interpreted as an assessment of the INOP
projects at a very early stage of their development
and over a brief period of time. Nevertheless, the
findings also make clear that much remains to be
learned about the optimal approach to structuring
the various components of this type of program.

Applying the lessons. In addition, it is important
to note the small scale of many of these INOP
projects, which often constituted only a single
component of a police department's operations. For
this reason it would be difficult to apply the
lessons of their experiences to those of police
departments generally. Moreover, because the
evaluation was not national in scope, the same
reasoning would apply.

The challenges in implementing INOP led to the
conclusion that the evaluation findings would be
particularly useful for jurisdictions that have
community policing initiatives in the planning
stages. The experiences of the eight INOP
demonstration sites could help these jurisdictions
avoid some of the difficulties they might otherwise
encounter and influence them not to abandon their
plans but to improve the likelihood of their
success. In this way, implementation of community
policing at the neighborhood level could be
accomplished more smoothly and productively.

Eight distinctive jurisdictions and programs
Hayward, California--Community-Oriented Policing
and Problem Solving (COPPS)

Hayward is a relatively low-income community in
which a majority of the population is white, but
there is also a great deal of ethnic diversity. The
entire city was targeted for INOP, although one
area with a pervasive drug problem received more
attention than others.

Community policing was a fairly recent development,
introduced in 1991. The department reorganized to
accommodate the new approach by decentralizing
patrol, and all officers became community policing
officers. The cornerstone of INOP was a large van,
the Neighborhood Access Vehicle, intended for use
as a mobile office and community meeting place. It
was to serve as a source of referral information
and to make the police more accessible and more
visible in neighborhoods where it was deployed.
INOP was also to include drug enforcement in the
schools that would involve cooperation between the
police and school principals. Enforcement through a
Tactical Narcotics Team took place on a parallel
track.

COPPS training was held for all police personnel.
The volunteers of Neighborhood Alert, a block watch
group active in the city for 20 years, were also
trained in a range of topics, and training for
rental unit managers in recognizing drug abuse was
planned. Plans were also made to increase the
number of Neighborhood Alert groups.

INOP helped solidify the interagency cooperation
that had existed for several years in the "Beat
Health Team," which addressed issues of public
health and disorder. INOP developed an information
and referral resource guide to facilitate citizen
access to other agencies' services and a guide to
alcoholism, drug abuse, and family support
services.

Houston, Texas--Operation Siege

There were two INOP target areas in Houston. In
one, which experienced the city's most serious
crime, the major problems were prostitution, crack
cocaine, and abandoned buildings used by crack
dealers. The other contained many "cantinas" (bars)
that residents associated with criminal activity.

Houston's experience with neighborhood-oriented, 
problem-solving policing dated to 1982, and 5 years
later plans were made (but then abandoned) to adopt
community policing departmentwide. INOP emphasized
enforcement through a strategy of high-visibility
patrol aimed at open-air drug activity, monitoring
of the cantinas, and covert operations and
intelligence gathering targeted to drug sellers and
suspects.

The emphasis on enforcement did not preclude
community involvement. Operation Siege opened with
a series of meetings with community groups to
identify problems and plan strategy. The police
enhanced their relationship with Neighborhood
Watch, which monitored the cantinas; in this target
area citizens formed a patrol and were given CB
radios to contact the police. In the other target
area the police helped revitalize a community
organization, which in turn helped supply
information and aided the police in other ways. The
police also helped elderly homeowners in "target
hardening," providing locks and doors free of
charge to a number of them. No formal partnerships
were established with other city agencies, but some
informal links were made with individuals within
these agencies.

Louisville, Kentucky--Community-Oriented Policing
(COP)

INOP was adopted in one (and subsequently a second)
of the six police districts in Louisville. The
initial district was selected because it had the
highest level of violent crime in the city and had
been the center of heroin trafficking. It was also
plagued by high unemployment, and a substantial
number of liquor stores and bars had been
identified as drug-trafficking locations. INOP had
two phases, planning and problem identification,
followed by strategy development and
implementation. Phase two focused on problem
solving, primarily in a park identified as a site
of drug activity.

Since the police were involved districtwide, there
was no recruitment, and all officers were expected
ultimately to participate. The enforcement strategy
used almost exclusively was a task force of
officers who employed a variety of techniques
(surveillance, for example) for a few weeks to a
few months, depending on the problem.
Prevention/education was also part of the strategy,
with some community members trained in drug abuse
prevention, and an education campaign to create
awareness of drug issues was planned.

A project committee and a strategy committee,
consisting of police officers and community
members, were formed and later consolidated into
one. Among other activities, the committee
conducted an "advertising" campaign and held
community forums to define priority issues.
Community involvement was built on the foundation
of a number of active, organized block associations
that predated INOP. Several block association
leaders became active members of the project
committee.

In enforcement, the police department received
cooperation and assistance from the city-county
narcotics unit whose director pledged support. INOP
created 12 partnerships with city agencies,
including those responsible for job training,
housing, health, and parks and recreation. The
mayor formally endorsed "COP" (as INOP was called)
and mandated cooperation by all supporting
agencies. COP also became a member of the
city-county drug rehabilitation, education, and
enforcement program, which linked the project to a
consortium of treatment and prevention initiatives.

New York City--Community Patrol Officer Program
(CPOP)

By 1988 community policing in New York had been
instituted citywide, although the approach has
since evolved. The INOP project targeted three
precincts: in East Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.
Each had a substantial drug problem, a large
proportion of low-income residents, and a large
proportion of minority residents.

The INOP precincts each had a van (a converted
motor home) parked outside an elementary or junior
high school in areas of active drug markets.
Services (such as youth counseling) were provided
in them and the adjacent schools. Information on
drug prevention was also available. The vans were
not used for citizen reporting of crime or
providing other information about crime. Rather,
citizens who had this type of information were
instructed to go to the precinct or to call in
reports. The presence of the vans was expected to
encourage school attendance. Because the vans were
to be seen as a community--not a police--resource,
they were not to be staffed by police. However,
lack of volunteers led to assignment of a police
coordinator.

The Tactical Narcotics Teams, a street-level,
buy-and-bust enforcement program, conducted drug
sweeps at the time the vans were set up. Otherwise,
the enforcement component was not large. Community
Patrol Officers, who were assigned walking beats,
provided drug prevention activities and referrals
to treatment, and they patrolled the area around
the vans to take information about drug use in the
area and to ensure the safety of people using them.

Community volunteers were recruited through the
Parent-Teacher Associations and received training,
and the Manhattan District Attorney's office also
trained volunteers. Outreach also included
introduction of the Neighborhood Resource Centers
(the vans) to residents, with requests for
volunteers to staff them.

Several public and private agencies were involved:
the Board of Education; Victim Services Agency; the
Department of Health; the Department of Youth
Services; the nonprofit Citizens Committee for New
York City; MOSAIC, a Bronx community center; and
the District Attorney's Office. The Department of
Health, for example, provided an injury-prevention
component, and Youth Services provided a counselor.

Norfolk, Virginia--Police-Assisted Community
Enforcement (PACE)

Although concentrated in and around public housing,
the INOP project in Norfolk was part of a citywide
program called PACE, which involved all city
agencies. By the end of the evaluation research,
PACE had been established in 10 areas, with plans
for 2 more. Crime and calls for service were to be
reduced in a 3-stage process of sweeps, stepped-up
patrols, and community partnerships. PACE included
all officers, although some were involved more than
others. All officers, including the chief, received
introductory training, followed by ongoing
inservice training.

Stage 1 was an assault on street drug activity
through intelligence gathering, undercover
operations, and saturation patrols. The major
component of drug prevention was an athletic league
for young people. Other features included working
with the D.A.R.E.þ (Drug Abuse Resistance Education)
program in the schools, demolition of abandoned
buildings, attention to physical disorder,
evictions of drug dealers, and screening of rental
applicants.

Police outreach began in Stage 2, with introduction
of the program to the community. Police met with
community leaders to organize Neighborhood Watch
and Operation Identification. PACE representatives
attended community meetings and other functions.
"Community Service Days," featuring representatives
of city agencies, were organized. Stage 3, whose
goal was full community partnership and a reduced
burden on the police, was not fully implemented.

Interagency coordination was extensive and
mandated, and all city agencies had a role. The
Support Services Committee, which coordinated the
services of police and other city agencies,
addressed specific issues like family services and
signs of physical disorder.

Portland, Oregon--Iris Court Community Policing
Demonstration Project

Portland INOP was a demonstration project, one of
three established in each of the city's three
police precincts as part of community policing,
which began in 1989. The focus was a public-housing
complex where most of the units were occupied by
low-income residents. Evidence suggested that many
of them were drug-dependent. This site and three
adjacent housing projects were selected primarily
because of high levels of open-air drug dealing,
calls for service to the police, and gang violence.
The project served the 159 residents of the housing
complexes.

The projects had several related components:
enforcement/high-visibility patrol, a "Neighborhood
Response Team" of two uniformed patrol offi-cers, a
civilian project coordinator, a community health
nurse, a community policing contact office,
partnerships between residents and social service
providers, use of Crime Prevention Through
Environmental Design (CPTED) principles, and
resident organizing and empowerment. The emphasis
on human services partnerships with other agencies
made this project unique among the INOP sites.

The primary method of drug demand reduction was
coordination and provision of social services. The
contact office provided referral to services rather
than functioning as a police minista- tion. The
project coordinator, a civilian employee of the
police department, worked full time in the contact
office linking residents with service providers,
making referrals, and coordinating outreach.
Training landlords in how to keep drug activity out
of their properties was another INOP component
(though not in Iris Court).

Service provision aimed at improving the quality of
life of the Iris Court residents to make drug use
less attractive to at-risk youths. The
enforcement/high-visibility patrol component was
begun, however, just before INOP was launched and
was intended to convince residents the neighborhood
was safe to some degree. The rationale was that
before Iris Court residents would take advantage of
the social services based in their neighborhood,
they needed to feel safe. The means to that end
were eviction of suspected drug traffickers and
people engaged in other illegal activities,
enforcement of the trespass ordinance, and
street-level drug enforcement.

Community outreach responsibility lay primarily
with the Neighborhood Response Team; its two
members attended resident association meetings, and
they worked with the residents' council and in the
contact office. Through the city housing authority
and the project coordinator's outreach efforts, the
residents' council and a tenants' association were
organized.

Prince George's County, Maryland--
Community-Oriented Policing Squad (COPS)

The INOP project was located in a single patrol
sector of one police district of this bedroom
suburb of Washington, D.C. The area is a "line"
district, so-called because it shares some of the
problems of crime and poverty that characterize the
adjacent areas of its urban neighbor.

Problem-solving policing was not unknown, but the
project was part of an expansion of the police
force. The aim of the expansion was to devote staff
for the first time to continuous
neighborhood-oriented problem solving in a
department long known for its sometimes strained
relations with the community. COPS officers were
selected after a call for volunteers.

Satellite offices established in problem-ridden
apartment complexes offered information about
community services. The COPS officers' presence
several hours a week was designed to reduce fear
and increase police visibility. The officers
patrolled (sometimes on foot), conducted community
outreach, provided service referrals, and
identified and addressed neighborhood problems.
Information about prevention was available at the
offices, and COPS officers were involved in drug
prevention and treatment activities.

Enforcement included police use of information from
community sources to identify narcotics locations.
The COPS officers also conducted traffic checks at
entrances of apartment complexes known for drug
activity and explored avenues of civil enforcement.

Community members were represented on the planning
committee, the project's advisory group, which
consisted also of representatives of several county
agencies. COPS officers established small planning
committees on their beats and worked with church
groups, Neighborhood Watch and Business Watch,
tenant organizations, and municipal officials.

Tempe, Arizona--Beat 16

Beat 16, an economically disadvantaged but stable
area of Tempe, had a long-standing heroin
trafficking problem and a large number of calls for
service. INOP, Tempe's introduction to community
policing, was centered in a police ministation
created as a modular unit in a park. It was
established as a pilot project in a single beat,
with assignment to a single squad of officers on a
long-term basis.

The approach differed more philosophically than
operationally from traditional policing. The
responsibilities of Beat 16 were like those of
routine operations except that its officers were
not responsible for calls outside their beat and
could set priorities and delay response to calls.
The project focused primarily on education and
prevention, and the ministation was the site of a
drug information hotline. Ties were established
with several prevention programs for youths. There
was also an enforcement component that began with a
drug sweep of the area.

The officers recruited for the project received
intensive training and were encouraged to become
familiar with problems of the beat and to interact
with residents. Several members of the citizens'
Coordinating Committee were also trained at the
department's Citizen Police Academy.

Each officer on the Beat 16 squad attended meetings
of a specific home-owners' association or other
neighborhood group. The Coordinating Committee--
consisting of representatives of community groups,
business leaders, service providers, and city
officials--was a central feature. It created links
with other agencies, and it was to have had an
active role in defining problems and identifying
resources but was disbanded because of lack of
interest on the part of community residents and
difficulties in defining its role and that of its
members. The activities of the committee were then
taken over by another group.

Evaluation findings

Police understanding and support. Gaining police
acceptance was one of the major implementation
challenges of INOP. Like many other jurisdictions
that have adopted community policing, the INOP
sites experienced resistance from many patrol
officers. Some resistance may have derived from
labor-management problems and from problems at the
institutional level. In this respect, the sites
resembled other organizations in which management
has had difficulty communicating its goals to
employees. In other words, the resistance of patrol
officers may not always have been to community
policing itself; rather, it may have resulted from
the low credibility accorded to any
management-instituted change or reform. Because
most of the projects had been in operation less
than a year before the evaluation began, they had
little time to overcome this obstacle.4 

Lack of knowledge. The majority of the INOP
projects consisted of pilot or experimental
community policing units in target areas rather
than jurisdictionwide undertakings, and the
officers not involved in them had little knowledge
of them. This lack of knowledge, which may be
traced to inadequate communication of project goals
at the outset, was a major factor in the limited
support for community policing among police
officers.

Most INOP projects expended considerable effort in
explaining project goals and operations as part of
their training of INOP officers. However, the bulk
of the training focused on these officers alone,
and even the officers who were trained often
displayed only a rudimentary understanding of
community policing. (See "Preparatory Steps:
Training and Technical Assistance.")

In general, when officers (both those involved in
the INOP projects and those not involved) were
asked about the INOP project goals or for their
definition of community policing, they would note
its emphasis on community outreach and the new
relationship envisioned 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. Most police officers defined
"real" police work as work involving crime-related
tasks.

The lack of understanding is not unique to the INOP
sites. Because community policing is still
relatively new, inadequate definition and
understanding of its goals and means have
complicated implementation. The officers themselves
did not have a single definition, although all
their definitions shared some common elements (such
as involvement of the community) that can be
conveyed in training.

The ambitious nature of the community policing
mission--calling for a new role for the patrol
officer--also creates implementation difficulties.
Community policing is a fight for the "hearts and
minds" of patrol officers and the public. It may be
that the INOP sites underestimated the difficulties
of this challenge. Officers who eventually embraced
the idea of community policing enough to volunteer
for the INOP projects recognized the scope of this
challenge when they noted that because of their
nontraditional nature, the projects needed not just
to be described by management but to be actively
"sold" to patrol officers.  Such an undertaking,
involving a shift in the culture of policing, would
no doubt take more time to produce results than was
available to these projects--more time than the
period of the evaluation. In New York and Houston,
even after 10 years experience with community
policing, many officers contended that there was
little support among the rank and file. This
suggests that acceptance by officers may take a
very long time.

Opposition to special-unit status. Because for most
of the police departments INOP was the first
experience with community policing, the projects
were usually established as distinct units within
patrol, rather than departmentwide. The
introduction of special units set apart from the
rest of the department seemed to exacerbate the
conflict between community policing's reform agenda
and the more traditional outlook and hierarchical
structure of the departments.

The perception of elitism is ironic because
community policing is meant to close the gap
between patrol and special units and to empower and
value the rank-and-file patrol officer as the most
important agent for police work. But INOP projects
were themselves special units and as such created
distrust between police management and
rank-and-file patrol officers and between officers
assigned to traditional policing and those assigned
to community policing.

A certain amount of this intradepartment resentment
can be attributed to the general antagonism that
may exist to one degree or another between patrol
and any special unit. Therefore, this problem in
the INOP projects may have had little to do with
community policing itself. Such rivalries are
common in most police departments large enough to
have special units, and evidence suggests that
police departments in the INOP sites were no
exception.

It was evident from the interviews that senior
patrol officers seemed to make up the backbone of
resistance to the INOP projects and the reforms
they represented. This was largely because of
long-standing working styles cultivated from
performing years of traditional patrol work but
also because they felt disenfranchised by a
management system that takes the best and brightest
out of patrol and that has left them behind.

The intrusion of the INOP projects and their
community policing agenda into the long-standing
promotional structure of departments that rely on
the distinctions between patrol and specialized
units caused many senior patrol officers in some
INOP sites to become embittered and resistant to
reforms. By contrast, it also inspired some
officers to become involved in community policing.
This was particularly the case in departments that
expressed intentions to expand their community
policing initiatives. An officer in Prince George's
County (Maryland), for example, indicated that the
department's plans for expanding INOP and adopting
community policing as an important element of
patrol deployment had led some officers to believe
that the INOP projects were the new career path to
promotion.

An administrator in Louisville saw community
policing as the perfect solution to the problems he
associated with a department structured around
special units because of the value that the
approach places on the individual patrol officer
and the power and responsibility it assigns to each
one.

Officers involved in the INOP projects often
expressed their belief that acceptance would take a
long time. Community policing would gain widespread
acceptance in their department, they felt, only
after a generation of younger officers, trained in
community policing from the beginning of their
careers, had filled the ranks.

Productivity issues. Some objections stemmed from
officers' belief that community policing is a less
productive form of policing than traditional
patrol. (They perceived that fewer arrests are
made, for example.) Because police departments face
resource constraints, these supposedly less
productive units come in for particular criticism.

Many non-INOP patrol officers felt that the
community policing projects were safe havens for
officers who did not want to work hard. This
perception was particularly common in sites where
community policing officers were not required to
answer 911 calls. Patrol officers generally
believed that community police officers should
respond to calls in their beats, if only as backup
for regular patrol.

Concern for resources. Related fiscal and human
resources issues played an important part in the
way police officers viewed INOP. Most police
officers (and many community residents) felt their
police departments were understaffed and
overworked. At all eight sites, officers raised
concerns about the effect of community policing on
scarce departmental resources. In addition to
believing that community policing was less
productive than traditional policing, they also saw
it as more time consuming and requiring more police
resources. Community outreach and problem solving
were the two specific activities that officers
identified as being the most labor intensive, as
well as the most difficult to integrate with their
more traditional duties.

In general, officers recognized that community
policing activities necessarily would consume extra
time, and there was a general consensus that they
also required a different kind of time from that
spent on traditional police functions. Just as an
officer in Tempe said she needed large blocks of
uncommitted time to develop a relationship with
school children in her beat, so, too, officers in
Norfolk felt that working with community residents
demanded a new work flexibility.

Officers also indicated that the press of 911 calls
made it difficult to meet the need for community
outreach, problem solving, and networking with
other agencies required of community policing. That
perception may be based on the notion that the key
to easing crime conditions is additional resources.
Some officers did believe that community policing
would in the long run reduce 911 calls and ease
staffing constraints.

Officers were also concerned about the size of the
area for which they were responsible. In contrast
to conventional police work, which rotates officers
in and out of districts according to a prearranged
schedule, community policing builds the officer's
relationship with and accountability to the
community in which he or she works through
relatively permanent assignment to a specific
geographic area. These "beats" are typically
smaller than those of radio motor patrols. Most of
the INOP projects, however, did not subdivide their
pre-existing system of geographical deployment to
accommodate the community policing agenda, and the
officers viewed their beats as too large.

Expectations too high. Police managers in many of
the INOP sites who were trying to sell resistant
officers on the merits of the program may have
described the potential benefits too broadly and
optimistically. As a result, officers opposed to
community policing had the opportunity to criticize
the project if it failed to deliver. But in all the
sites, INOP officers saw these criticisms as
premature and recognized that community policing
needed time if it was to demonstrate the effects
and efficiencies it was trying to produce. They
felt that critics of the projects were pointing
prematurely to failures that had not had sufficient
time to mature into successes.

Reliance on individual officers. INOP creates a new
role for the police officer, one that requires a
new outlook and a new set of skills. The scale of
the change in the police officer's basic job
description and therefore in his/her occupational
identity also generated resistance to INOP among
regular patrol officers.

Whether they were assigned to INOP projects or not,
officers believed that certain individual "styles"
of policing were more suitable than others to
community policing. The importance of the
characteristics of individual police officers in
the success of the INOP projects was a theme in all
sites, and it manifested itself in several ways.
For example, in some sites, a few dedicated and
knowledgeable police officers essentially carried
the entire INOP effort. At the supervisory level,
the newness and complexity of community policing
increased the latitude for individual
interpretation of its goals.

If responsibility for success resides in a small,
core group of officers, supervisors, and project
administrators, this highlights the necessity of
developing recruitment standards that will enable
police departments to select officers who are most
likely to embrace a community policing approach.

Labor-management tension. Most of the officers
interviewed felt that community policing was
happening to them rather than with them and that
there was no attempt to involve the rank and file
in decisionmaking. This perception was due in part
to their skepticism about new programs in general
and their strained relations with management. While
officers throughout the sites expressed distaste
for specific aspects of community policing, they
were almost unanimous in criticizing what they saw
as heavy-handed implementation by management.
Community policing emphasizes community empowerment
and involving citizens in decisionmaking.
Rank-and-file patrol officers, however, generally
argued that administrators had excluded them from
decisionmaking.

Some police officers perceived that changes in
their job descriptions are driven by political
rather than law enforcement considerations. Some
took comfort from the fact that a long list of new
projects and restructurings had come and gone
without significantly changing the way policing is
performed. This rapid succession of "repackagings"
in policing since the current round of reforms
began in the 1970's convinced many officers that
all new projects are driven by political pressures
on police and city managers and are thus inherently
of dubious value.

A "new old" idea. In virtually every site, most of
the officers who took part in focus groups
described the kind of policing implemented by the
INOP projects as nothing new but rather as just
"good, old-fashioned policing." This was the view
of officers who were trying to make a case in favor
of community policing, but it was expressed more
often by officers who were skeptical about reform.
By arguing that INOP essentially requires officers
to engage in the same kind of sound policing that
many of them have been practicing for years, the
resistant offi-cers made a case for continuing the
status quo. This view, which focused largely on the
community outreach component of community policing,
was rooted mainly in the general lack of knowledge
of community policing. But it may also have been an
expression of a generic resistance to change of any
sort rather than to INOP. Again, it reflects the
distrust of management, which officers raised
without prompting, and that underlies some of their
resistance.

Perceived loss of enforcement power. The parallel
with an idyllic period in the past when the "beat
cop" and citizens enjoyed a more trusting
relationship was contradicted by the officers'
perception that community policing placed too many
restraints on police power. The officers were
concerned their enforcement powers would be
limited. In most sites, the lack of an aggressive
enforcement component was consistently reported by
officers not assigned to INOP as the biggest
stumbling block to acceptance of it.

Some skeptical officers did express a willingness
to change their minds if community policing could
achieve traditional law enforcement goals. The key
to community policing's credibility, they claimed,
was its ability to reduce 911 calls, reduce
criminal activity, and produce arrests. At least in
part, community policing's perceived directives to
"smile and wave" (rather than enforce) were
disdained because they came from management.

Involvement of other agencies

If community policing is to be successful, it must
include problem solving, and this in turn requires
the active involvement of other city agencies.
Although most of the INOP sites made some attempts
to involve city agencies, this is the area in which
opportunities for better implementation were
greatest. Interagency involvement was limited and
informal. Many of the INOP projects were perceived
to depend not on cooperative efforts among agencies
but on the efforts of one or two individuals--a
police administrator or a beat officer. 

Norfolk was the sole exception; in fact, the
active, mandated involvement of all city agencies
was the component that made Norfolk's program
notable. The mayor made it clear to every
department head that all city departments were part
of the Police-Assisted Community Enforcement
program. The program was promoted and training was
provided to administrative staff from every city
agency. Organizational structure was provided by
the PACE Support Services Committee on which all
city agencies were represented. The committee
focused on team-centered assessment of family
service needs and quality-of-life issues in the
neighborhoods. 

Traditional enforcement strategies--e.g., making
arrests, filing reports, and issuing summonses--do
not involve public agencies other than the police.
But many problems cannot be solved through
traditional means alone and require input from
other agencies and from community residents. This
is especially true of quality-of-life problems
(such as abandoned cars, noise, graffiti, and other
signs of neighborhood disorder or decay).

Reliance on personal networking. Most police
officers are not experienced in dealing with other
public or private agencies, nor are there effective
mechanisms to make such interactions work smoothly
and predictably. If an officer at an INOP site
believed that another public agency could be
helpful in dealing with a particular problem, he or
she most often relied on personal contact with
someone at the agency. This was done because there
was no structured relationship between the
department and the agency and no formalized
procedures to follow. If the contact person should
leave the agency, the officer would have no quick,
effective means of dealing with similar, subsequent
problems. This business-as-usual approach was taken
in most of the INOP sites during the period of the
study.

In some sites there was little support for the
program from even the city (or county) government.
For such cities, community policing is de facto an
isolated police department phenomenon.

Community involvement

Definitions of community policing may vary, but all
share the idea that the police and the community
must work together to identify problems affecting
the community and to develop solutions. This is a
radical departure from the era of "professionalism"
in policing in which police claimed a monopoly of
the responsibility for crime control and actively
discouraged citizen involvement in police business.

Despite the central role of the police-citizen
partnership, many of the police departments paid
little attention to the education and inclusion of
the community. All the INOP sites experienced
difficulty in establishing a solid community
infrastructure upon which to build their programs.
Although they did not have much time in which to
organize the communities, their experience
nonetheless suggests that the question of how to
unleash the potential for effective organization
may prove to be the greatest challenge for
community policing.

Familiarity with INOP and community policing.
Understanding precedes involvement. Respondents'
knowledge of a project--its existence, goals, and
tactics--varied greatly at all the sites, and the
interview data indicate that the level of
understanding about INOP or community policing in
general was closely linked to a person's status in
the community and to the frequency of his or her
interaction with the police.5 Thus, in Hayward and
Houston, block watch leaders knew a great deal more
about the INOP project than did either their
members or average citizens, and the same was true
of residents' council members in Portland.

This phenomenon is hardly limited to INOP, however.
Almost by definition, local leaders will make it
their business to become familiar with issues
affecting their community. This was the case in the
INOP sites, where community leaders who interacted
frequently with the police knew more about INOP
than did residents who belonged to no community
group. In all the INOP sites, however, even the
most knowledgeable community leaders had only
limited familiarity with project goals, tactics,
and the role of the community.

Some residents, particularly older people, were
unaware of the program. Community leaders and other
residents tended to lay blame for lack of knowledge
on the police, who they claimed did not adequately
inform or educate the general population. Even
assuming the best education campaign, however, it
would have been difficult for the INOP projects to
become a familiar community fixture in the short
timespan they were in operation.

Type of knowledge. Residents of public housing or
other disadvantaged neighborhoods that were INOP
sites often defined community policing or a
specific INOP project solely in terms of the
picnics, block parties, and events for children
that were so often used as methods of community
outreach. They were familiar with little of the
substance of community policing or the INOP
projects. While social events like block parties do
little to inform or educate community residents
about community policing and their role in it, it
is possible that they may create solidarity in the
community and thus could be considered the
beginnings of attempts to organize. In addition,
these events allow residents to meet police
officers in a nonthreatening situation.

Perception of community organization. Many
residents at all eight sites believed the projects
had positive effects on the level of community
organization and involvement. In many instances,
however, their responses indicated they equated
community organization with large turnouts for
social events, such as barbecues and picnics.
Again, although larger turnouts for community
meetings or significant increases in the number of
people volunteering to help with problem solving
would be better indicators of community
involvement, the rudiments of community
organization might be detected in people's equating
it with these social events.

Issues in stimulating community involvement

Both practitioners and theorists of community
policing often assume that because the approach
offers such evident benefits to the community, once
educated about these benefits, residents will
actively aid in the effort. The evidence from these
eight sites strongly suggests, however, that
community residents generally may not want to
become involved, and from their perspective, the
reasons are sound.

Fear of retaliation. The reason most frequently
cited in all eight communities for lack of
involvement was residents' fear of retaliation from
drug dealers. In several communities residents also
specifically expressed fear of reprisals when they
were identified as "snitches" as a result of their
calls to the police. Responding police officers
would come to their homes and thus they would be
observed by the drug dealers.

In all theories of community policing, the
perception of fear is a central concern. Implicitly
or explicitly, most adherents of community policing
incorporate the theory of "broken windows"6 into
their programs. This theory holds that the police
need to emphasize their order-maintenance function;
for example, attending to disorderly behaviors such
as loitering or public drunkenness. Such behavior,
if neglected by the police, leads to increased
incivilities, lower levels of informal social
control, and greater fear among community
residents. The resulting condition, left
unattended, increases the level of community decay,
both social and physical, and makes the area ripe
for intrusion by outside criminal elements. This in
turn generates even more fear.

The role of the community policing officer is to
make residents feel safer because he or she will
concentrate on the incivilities and
order-maintenance problems that inspire fear in
residents. It may be, however, that fear is too
deeply ingrained among residents of some low-income
urban areas. If so, community policing may be
unable to reduce fear to the degree necessary to
allow residents to feel safe enough to police
themselves and take back the streets.

Community policing may find itself confronted by a
major contradiction as a result. If community
policing is to attain its goal of reducing fear,
the streets must first be made safe from the
perspective of community residents. According to
the residents of these eight communities, for this
to happen, the level of crime, not merely the
perception of it, must fall. However, most theories
of community policing seem to assert that without
the active participation of the community, the
police cannot reduce the incidence of crime and
disorder and thus reduce fear.

The transitory nature of projects to assist
disadvantaged neighborhoods. The designers of many
of the INOP projects realized this and began or
preceded their projects with intensive, traditional
law enforcement efforts.7 Such actions may produce
unintended effects, however. Residents almost
unanimously applaud police attempts to increase
enforcement in their neighborhoods, and during such
crackdowns they report feeling safer. But many of
these intensive enforcement initiatives are
(intentionally) short-lived and therefore do not
produce the desired effect of reducing fear in the
long run. When this happens, residents begin to
define community policing as "just another program"
in which services are here today but gone tomorrow.
Residents attributed lack of community involvement
to the fleeting nature of the INOP projects. The
perceived view of projects as transitory was most
apparent where a strong enforcement effort--one of
short duration--preceded an INOP project.

Historically poor police-community relations. One
of the untested assumptions of community policing
is that residents really want closer contact with
the police and want to work with them to reduce
crime. The assumption is itself based on the notion
that people who do not routinely violate the law
and who will eventually come to work cooperatively
with the police are the logical audience for the
community policing approach. Again, data collected
in the interviews for this study cast doubt on
these assumptions.

A large number of the community residents indicated
that a major reason for lack of involvement or even
outright hostility was the historically negative
relationship between the police and residents of
economically disadvantaged communities. Such
relationships, most common in areas of the city
usually chosen as the target sites for community
policing demonstration projects, will not be easily
changed. Police officers in many of the sites
interpreted the refusal of residents to become
involved as apathy or lack of interest in bettering
their own lives. The lack of involvement may,
however, be due less to apathy than to this
long-standing antagonism.

Lack of outreach by the police. Nearly all the INOP
sites were hampered in their attempts to generate
community organization and involvement by lack of
resources and experience. The exceptions were
Hayward and Houston, which had strong block watch
groups in the target areas. While the police
departments recognized the need to train officers
in the strategy and tactics of community policing,
they did not provide the same level of training to
members of the community.

One evident need is for training in the fundamental
principles of community policing and the role of
the community. Confusion about the role of the
community in "community policing" was common. As
noted earlier, although community leaders had some
notion of community policing, ordinary residents
had very limited knowledge. Most of the INOP
projects did, however, attempt to involve residents
in some manner. In Tempe and New York, police
recruited citizens as volunteers; in Portland, they
helped residents form councils; and in Norfolk,
they involved citizens in interagency problem
solving.

The nature of the target neighborhoods. The
economically disadvantaged urban areas that
generally serve as testing grounds for community
policing tend to be highly disorganized,
characterized by poverty, unemployment, inadequate
educational services, and high crime rates. In
areas encumbered by such an array of problems it is
often difficult to find well-organized community
groups that are attempting to address
quality-of-life issues.

Most residents in the eight INOP sites reported
that the level of community organization was only
average or low and that this had been the case for
some time. Most attributed this lack of community
activism to fear. In several sites (particularly
Tempe, Houston, and Hayward), the police were
particularly feared by the illegal immigrants who
lived there in large numbers.

The initial responsibility for generating community
organization in troubled areas must fall to the
police because it is they who are asking the public
to assist them. This police effort is best
undertaken in association with other city agencies.
Thus, in Portland, where the Iris Court project
serves people living in public housing, the police
asked the city's Housing Authority to assist the
residents in forming a residents' council; and in
Hayward, the police built on the solid foundation
provided by the citywide "Neighborhood Alert"
groups.

Intragroup conflict. A common barrier to
organizing, according to both residents and police
officers, was conflict among community leaders and
residents. In some sites this took the form of
disagreement about what issues were to be
addressed, how tasks were to be delegated, and
similar strategic and tactical questions. In
several sites, personality conflicts with community
leaders were cited as a major reason residents
refused to become involved with a block watch,
residents' council, or other civic association
linked to INOP.

The intragroup conflicts suggest that references to
an ideal "community" often fail to consider that in
reality the community is often an aggregate of
competing groups. Simply because people live in the
same geographic area and share the same racial and
class backgrounds does not guarantee that they
share all the same values or define problems the
same way.

The Portland site took a step toward solving this
problem by offering training for the Iris Court
residents. The aim of the training, offered to
residents' council members, was broader
participation in the project, and it also focused
on resolving intragroup conflict.

Finding out what the community wants. One of the
principles guiding community policing is
recognition that the police must be guided by the
values of the community. Identifying those values
may not be easy, especially when neighborhoods are
heterogeneous. 

Residents of the INOP sites were asked how they
would improve the project and how they would
improve community policing or policing in general.
A number of patterned responses emerged across the
sites, among them the desire for continuity in
assignment of beat officers. Residents wanted a
beat officer assigned for an extended period of
time. In Portland, for example, a Neighborhood
Response Team, consisting of two officers, spent a
great deal of time at the start of the INOP project
in the public housing complex to which they were
assigned and established rapport with a large
number of residents. Residents reported that after
a time, however, the presence of these officers
declined dramatically.

It is clear from the INOP sites that residents took
the problem of "revolving beat officers" very
seriously. The beat officer is the most visible
manifestation of the community policing approach,
and, in fact, it was common for residents to define
community policing in terms of the beat officer.

Another community expectation, as expressed by
residents, was for police to be crime fighters
above all else, and they defined the success of
community policing in terms of reducing crime and
fear. However, a great many residents also noted
other, equally important criteria, one of which was
better relationships among residents and the
police, which often seemed to hinge on the idea of
having long-term beat officers.

The perceived impact of INOP on crime and quality
of life

Drug trafficking. All the projects had one goal in
common: reducing drug demand. The purpose of INOP
was to develop innovative approaches to that end.
The general perception of residents and others who
were interviewed was that drug trafficking had been
displaced, either from one area to another, from
street level to indoors, or to a different time of
day.

Some differences in this overall impression were
found in specific sites. In Hayward, Houston, and
New York City, for example, some people interviewed
believed the INOP project had no effect on drug
trafficking. In Portland and Tempe, by contrast
(see "Attitudes Towards INOP"), the project was
seen as extremely effective. In the other sites,
the predominant view was that drug dealing had been
displaced to an area receiving less attention from
the project, to a few blocks away but within the
same area, to locations indoors rather than on the
street, or to another time during the day.

Drug-related crime. The people interviewed found it
more difficult to assess the effects of the INOP
projects on drug-related crime. Often they noted
they were not really able to distinguish crimes
that were drug related from those that were not,
but despite this difficulty they were able to make
an assessment. Responses ranged from "no effect" to
"very strong" impact, with a full range of
responses in- between. New York City was the only
site reporting "no effect" on drug-related crime,
while Portland, Tempe, and Norfolk said the INOP
project had a "very strong" impact. In fact, almost
all respondents in Portland believed the INOP
project had a very large impact on crime in Iris
Court, with dramatic changes in gang activity,
violent crime, robberies, and burglaries. In Prince
George's County, people believed that crime rates
had declined, and the County Executive proclaimed
the program a "true success." In Hayward, Houston,
and Louisville, respondents were divided in their
assessments.

Fear and drug-related crime. Theories holding that
social disorder and crime generate fear suggest
that it will decline where drug trafficking and
crime are perceived to have declined. Accordingly,
respondents in Hayward, Houston, and New York City
believed the INOP projects had little or no effect
on drugs and crime (or only a temporary effect),
and the levels of citizens' fear in those cities
changed little. By contrast, in Portland, where the
project was viewed as effective in reducing drug
trafficking, respondents were overwhelmingly
positive about the project's effect on fear, as
were respondents from Tempe and Prince George's
County. Responses from Norfolk and Louisville were
mixed.

Police-community relations. There appeared to be
little relationship between perceptions of effects
on drugs, crime, and fear and perceptions of how
the projects affected police-community relations;
it did not necessarily follow that respondents who
saw INOP as having little effect on crime also saw
it as having little effect on the relationship of
the community to the police. Most respondents
reported better relationships between the police
and community residents. Even in sites where INOP's
effect on drugs, crime, and fear was perceived as
minimal (Hayward, Houston, and New York City),
respondents generally believed the relationship
between the police and the community had improved.

Community organization and involvement. Respondents
found it more difficult to assess INOP's effect on
community organization and involvement, but in most
sites they indicated that levels of community
organization and involvement had increased since
the start of the INOP project. It was not clear,
however, whether the increases were attributable to
INOP or to other factors. Even in Hayward, where
citizens' groups were the most organized among the
eight sites, it appeared that the increased
organization was more likely the result of a
grassroots effort by the community that predated
the INOP program. Nevertheless, the police and
residents all indicated that more Neighborhood
Alert groups had been formed and attendance in
existing groups had improved since community
policing began.

The response of a police administrator from
Louisville may help explain the general view of
respondents that community organization had
increased. The administrator indicated that the
many interventions taking place, some not related
to INOP, made residents feel "there is some
interest in them." Residents of many of the INOP
neighborhoods to whom the police were paying
attention for the first time may have felt that any
intervention was better than no attention at all.

Easing the transition to community policing

Community policing holds great promise for citizen
participation, increased responsiveness on the part
of the police to the concerns of residents, and
greater police accountability. But if community
policing is to be granted legitimacy by the public,
its proponents need to demonstrate that it works.
The INOP projects provided an opportunity to meet
the need for information about the effectiveness of
the approach and about the implementation
challenges community policing faces.

In achieving the crime-reduction goals of community
policing, the INOP projects had mixed success, but
this conclusion needs to be seen in light of the
limited amount of time the projects had been in
operation before their results were assessed.
Community policing represents major shifts, both
for the police and community residents, and--
particularly because of its emphasis on prevention-
-is likely to take a long time before it approaches
institutionalization.

Aside from the effects of the projects in reducing
crime and fear, the assessment brought to light a
number of areas in which implementation could be
improved. The experiences of the eight INOP sites
clearly revealed that in the transition to
community policing, jurisdictions need to pay
particular attention to three issues: overcoming
patrol officer resistance, generating interagency
support, and building community involvement. The
assessment findings suggest that helping to ensure
a better product--crime reduction--may require
greater attention to process.

Overcoming patrol officer resistance. Resistance by
police officers to community policing is due in
part to inadequate understanding of the principles
on which the approach is based, which in turn stems
from insufficient training. Police officials who
envision the transition of their own departments to
community policing can learn from the experience of
the INOP sites about the need for a commitment to
training all officers.

Jurisdictions contemplating adopting community
policing may also want to rethink the special-unit
status accorded many of the INOP project offi-cers
because of its potential for generating
intradepartmental rivalry and consequent resentment
and resistance. Moreover, the view of community
policing as a drain on resources, one in which not
all officers are seen as pulling their own weight
or performing traditional duties (such as
responding to 911 calls), was also revealed in the
INOP sites as a problem that needs to be overcome.
For community policing to be successful in
attracting the most talented personnel, police
departments might want to make it a career path--an
exception to the current rule that advancement does
not run through patrol.

New recruitment strategies may also be needed. In
some INOP sites, it appeared that the continued
existence of the program rested on a single officer
or administrator. The nature of community policing
also makes it susceptible to variations in
supervisory style, and because of the emphasis on
interaction with the community, a single officer or
supervisor can strongly influence the public's
perceptions of the program. Officers who are
favorably disposed toward community policing may
positively influence community residents, while
officers who have not bought into the concept may
cause residents to develop a negative impression.
New recruitment strategies could help police
departments select candidates committed to the
ideals of working with and for the community.

Becoming a city agencywide phenomenon. At the INOP
sites, the police tended to rely on personal
contacts with other agencies to secure their
involvement, and community policing was almost
always an isolated police department phenomenon.
This approach highlights the need for an organized,
systematic involvement of agencies citywide. This
need is particularly acute because community
policing involves crime prevention and
quality-of-life issues, not all of which fall
within the purview of the police.

The experience of the INOP sites suggests that at
the very least, employees of other agencies should
understand how they can contribute to problem
solving; in short, they need to be instructed in
their role in community policing, which is no less
important than that of beat officers or concerned
community residents.

Involving the community. That the INOP sites in
general had limited success in stimulating
community organization is not surprising, given the
brief time in which to involve the community and
the limited experience of the police in this area.
The evaluation findings indicate that neighborhood
organizing is a skill the police will want to
develop if they hope to involve the community.
Other city agencies can play a role in this
process. If police departments involve them from
the beginning of the implementation process, they
could be useful in stimulating community
involvement by educating the public.

By the same token, the experience of the INOP
projects can be useful for police administrators in
recognizing community education and training as
equal in importance with police training and
education (though far more difficult to
accomplish). Existing community organizations and
leaders are the logical first audience, but it
should be kept in mind that neighborhoods that
commonly serve as community policing pilot sites
generally have few viable community groups. The
police, in concert with other public and private
agencies, should create organization where it does
not exist, although it may be argued that a high
level of community organization is not necessary
for community policing to function effectively.

To address residents' concerns about the transitory
nature of policing projects, departments
considering adopting community policing will want
to gauge as accurately as possible, before it is
instituted, the resources required to practice it.
Almost all the INOP sites promised communities
regular beat officers who would be permanent
fixtures of the neighborhood, but these officers
were in fact rotated, preventing residents from
getting to know them. If the police do not
accurately estimate resources, the result may be
broken promises to the community and a loss of
police credibility.

Conclusion

At least initially, community policing will require
more resources. That means jurisdictions will find
themselves faced with committing to larger budgets
in an increasingly harsh fiscal climate. This need
highlights the importance of involving other
agencies. Not only are they essential to the
problem-solving approach to policing, but resource
constraints on police departments make them even
more valuable because their involvement provides
the opportunity to leverage additional expertise
and resources.

Given the monumental nature of the tasks, the
transition to community policing will take a
considerable amount of time--much more time than
these eight sites had to "prove themselves." It
remains to be seen whether an already impatient
public will accept this fact. In large cities with
extremely diverse populations and large police
bureaucracies, the process is likely to take far
longer. 

The transition may be faster and ultimately more
productive if the jurisdiction itself makes a
commitment to a transition that assigns equal value
to training the police, the public, and the staffs
of all public agencies. The training provided to
the INOP sites introduced the key players to the
concepts and principles of community policing and
to related procedures and practices. It was
intended only to set community policing in motion.
However, the need for training persists throughout
the life of a project, particularly because the new
philosophy entails so many and such profound
changes. The resistance of many officers at these
sites to community policing is a strong argument
for offering training on an ongoing basis.
Ultimately, training may prove to be a key to
long-term success.

[begin text of RIB]

Community policing could arguably be called the new
orthodoxy of law enforcement in the United States.
It has become an increasingly popular alternative
to what many police administrators perceive as the
failure of traditional policing to deal effectively
with street crime, especially crimes of violence
and drug trafficking. Although the concept is
defined in varying ways, and its ability to meet
its goals remains largely untested, community
policing has gained widespread acceptance.
According to one source, about 40 percent of the
Nation's larger police departments have adopted it.1

Community-centered drug demand reduction 
If community policing has been a central aspect of
emerging police agendas in many jurisdictions
throughout the country, so has drug demand
reduction. Innovative Neighborhood-Oriented
Policing (INOP) is unique in drawing on the
principles of community policing and applying them
to drug demand reduction. One of these principles--
a major component of community policing--is that
partnerships between the police and the community
can be effective in reducing crime and fear. In
focusing on a particular issue, INOP also draws on
the principles of problem-solving policing.

Demand reduction can involve intensive local
street-level enforcement, which makes it more
difficult for buyers and sellers to link up with
each other and may dissuade new users from becoming
addicted. Beyond intensive enforcement, which is
the more common focus of police initiatives
directed at illegal drug use, demand reduction can
also include prevention and treatment. What is
unique about INOP is its attempt to supplement
traditional enforcement with long-term
community-based prevention, education, and
treatment referral. Combining all these components,
INOP projects approximate a comprehensive approach
to demand reduction. Ideally, all components are
represented in a given project. In the INOP
projects analyzed in this Research in Brief, each
contained some but not all the components.

The INOP program

INOP was designed in 1990 by the Bureau of Justice
Assistance (BJA), U.S. Department of Justice, as a
demonstration program to further the National Drug
Control Strategy by focusing on and broadening the
scope of community-based approaches to drug demand
reduction. INOP projects are based on the notion
that crime and drug problems must be addressed by
the entire community, not just by the police
department. Because of the nature and extent of the
drug problem, traditional police tactics are
limited in their ability to control it. Proactive
and interactive approaches by communities and the
police have thus become essential to accomplish
both law enforcement and community objectives.
INOP's goal is to develop strategies for demand
reduction that are centered in the community and
anchored in the police-community partnership.
Police departments are to act as catalysts for
developing and sustaining a coordinated network of
neighborhood services.2
Eight jurisdictions were selected by BJA as the
sites of initial INOP demonstration projects. Each
site was awarded between $100,000 and $200,000 for
the first year of its program.3 The sites differed
greatly in population size and consequently in the
size of the police agency that served them. They
also differed in their relationships to other
neighborhood-oriented policing initiatives within
the jurisdiction. In several, for example, the INOP
project was the police department's first effort at
implementing a neighborhood-oriented style of
policing. In others, it was a relatively small
component of a larger, citywide
neighborhood-oriented policing initiative that was
either new or well established.

[Insert exhibit 1 near here.]
In general, the projects shared a police
enforcement component (except in New York), a focus
on target neighborhoods, community involvement, and
interagency planning and partnerships. Drug demand
reduction was the goal shared by all, but the
approaches differed substantially. Some sites
featured components that met particular community
needs, such as an extensive public advertising
campaign or reliance on volunteers.

Evaluation issues and methods

The INOP projects were evaluated by the Vera
Institute of Justice under National Institute of
Justice (NIJ) sponsorship, about 1 year after each
had been launched. The process evaluation presented
indepth descriptions of the sites and cross-site
comparisons of program structure and operations and
expectations of the various groups--police
personnel, municipal and community leaders, and
others--who had roles in the projects.

Measuring effects on crime. The impact evaluation,
which is discussed in this document, examined the
effects of the INOP projects on drug demand, public
safety, and the quality of life of the communities
and identified the characteristics of the projects
that contributed to (or tended to detract from)
program effectiveness.

The effects were measured in terms of the
perceptions of the people involved in the projects-
-police officers and administrators, other police
agency personnel, residents, and business people.
Effects were measured both within each site and
across the sites. Specifically, the individuals
interviewed (a total of 552 in the eight sites)
were asked for their views of the effects on drug
use and drug trafficking, drug-related crime and
other crime, fear, quality of life in the area,
police-community relations, and level of community
organization and involvement.

Implementation issues. Another part of the
evaluation analyzed project implementation based on
comparisons among all sites. The research conducted
for this analysis employed a variety of methods:
interviews, focus groups, field observations by the
researchers, and review of evaluations conducted
locally when these were available. The
implementation issues included police acceptance
of/resistance to INOP, extent of community
organization and involvement, and extent of
involvement of public agencies other than the
police.

One of the most significant findings--but one that
may come as no surprise--was that early stages of
implementing community policing are not easy. This
was the experience in all eight jurisdictions. For
one thing, it was difficult to convince police
officers to accept the new roles and behaviors
required for community policing. Citizen
involvement--the linchpin of community policing--
was particularly challenging. Despite
acknowledgment by some residents (largely community
leaders) of community policing as valuable,
activism was generally confined to a small group of
dedicated individuals. The comprehensive approach
that is another hallmark of community policing was
not carried out to the extent it might have been
because the involvement of agencies other than the
police was, at best, limited at most sites.

Evaluation timing. The timing of the evaluations
goes a long way to explain the findings regarding
implementation difficulties. The evaluations began
in mid-1991, with data collection ending about a
year later. (The timing of the evaluation was
determined by receipt of funding from NIJ.) Most of
the projects were launched in mid-1990--only a year
before the start of the evaluation. These dates are
important to keep in mind because they indicate
that the INOP projects were at varying stages of
implementation, most of them up and running only a
short time before they were subjected to
evaluation. In other words, they did not have much
time to become fully operational.

The project in Hayward, California, is one example.
It began fairly late--in 1991--and its central
component, a mobile van, was not put into operation
until the researchers' final site visit. The
projects continued to progress after the
evaluations were completed. In Tempe, Arizona,
followup through mid-1993 revealed the extent of
progress achieved. (See "Recent Developments in
Tempe, Arizona.")

Insert sidebar 1, "Recent Developments in Tempe,
Arizona," about here.]

Because the INOP projects had little time to
establish a "track record," it is not possible to
come to any definitive conclusions regarding
long-term outcomes. Many of the difficulties the
projects encountered need to be considered in light
of this time frame. For this reason, the evaluation
is best interpreted as an assessment of the INOP
projects at a very early stage of their development
and over a brief period of time. Nevertheless, the
findings also make clear that much remains to be
learned about the optimal approach to structuring
the various components of this type of program.

Applying the lessons. In addition, it is important
to note the small scale of many of these INOP
projects, which often constituted only a single
component of a police department's operations. For
this reason it would be difficult to apply the
lessons of their experiences to those of police
departments generally. Moreover, because the
evaluation was not national in scope, the same
reasoning would apply.

The challenges in implementing INOP led to the
conclusion that the evaluation findings would be
particularly useful for jurisdictions that have
community policing initiatives in the planning
stages. The experiences of the eight INOP
demonstration sites could help these jurisdictions
avoid some of the difficulties they might otherwise
encounter and influence them not to abandon their
plans but to improve the likelihood of their
success. In this way, implementation of community
policing at the neighborhood level could be
accomplished more smoothly and productively.

Eight distinctive jurisdictions and programs

Hayward, California--Community Oriented Policing
and Problem Solving (COPPS)
Hayward is a relatively low-income community in
which a majority of the population is white, but
there is also a great deal of ethnic diversity. The
entire city was targeted for INOP, although one
area with a pervasive drug problem received more
attention than others.

Community policing was a fairly recent development,
introduced in 1991. The department reorganized to
accommodate the new approach by decentralizing
patrol, and all officers became community policing
officers. The cornerstone of INOP was a large van,
the Neighborhood Access Vehicle, intended for use
as a mobile office and community meeting place. It
was to serve as a source of referral information
and to make the police more accessible and more
visible in neighborhoods where it was deployed.
INOP was also to include drug enforcement in the
schools that would involve cooperation between the
police and school principals. Enforcement through a
Tactical Narcotics Team took place on a parallel
track.

COPPS training was held for all police personnel.
The volunteers of Neighborhood Alert, a block watch
group active in the city for 20 years, were also
trained in a range of topics, and training for
rental unit managers in recognizing drug abuse was
planned. Plans were also made to increase the
number of Neighborhood Alert groups.

INOP helped solidify the interagency cooperation
that had existed for several years in the "Beat
Health Team," which addressed issues of public
health. INOP developed an information and referral
resource guide to facilitate citizen access to
other agencies' services and a guide to alcoholism,
drug abuse, and family support services.

Houston, Texas--Operation Siege

There were two INOP target areas in Houston. In
one, which experienced the city's most serious
crime, the major problems were prostitution, crack
cocaine, and abandoned buildings used by crack
dealers. The other contained many "cantinas" (bars)
that residents associated with criminal activity.

Houston's experience with neighborhood-oriented,
problem-solving policing dated to 1982, and 5 years
later plans were made (but then abandoned) to adopt
community policing departmentwide. INOP emphasized
enforcement through a strategy of high-visibility
patrol aimed at open-air drug activity, monitoring
of the cantinas, and covert operations and
intelligence gathering targeted to drug sellers and
suspects.

The emphasis on enforcement did not preclude
community involvement. Operation Siege opened with
a series of meetings with community groups to
identify problems and plan strategy. The police
enhanced their relationship with Neighborhood
Watch, which monitored the cantinas; in this target
area citizens formed a patrol and were given CB
radios to contact the police. In the other target
area the police helped revitalize a community
organization, which in turn helped supply
information and aided the police in other ways. The
police also helped elderly homeowners in "target
hardening," providing locks and doors free of
charge to a number of them. No formal partnerships
were established with other city agencies, but some
informal links were made with individuals within
these agencies.

Louisville, Kentucky--Community-Oriented Policing
(COP)

INOP was adopted in one (and subsequently a second)
of the six police districts in Louisville. The
initial district was selected because it had the
highest level of violent crime in the city and had
been the center of heroin trafficking. It was also
plagued by high unemployment, and a substantial
number of liquor stores and bars had been
identified as drug-trafficking locations. INOP had
two phases, planning and problem identification,
followed by strategy development and
implementation. Phase two focused on problem
solving, primarily in a park identified as a site
of drug activity.

Since the police were involved districtwide, there
was no recruitment, and all officers were expected
ultimately to participate. The enforcement strategy
used almost exclusively was a task force of
officers who employed a variety of techniques
(surveillance, for example) for a few weeks to a
few months, depending on the problem.
Prevention/education was also part of the strategy,
with some community members trained in drug abuse
prevention, and an education campaign to create
awareness of drug issues was planned.

A project committee and a strategy committee,
consisting of police officers and community
members, were formed and later consolidated into
one. Among other activities, the committee
conducted an "advertising" campaign and held
community forums to define priority issues.
Community involvement was built on the foundation
of a number of active, organized block associations
that predated INOP. Several block association
leaders became active members of the project
committee.

In enforcement, the police department received
cooperation and assistance from the city-county
narcotics unit whose director pledged support. INOP
created 12 partnerships with city agencies,
including those responsible for job training,
housing, health, and parks and recreation. The
mayor formally endorsed "COP" (as INOP was called)
and mandated cooperation by all supporting
agencies. COP also became a member of the
city-county drug rehabilitation, education, and
enforcement program, which linked the project to a
consortium of treatment and prevention initiatives.

New York City--Community Patrol Officer Program
(CPOP)

By 1988 community policing in New York had been
instituted citywide, although the approach has
since evolved. The INOP project targeted three
precincts: East Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.
Each had a substantial drug problem, a large
proportion of low-income residents, and a large
proportion of minority residents.

The INOP precincts each had a van (a converted
motor home) parked outside an elementary or junior
high school in areas of active drug markets.
Services (such as youth counseling) were provided
in them and the adjacent schools. Information on
drug prevention was also available. The vans were
not used for citizen reporting of crime or
providing other information about crime. Rather,
citizens who had this type of information were
instructed to go to the precinct or to call in
reports. The presence of the vans was expected to
encourage school attendance. Because the vans were
to be seen as a community--not a police--resource,
they were not to be staffed by police. However,
lack of volunteers led to assignment of a police
coordinator.

The Tactical Narcotics Teams, a street-level,
buy-and-bust enforcement program, conducted drug
sweeps at the time the vans were set up. Otherwise,
the enforcement component was not large. Community
Patrol Officers, who were assigned walking beats,
provided drug prevention activities and referrals
to treatment, and they patrolled the area around
the vans to take information about drug use in the
area and to ensure the safety of people using them.

Community volunteers were recruited through the
Parent-Teacher Associations and received training,
and the Manhattan District Attorney's office also
trained volunteers. Outreach also included
introduction of the Neighborhood Resource Centers
(the vans) to residents, with requests for
volunteers to staff them.

Several public and private agencies were involved:
the Board of Education; Victim Services Agency; the
Department of Health; the Department of Youth
Services; the nonprofit, Citizens Committee for New
York City; MOSAIC, a Bronx community center; and
the District Attorney's office. The health
department, for example, provided an
injury-prevention component, and Youth Services
provided a counselor.

Norfolk, Virginia--Police-Assisted Community
Enforcement (PACE)

Although concentrated in and around public housing,
the INOP project in Norfolk was part of a citywide
program called PACE, which involved all city
agencies. By the end of the evaluation research,
PACE had been established in 10 areas, with plans
for 2 more. Crime and calls for service were to be
reduced in a 3-stage process of sweeps, stepped-up
patrol, and community partnerships. PACE included
all officers, although some were involved more than
others. All officers, including the chief, received
introductory training, followed by ongoing
inservice training.

Stage 1 was an assault on street drug activity
through intelligence gathering, undercover
operations, and saturation patrols. The major
component of drug prevention was an athletic league
for young people. Other features included working
with the D.A.R.E.þ (Drug Abuse Resistance
Education) program in the schools, demolition of
abandoned buildings, attention to physical
disorder, evictions of drug dealers, and screening
of rental applicants.

Police outreach began in Stage 2, with introduction
of the program to the community. Police met with
community leaders to organize Neighborhood Watch
and Operation Identification. PACE representatives
attended community meetings and other functions.
"Community Service Days," featuring representatives
of city agencies, were organized. Stage 3, whose
goal was full community partnership and a reduced
burden on the police, was not fully implemented.

Interagency coordination was extensive and
mandated, and all city agencies had a role. The
Support Services Committee, which coordinated the
services of police and other city agencies,
addressed specific issues like family services and
signs of physical disorder.

Portland, Oregon--Iris Court Community Policing
Demonstration Project

Portland INOP was a demonstration project, one of
three established in each of the city's three
police precincts as part of community policing,
which began in 1989. The focus was a public-housing
complex where most of the units were occupied by
low-income residents. Evidence suggested that many
of them were drug-dependent. This site and three
adjacent housing projects were selected primarily
because of high levels of open-air drug dealing,
calls for service to the police, and gang violence.
The project served the 159 residents of the housing
complexes.

The projects had several related components:
enforcement/high-visibility patrol, a "Neighborhood
Response Team" of two uniformed patrol officers, a
civilian project coordinator, a community health
nurse, a community policing contact office,
partnerships between residents and social service
providers, use of Crime Prevention Through
Environmental Design (CPTED) principles, and
resident organizing and empowerment. The emphasis
on human services partnerships with other agencies
made this project unique among the INOP sites.

The primary method of drug demand reduction was
coordination and provision of social services. The
contact office provided referral to services rather
than functioning as a police ministation. The
project coordinator, a civilian employee of the
police department, worked full time in the contact
office linking residents with service providers,
making referrals, and coordinating outreach.
Training landlords in how to keep drug activity out
of their properties was another INOP component
(though not in Iris Court).

Service provision aimed at improving the quality of
life of the Iris Court residents to make drug use
less attractive to at-risk youths. The
enforcement/high-visibility patrol component was
begun, however, just before INOP was launched and
was intended to convince residents the neighborhood
was safe to some degree. The rationale was that
before Iris Court residents would take advantage of
the social services based in their neighborhood,
they needed to feel safe. The means to that end
were eviction of suspected drug traffickers and
people engaged in other illegal activities,
enforcement of the trespass ordinance, and
street-level drug enforcement.

Community outreach responsibility lay primarily
with the Neighborhood Response Team; its two
members attended resident association meetings, and
they worked with the residents' council and in the
contact office. Through the city housing authority
and the project coordinator's outreach efforts, the
residents' council and a tenants' association were
organized.

Prince George's County, Maryland--
Community-Oriented Policing Squad (COPS)

The INOP project was located in a single patrol
sector of one police district of this bedroom
suburb of Washington, D.C. The area is a "line"
district, so-called because it shares some of the
problems of crime and poverty that characterize the
adjacent areas of its urban neighbor.

Problem-solving policing was not unknown, but the
project was part of an expansion of the police
force. The aim of the expansion was to devote staff
for the first time to continuous
neighborhood-oriented problem solving in a
department long known for its sometimes strained
relations with the community. COPS officers were
selected after a call for volunteers.
Satellite offices established in problem-ridden
apartment complexes offered information about
community services. The COPS officers' presence
several hours a week was designed to reduce fear
and increase police visibility. The officers
patrolled (sometimes on foot), conducted community
outreach, provided service referrals, and
identified and addressed neighborhood problems.
Information about prevention was available at the
offices, and COPS officers were involved in drug
prevention and treatment activities.

Enforcement included police use of information from
community sources to identify narcotics locations.
The COPS officers also conducted traffic checks at
entrances of apartment complexes known for drug
activity and explored avenues of civil enforcement.

Community members were represented on the planning
committee, the project's advisory group, which
consisted also of representatives of several county
agencies. COPS officers established small planning
committees on their beats and worked with church
groups, Neighborhood Watch and Business Watch,
tenant organizations, and municipal officials.

Tempe, Arizona--Beat 16

Beat 16, an economically disadvantaged but stable
area of Tempe, had a long-standing heroin
trafficking problem and a large number of calls for
service. INOP, Tempe's introduction to community
policing, was centered in a police ministation
created as a modular unit in a park. It was
established as a pilot project in a single beat,
with assignment to a single squad of officers on a
long-term basis.

The approach differed more philosophically than
operationally from traditional policing. The
responsibilities of Beat 16 were like those of
routine operations except that its officers were
not responsible for calls outside their beat and
could set priorities and delay response to calls.
The project focused primarily on education and
prevention, and the ministation was the site of a
drug information hotline. Ties were established
with several prevention programs for youths. There
was also an enforcement component which began with
a drug sweep of the area.

The officers recruited for the project received
intensive training and were encouraged to become
familiar with problems of the beat and to interact
with residents. Several members of the citizens'
Coordinating Committee were also trained at the
department's Citizen Police Academy.

Each officer on the Beat 16 squad attended meetings
of a specific homeowners' association or other
neighborhood group. The Coordinating Committee--
consisting of representatives of community groups,
business leaders, service providers, and city
officials--was a central feature. It created links
with other agencies, and it was to have had an
active role in defining problems and identifying
resources but was disbanded because of lack of
interest on the part of community residents'
difficulties in defining its role and that of its
members. The activities of the committee were then
taken over by another group.

Evaluation findings

Police understanding and support. Gaining police
acceptance was one of the major implementation
challenges of INOP. Like many other jurisdictions
that have adopted community policing, the INOP
sites experienced resistance from many patrol
officers. Some resistance may have derived from
labor-management problems and from problems at the
institutional level. In this respect, the sites
resembled other organizations in which management
has had difficulty communicating its goals to
employees. In other words, the resistance of patrol
officers may not always have been to community
policing itself; rather, it may have resulted from
the low credibility accorded to any
management-instituted change or reform. Because
most of the projects had been in operation less
than a year before the evaluation began, they had
little time to overcome this obstacle.4 1

Lack of knowledge. The majority of the INOP
projects consisted of pilot or experimental
community policing units in target areas rather
than jurisdictionwide undertakings, and the
officers not involved in them had little knowledge
of them. This lack of knowledge, which may be
traced to inadequate communication of project goals
at the outset, was a major factor in the limited
support for community policing among police
officers.

Most INOP projects expended considerable effort in
explaining project goals and operations as part of
their training of INOP officers. However, the bulk
of the training focused on these officers alone,
and even the officers who were trained often
displayed only a rudimentary understanding of
community policing. (See "Preparatory Steps:
Training and Technical Assistance.")

In general, when officers (both those involved in
the INOP projects and those not involved) were
asked about the INOP project goals or for their
definition of community policing, they would note
its emphasis on community outreach and the new
relationship envisioned 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. Most police officers defined
"real" police work as work involving crime-related
tasks.

The lack of understanding is not unique to the INOP
sites. Because community policing is still
relatively new, inadequate definition and
understanding of its goals and means have
complicated implementation. The officers themselves
did not have a singe definition, although all their
definitions shared some common elements (such as
involvement of the community) that can be conveyed
in training.

The ambitious nature of the community policing
mission--calling for a new role for the patrol
officer--also creates implementation difficulties.
Community policing is a fight for the "hearts and
minds" of patrol officers and the public. It may be
that the INOP sites underestimated the difficulties
of this challenge. Officers who eventually embraced
the idea of community policing enough to volunteer
for the INOP projects recognized the scope of this
challenge when they noted that the projects needed
not just to be described by management but to be
actively "sold" to patrol officers because of their
nontraditional nature. Such an undertaking,
involving a shift in the culture of policing, would
no doubt take more time to produce results than was
available to these projects--more time than the
period of the evaluation. In New York and Houston,
even after 10 years experience with community
policing, many officers contended that there was
little support among the rank and file. This
suggests that acceptance by officers may take a
very long time.

Opposition to special-unit status. Because for most
of the police departments INOP was the first
experience with community policing, the projects
were usually established as distinct units within
patrol, rather than departmentwide. The
introduction of special units set apart from the
rest of the department seemed to exacerbate the
conflict between community policing's reform agenda
and the more traditional outlook and hierarchical
structure of the departments.

The perception of elitism is ironic because
community policing is meant to close the gap
between patrol and special units and to empower and
value the rank-and-file patrol officer as the most
important agent for police work. But INOP projects
were themselves special units and as such created
distrust between police management and
rank-and-file patrol officers and between officers
assigned to traditional policing and those assigned
to community policing.

A certain amount of this intradepartment resentment
can be attributed to the general antagonism that
may exist to one degree or another between patrol
and any special unit. Therefore, this problem in
the INOP projects may have had little to do with
community policing itself. Such rivalries are
common in most police departments large enough to
have special units, and evidence suggests that
police departments in the INOP sites were no
exception.

It was evident from the interviews that senior
patrol officers seemed to make up the backbone of
resistance to the INOP projects and the reforms
they represented. This was largely because of
long-standing working styles cultivated from
performing years of traditional patrol work but
also because they felt disenfranchised by a
management system that takes the best and brightest
out of patrol and that has left them behind.

The intrusion of the INOP projects and their
community policing agenda into the long-standing
promotional structure of departments that rely on
the distinctions between patrol and specialized
units caused many senior patrol officers in some
INOP sites to become embittered and resistant to
reforms. 
By contrast, it also inspired some officers to
become involved in community policing. This was
particularly the case in departments that expressed
intentions to expand their community policing
initiatives. An officer in Prince George's County
(Maryland), for example, indicated that the
department's plans for expanding INOP and adopting
community policing as an important element of
patrol deployment had led some officers to believe
that the INOP projects were the new career path to
promotion.

An administrator in Louisville saw community
policing as the perfect solution to the problems he
associated with a department structured around
special units because of the value that the
approach places on the individual patrol officer
and the power and responsibility it assigns to each
one.

Officers involved in the INOP projects often
expressed their belief that acceptance would take a
long time. Community policing would gain widespread
acceptance in their department, they felt, only
after a generation of younger officers, trained in
community policing from the beginning of their
careers, had filled the ranks.

Productivity issues. Some objections stemmed from
officers' belief that community policing is a less
productive form of policing than traditional
patrol. (They perceived that fewer arrests are
made, for example.) Because police departments face
resource constraints, these supposedly less
productive units come in for particular criticism.

Many non-INOP patrol officers felt that the
community policing projects were safe havens for
officers who did not want to work hard. This
perception was particularly common in sites where
community policing officers were not required to
answer 911 calls. Patrol officers generally
believed that community police officers should
respond to calls in their beats, if only as backup
for regular patrol.

Concern for resources. Related fiscal and human
resources issues played an important part in the
way police officers viewed INOP. Most police
officers (and many community residents) felt their
police departments were understaffed and
overworked. At all eight sites officers raised
concerns about the effect of community policing on
scarce departmental resources. In addition to
believing that community policing was less
productive than traditional policing, they also saw
it as more time consuming and requiring more police
resources. Community outreach and problem solving
were the two specific activities that officers
identified as being the most labor intensive, as
well as the most difficult to integrate with their
more traditional duties.

In general, officers recognized that community
policing activities necessarily would consume extra
time, and there was a general consensus that they
also required a different kind of time from that
spent on traditional police functions. Just as an
officer in Tempe said she needed large blocks of
uncommitted time to develop a relationship with
school children in her beat, so, too, officers in
Norfolk felt that working with community residents
demanded a new work flexibility.

Officers also indicated that the press of 911 calls
made it difficult to meet the need for community
outreach, problem solving, and networking with
other agencies required of community policing. That
perception may be based on the notion that the key
to easing crime conditions is additional resources.
Some officers did believe that community policing
would in the long run reduce 911 calls and ease
staffing constraints.

Officers were also concerned about the size of the
area for which they were responsible. In contrast
to conventional police work, which rotates officers
in and out of districts according to a prearranged
schedule, community policing builds the officer's
relationship with and accountability to the
community in which he or she works through
relatively permanent assignment to a specific
geographic area. These "beats" are typically
smaller than those of radio motor patrols. Most of
the INOP projects, however, did not subdivide their
pre-existing system of geographical deployment to
accommodate the community policing agenda, and the
officers viewed their beats as too large.

Expectations too high. Police managers in many of
the INOP sites who were trying to sell resistant
officers on the merits of the program may have
described the potential benefits too broadly and
optimistically. As a result, officers opposed to
community policing had the opportunity to criticize
the project if it failed to deliver. But in all the
sites, INOP officers saw these criticisms as
premature and recognized that community policing
needed time if it was to demonstrate the effects
and efficiencies it was trying to produce. They
felt that critics of the projects were pointing
prematurely to failures that had not had sufficient
time to mature into successes.

Reliance on individual officers. INOP creates a new
role for the police officer, one that requires a
new outlook and a new set of skills. The scale of
the change in the police officer's basic job
description and therefore in his/her occupational
identity also generated resistance to INOP among
regular patrol officers.

Whether they were assigned to INOP projects or not,
officers believed that certain individual "styles"
of policing were more suitable than others to
community policing. The importance of the
characteristics of individual police officers in
the success of the INOP projects was a theme in all
sites, and it manifested itself in several ways.
For example, in some sites, a few dedicated and
knowledgeable police officers essentially carried
the entire INOP effort. At the supervisory level,
the newness and complexity of community policing
increased the latitude for individual
interpretation of its goals.

If responsibility for success resides in a small,
core group of officers, supervisors, and project
administrators, this highlights the necessity of
developing recruitment standards that will enable
police departments to select officers who are most
likely to embrace a community policing approach.

Labor-management tension. Most of the officers
interviewed felt that community policing was
happening to them rather than with them and that
there was no attempt to involve the rank and file
in decisionmaking. This perception was due in part
to their skepticism about new programs in general
and their strained relations with management. While
officers throughout the sites expressed distaste
for specific aspects of community policing, they
were almost unanimous in criticizing what they saw
as heavy-handed implementation by management.
Community policing emphasizes community empowerment
and involving citizens in decisionmaking.
Rank-and-file patrol officers, however, generally
argued that administrators had excluded them from
decisionmaking.

Some police officers perceived that changes in
their job descriptions are driven by political
rather than law enforcement considerations. Some
took comfort from the fact that a long list of new
projects and restructurings had come and gone
without significantly changing the way policing is
performed. This rapid succession of "repackagings"
in policing since the current round of reforms
began in the 1970's convinced many officers that
all new projects are driven by political pressures
on police and city managers and are thus inherently
of dubious value.

A "new old" idea. In virtually every site, most of
the officers who took part in focus groups
described the kind of policing implemented by the
INOP projects as nothing new but rather as just
"good, old-fashioned policing." This was the view
of officers who were trying to make a case in favor
of community policing, but it was expressed more
often by officers who were skeptical about reform.
By arguing that INOP essentially requires officers
to engage in the same kind of sound policing that
many of them have been practicing for years, the
resistant officers made a case for continuing the
status quo. This view, which focused largely on the
community outreach component of community policing,
was rooted mainly in the general lack of knowledge
of community policing. But it may also have been an
expression of a generic resistance to change of any
sort rather than to INOP. Again, it reflects the
distrust of management, which officers raised
without prompting, and that underlies some of their
resistance.

Perceived loss of enforcement power. The parallel
with an idyllic period in the past when the "beat
cop" and citizens enjoyed a more trusting
relationship was contradicted by the officers'
perception that community policing placed too many
restraints on police power. The officers were
concerned their enforcement powers would be
limited. In most sites, the lack of an aggressive
enforcement component was consistently reported by
officers not assigned to INOP as the biggest
stumbling block to acceptance of it.

Some skeptical officers did express a willingness
to change their minds if community policing could
achieve traditional law-enforcement goals. They key
to community policing's credibility, they claimed,
was its ability to reduce 911 calls, reduce
criminal activity, and produce arrests. At least in
part, community policing's perceived directives to
"smile and wave" (rather than enforce) were
disdained because they came from management.

Involvement of other agencies

If community policing is to be successful, it must
include problem solving, and this in turn requires
the active involvement of other city agencies.
Although most of the INOP sites made some attempts
to involve city agencies, this is the area in which
opportunities for better implementation were
greatest. Interagency involvement was limited and
informal. Many of the INOP projects were perceived
to depend not on cooperative efforts among agencies
but on the efforts of one or two individuals--a
police administrator or a beat officer. 

Norfolk was the sole exception; in fact, the
active, mandated involvement of all city agencies
was the component that made Norfolk's program
notable. The mayor made it clear to every
department head that all city departments were part
of the Police Assisted Community Enforcement
program. The program was promoted and training was
provided to administrative staff from every city
agency. Organizational structure was provided by
the PACE Support Services Committee on which all
city agencies were represented. The Committee
focused on team-centered assessment of family
service needs and quality-of-life issues in the
neighborhoods. 

Traditional enforcement strategies--e.g., making
arrests, filing reports, and issuing summonses--do
not involve public agencies other than the police.
But many problems cannot be solved through
traditional means alone and require input from
other agencies and from community residents. This
is especially true of quality-of-life problems
(such as abandoned cars, noise, graffiti, and other
signs of neighborhood disorder or decay).

Reliance on personal networking. Most police
officers are not experienced in dealing with other
public or private agencies, nor are there effective
mechanisms to make such interactions work smoothly
and predictably. If an officer at an INOP site
believed that another public agency could be
helpful in dealing with a particular problem, he or
she most often relied on personal contact with
someone at the agency. This was done because there
was no structured relationship between the
department with the agency and no formalized
procedures to follow. If the contact person should
leave the agency, the officer would have no quick,
effective means of dealing with similar, subsequent
problems. This business-as-usual approach was taken
in most of the INOP sites during the period of the
study.

In some sites there was little support for the
program from even the city (or county) government.
For such cities, community policing is de facto an
isolated police department phenomenon.

Community involvement

Definitions of community policing may vary, but all
share the idea that the police and the community
must work together to identify problems affecting
the community and to develop solutions. This is a
radical departure from the era of "professionalism"
in policing in which police claimed a monopoly of
the responsibility for crime control and actively
discouraged citizen involvement in police business.
Despite the central role of the police-citizen
partnership, many of the police departments paid
little attention to the education and inclusion of
the community. All the INOP sites experienced
difficulty in establishing a solid community
infrastructure upon which to build their programs.
Although they did not have much time in which to
organize the communities, their experience
nonetheless suggests that the question of how to
unleash the potential for effective organization
may prove to be the greatest challenge for
community policing.

Familiarity with INOP and community policing.
Understanding precedes involvement. Respondents'
knowledge of a project--its existence, goals, and
tactics--varied greatly at all the sites, and the
interview data indicate that the level of
understanding about INOP or community policing in
general was closely linked to a person's status in
the community and to the frequency of his or her
interaction with the police.5 Thus, in Hayward and
Houston, block watch leaders knew a great deal more
about the INOP project than did either their
members or average citizens, and the same was true
of residents' council members in Portland.

This phenomenon is hardly limited to INOP, however.
Almost by definition, local leaders will make it
their business to become familiar with issues
affecting their community. This was the case in the
INOP sites, where community leaders who interacted
frequently with the police knew more about INOP
than did residents who belonged to no community
group. In all the INOP sites, however, even the
most knowledgeable community leaders had only
limited familiarity with project goals, tactics,
and the role of the community.

Some residents, particularly older people, were
unaware of the program. Community leaders and other
residents tended to lay blame for lack of knowledge
on the police, who they claimed did not adequately
inform or educate the general population. Even
assuming the best education campaign, however, it
would have been difficult for the INOP projects to
become a familiar community fixture in the short
time span they were in operation.

Type of knowledge. Residents of public housing or
other disadvantaged neighborhoods that were INOP
sites often defined community policing or a
specific INOP project solely in terms of the
picnics, block parties, and events for children
that were so often used as methods of community
outreach. They were familiar with little of the
substance of community policing or the INOP
projects. While social events like block parties do
little to inform or educate community residents
about community policing and their role in it, it
is possible that they may create solidarity in the
community and thus could be considered the
beginnings of attempts to organize. In addition,
these events allow residents to meet police
officers in a nonthreatening situation.

Perception of community organization. Many
residents at all eight sites believed the projects
had positive effects on the level of community
organization and involvement. In many instances,
however, their responses indicated they equated
community organization with large turnouts for
social events, such as barbecues and picnics.
Again, although larger turnouts for community
meetings or significant increases in the number of
people volunteering to help with problem solving
would be better indicators of community
involvement, the rudiments of community
organization might be detected in people's equating
it with these social events.

Issues in stimulating community involvement
Both practitioners and theorists of community
policing often assume that because the approach
offers such evident benefits to the community, once
educated about these benefits, residents will
actively aid in the effort. The evidence from these
eight sites strongly suggests, however, that
community residents generally may not want to
become involved, and from their perspective, the
reasons are sound.

Fear of retaliation. The reason most frequently
cited in all eight communities for lack of
involvement was residents' fear of retaliation from
drug dealers. In several communities residents also
specifically expressed fear of reprisals when they
were identified as "snitches" as a result of their
calls to the police. Responding police officers
would come to their homes and thus they would be
observed by the drug dealers.

In all theories of community policing, the
perception of fear is a central concern. Implicitly
or explicitly, most adherents of community policing
incorporate the theory of "broken windows"6 into
their programs. This theory holds that the police
need to emphasize their order-maintenance function;
for example, attending to disorderly behaviors such
as loitering or public drunkenness. Such behavior,
if neglected by the police, leads to increased
incivilities, lower levels of informal social
control, and greater fear among community
residents. The resulting condition, left
unattended, increases the level of community decay,
both social and physical, and makes the area ripe
for intrusion by outside criminal elements. This in
turn generates even more fear.

The role of the community policing officer is to
make residents feel safer because he or she will
concentrate on the incivilities and
order-maintenance problems that inspire unfounded
levels of fear in residents. It may be, however,
that fear is too deeply ingrained among residents
of some low-income urban areas. If so, community
policing may be unable to reduce fear to the degree
necessary to allow residents to feel safe enough to
police themselves and take back the streets.

Community policing may find itself confronted by a
major contradiction as a result. If community
policing is to attain its goal of reducing fear,
the streets must first be made safe from the
perspective of community residents. According to
the residents of these eight communities, for this
to happen, the level of crime, not merely the
perception of it, must fall. However, most theories
of community policing seem to assert that without
the active participation of the community, the
police cannot reduce the incidence of crime and
disorder and thus reduce fear.

The transitory nature of projects to assist
disadvantaged neighborhoods. The designers of many
of the INOP projects realized this and began or
preceded their projects with intensive, traditional
law enforcement efforts.7 Such actions may produce
unintended effects, however. Residents almost
unanimously applaud police attempts to increase
enforcement in their neighborhoods, and during such
crackdowns they report feeling safer. But many of
these intensive enforcement initiatives are
(intentionally) short-lived and therefore do not
produce the desired effect of reducing fear in the
long run. When this happens, residents begin to
define community policing as "just another program"
in which services are here today but gone tomorrow.
Residents attributed lack of community involvement
to the fleeting nature of the INOP projects. The
perception of projects as transitory was most
apparent where a strong enforcement effort--one of
short duration--preceded an INOP project.

Historically poor police-community relations. One
of the untested assumptions of community policing
is that residents really want closer contact with
the police and want to work with them to reduce
crime. The assumption is itself based on the notion
that people who do not routinely violate the law
and who will eventually come to work cooperatively
with the police are the logical audience for the
community policing approach. Again, data collected
in the interviews for this study cast doubt on
these assumptions.

A large number of the community residents indicated
that a major reason for lack of involvement or even
outright hostility was the historically negative
relationship between the police and residents of
economically disadvantaged communities. Such
relationships, most common in areas of the city
usually chosen as the target sites for community
policing demonstration projects, will not be easily
changed. Police officers in many of the sites
interpreted the refusal of residents to become
involved as apathy or lack of interest in bettering
their own lives. The lack of involvement may,
however, be due less to apathy than to this
long-standing antagonism.

Lack of outreach by the police. Nearly all the INOP
sites were hampered in their attempts to generate
community organization and involvement by lack of
resources and experience. The exceptions were
Hayward and Houston, which had strong block watch
groups in the target areas. While the police
departments recognized the need to train officers
in the strategy and tactics of community policing,
they did not provide the same level of training to
members of the community.

One evident need is for training in the fundamental
principles of community policing and the role of
the community: confusion about the role of the
community in "community policing" was common. As
noted earlier, although community leaders had some
notion of community policing, ordinary residents
had very limited knowledge. Most of the INOP
projects did, however, attempt to involve residents
in some manner. In Tempe and New York, police
recruited citizens as volunteers; in Portland, they
helped residents form councils; and in Norfolk,
they involved citizens in interagency problem
solving.

The nature of the target neighborhoods. The
economically disadvantaged urban areas that
generally serve as testing grounds for community
policing tend to be highly disorganized,
characterized by poverty, unemployment, inadequate
educational services, and high crime rates. In
areas encumbered by such an array of problems it is
often difficult to find well-organized community
groups that are attempting to address
quality-of-life issues.

Most residents in the eight INOP sites reported
that the level of community organization was only
average or low and that this had been the case for
some time. Most attributed this lack of community
activism to fear. In several sites (particularly
Tempe, Houston, and Hayward), the police were
particularly feared by the illegal immigrants who
lived there in large numbers.

The initial responsibility for generating community
organization in troubled areas must fall to the
police because it is they who are asking the public
to assist them. This police effort is best
undertaken in association with other city agencies.
Thus, in Portland, where the Iris Court project
serves people living in public housing, the police
asked the city's Housing Authority to assist the
residents in forming a residents' council; and in
Hayward, the police built on the solid foundation
provided by the citywide "Neighborhood Alert"
groups.

Intragroup conflict. A common barrier to
organizing, according to both residents and police
officers, was conflict among community leaders and
residents. In some sites this took the form of
disagreement about what issues were to be
addressed, how tasks were to be delegated, and
similar strategic and tactical questions. In
several sites, personality conflicts with community
leaders were cited as a major reason residents
refused to become involved with a block watch,
residents' council, or other civic association
linked to INOP.

The intragroup conflicts suggest that references to
an ideal "community" often fail to consider that in
reality the community is often an aggregate of
competing groups. Simply because people live in the
same geographic area and share the same racial and
class backgrounds does not guarantee that they
share all the same values or define problems the
same way.

The Portland site took a step toward solving this
problem by offering training for the Iris Court
residents. The aim of the training, offered to
residents' council members, was broader
participation in the project, and it also focused
on resolving intragroup conflict.

Finding out what the community wants. One of the
principles guiding community policing is
recognition that the police must be guided by the
values of the community. Identifying those values
may not be easy, especially when neighborhoods are
heterogeneous. 

Residents of the INOP sites were asked how they
would improve the project and how they would
improve community policing or policing in general.
A number of patterned responses emerged across the
sites, among them the desire for continuity in
assignment of beat officers. Residents wanted a
beat officer assigned for an extended period of
time. In Portland, for example, a Neighborhood
Response Team, consisting of two officers, spent a
great deal of time at the start of the INOP project
in the public housing complex to which they were
assigned and established rapport with a large
number of residents. Residents reported that after
a time, however, the presence of these officers
declined dramatically.

It is clear from the INOP sites that residents took
the problem of "revolving beat officers" very
seriously. The beat officer is the most visible
manifestation of the community policing approach,
and, in fact, it was common for residents to define
community policing in terms of the beat officer.
Another community expectation, as expressed by
residents, was for police to be crime fighters
above all else, and they defined the success of
community policing in terms of reducing crime and
fear. However, a great many residents also noted
other, equally important criteria, one of which was
better relationships among residents and the
police, which often seemed to hinge on the idea of
having long-term beat officers.

The perceived impact of INOP on crime and quality
of life

Drug trafficking. All the projects had one goal in
common: reducing drug demand. The purpose of INOP
was to develop innovative approaches to that end.
The general perception of residents and others who
were interviewed was that drug trafficking had been
displaced, either from one area to another, from
street level to indoors, or to a different time of
day.

Some differences in this overall impression were
found in specific sites. In Hayward, Houston, and
New York City, for example, some people interviewed
believed the INOP project had no effect on drug
trafficking. In Portland and Tempe, by contrast
(see "Attitudes Towards Tempe"), the project was
seen as extremely effective. In the other sites,
the predominant view was that drug dealing had been
displaced to an area receiving less attention from
the project, to a few blocks away but within the
same area, to locations indoors rather than on the
street, or to another time during the day.

Drug-related crime. The people interviewed found it
more difficult to assess the effects of the INOP
projects on drug-related crime. Often they noted
they were not really able to distinguish crimes
that were drug related from those that were not,
but despite this difficulty they were able to make
an assessment. Responses ranged from "no effect" to
"very strong" impact, with a full range of
responses in between. New York City was the only
site reporting "no effect" on drug-related crime,
while Portland, Tempe, and Norfolk said the INOP
project had a "very strong" impact. In fact, almost
all respondents in Portland believed the INOP
project had a very large impact on crime in Iris
Court, with dramatic changes in gang activity,
violent crime, robberies, and burglaries. In Prince
George's County, people believed that crime rates
had declined, and the County Executive proclaimed
the program a "true success." In Hayward, Houston,
and Louisville, respondents were divided in their
assessments.

Fear and drug-related crime. Theories holding that
social disorder and crime generate fear suggest
that it will decline where drug trafficking and
crime are perceived to have declined. Accordingly,
respondents in Hayward, Houston, and New York City
believed the INOP projects had little or no effect
on drugs and crime (or only a temporary effect),
and the levels of citizens' fear in those cities
changed little. By contrast, in Portland, where the
project was viewed as effective in reducing drug
trafficking, respondents were overwhelmingly
positive about the project's effect on fear, as
were respondents from Tempe and Prince George's
County. Responses from Norfolk and Louisville were
mixed.

Police-community relations. There appeared to be
little relationship between perceptions of effects
on drugs, crime, and fear and perceptions of how
the projects affected police-community relations;
it did not necessarily follow that respondents who
saw INOP as having little effect on crime also saw
it as having little effect on the relationship of
the community to the police. Most respondents
reported better relationships between the police
and community residents. Even in sites where INOP's
effect on drugs, crime, and fear was perceived as
minimal (Hayward, Houston, and New York City),
respondents generally believed the relationship
between the police and the community had improved.

Community organization and involvement. Respondents
found it more difficult to assess INOP's effect on
community organization and involvement, but in most
sites they indicated that levels of community
organization and involvement had increased since
the start of the INOP project. It was not clear,
however, whether the increases were attributable to
INOP or to other factors. Even in Hayward, where
citizens' groups were the most organized among the
eight sites, it appeared that the increased
organization was more likely the result of a
grassroots effort by the community that predated
the INOP program. Nevertheless, the police and
residents all indicated that more Neighborhood
Alert groups had been formed and attendance in
existing groups had improved since community
policing began.

The response of a police administrator from
Louisville may help explain the general view of
respondents that community organization had
increased. The administrator indicated that the
many interventions taking place, some not related
to INOP, made residents feel "there is some
interest in them." Residents of many of the INOP
neighborhoods to whom the police were paying
attention for the first time may have felt that any
intervention was better than no attention at all.

Easing the transition to community policing

Community policing holds great promise for citizen
participation, increased responsiveness on the part
of the police to the concerns of residents, and
greater police accountability. But if community
policing is to be granted legitimacy by the public,
its proponents need to demonstrate that it works.
The INOP projects provided an opportunity to meet
the need for information about the effectiveness of
the approach and about the implementation
challenges community policing faces.

In achieving the crime-reduction goals of community
policing, the INOP projects had mixed success, but
this conclusion needs to be seen in light of the
limited amount of time the projects had been in
operation before their results were assessed.
Community policing represents major shifts, both
for the police and community residents, and--
particularly because of its emphasis on prevention-
-is likely to take a long time before it approaches
institutionalization.

Aside from the effects of the projects in reducing
crime and fear, the assessment brought to light a
number of areas in which implementation could be
improved. The experiences of the eight INOP sites
clearly revealed that in the transition to
community policing, jurisdictions need to pay
particular attention to three issues: overcoming
patrol officer resistance, generating interagency
support, and building community involvement. The
assessment findings suggest that helping to ensure
a better product--crime reduction--may require
greater attention to process.

Overcoming patrol officer resistance. Resistance by
police officers to community policing is due in
part to inadequate understanding of the principles
on which the approach is based, which in turn stems
from insufficient training. Police officials who
envision the transition of their own departments to
community policing can learn from the experience of
the INOP sites about the need for a commitment to
training all officers.

Jurisdictions contemplating adopting community
policing may also want to rethink the special-unit
status accorded many of the INOP project officers
because of its potential for generating
intradepartmental rivalry and consequent resentment
and resistance. Moreover, the view of community
policing as a drain on resources, one in which not
all officers are seen as pulling their own weight
or performing traditional duties (such as
responding to 911 calls), was also revealed in the
INOP sites as a problem that needs to be overcome.
For community policing to be successful in
attracting the most talented personnel, police
departments might want to make it a career path--an
exception to the current rule that advancement does
not run through patrol.

New recruitment strategies may also be needed. In
some INOP sites, it appeared that the continued
existence of the program rested on a single officer
or administrator. The nature of community policing
also makes it susceptible to variations in
supervisory style, and because of the emphasis on
interaction with the community, a single officer or
supervisor can strongly influence the public's
perceptions of the program. Officers who are
favorably disposed toward community policing may
positively influence community residents, while
officers who have not bought into the concept may
cause residents to develop a negative impression.
New recruitment strategies could help police
departments select candidates committed to the
ideals of working with and for the community.

Becoming a city agencywide phenomenon. At the INOP
sites, the police tended to rely on personal
contacts with other agencies to secure their
involvement, and community policing was almost
always an isolated police department phenomenon.
This approach highlights the need for an organized,
systematic involvement of agencies citywide. This
need is particularly acute because community
policing involves crime prevention and
quality-of-life issues, not all of which fall
within the purview of the police.

The experience of the INOP sites suggests that at
the very least, employees of other agencies should
understand how they can contribute to problem
solving; in short, they need to be instructed in
their role in community policing, which is no less
important than that of beat officers or concerned
community residents.

Involving the community. That the INOP sites in
general had limited success in stimulating
community organization is not surprising, given the
brief time in which to involve the community and
the limited experience of the police in this area.
The evaluation findings indicate that neighborhood
organizing is a skill the police will want to
develop if they hope to involve the community.
Other city agencies can play a role in this
process: If police departments involve them from
the beginning of the implementation process, they
could be useful in stimulating community
involvement by educating the public.

By the same token, the experience of the INOP
projects can be useful for police administrators in
recognizing community education and training as
equal in importance with police training and
education (though far more difficult to
accomplish). Existing community organizations and
leaders are the logical first audience, but it
should be kept in mind that neighborhoods that
commonly serve as community policing pilot sites
generally have few viable community groups. The
police, in concert with other public and private
agencies, should create organization where it does
not exist, although it may be argued that a high
level of community organization is not necessary
for community policing to function effectively.
To address residents' concerns about the transitory
nature of policing projects, departments
considering adopting community policing will want
to gauge as accurately as possible, before it is
instituted, the resources required to practice it.
Almost all the INOP sites promised communities
regular beat officers who would be permanent
fixtures of the neighborhood, but these officers
were in fact rotated, preventing residents from
getting to know them. If the police do not
accurately estimate resources, the result may be
broken promises to the community and a loss of
police credibility.

Conclusion

At least initially, community policing will require
more resources. That means jurisdictions will find
themselves faced with committing to larger budgets
in an increasingly harsh fiscal climate. This need
highlights the importance of involving other
agencies. Not only are they essential to the
problem-solving approach to policing, but resource
constraints on police departments make them even
more valuable because their involvement provides
the opportunity to leverage additional expertise
and resources.

Given the monumental nature of the tasks, the
transition to community policing will take a
considerable amount of time--much more time than
these eight sites had to "prove themselves." It
remains to be seen whether an already impatient
public will accept this fact.

In large cities with extremely diverse populations
and large police bureaucracies, the process is
likely to take far longer. 

The transition may be faster and ultimately more
productive if the jurisdiction itself makes a
commitment to a transition that assigns equal value
to training the police, the public, and the staffs
of all public agencies. The training provided to
the INOP sites introduced the key players to the
concepts and principles of community policing and
to related procedures and practices. It was
intended only to set community policing in motion.
However, the need for training persists throughout
the life of a project, particularly because the new
philosophy entails so many and such profound
changes. The resistance of many officers at these
sites to community policing is a strong argument
for offering training on an ongoing basis.
Ultimately, training may prove to be a key to
long-term success.
-----------------------------------------------
The evaluation was conducted under NIJ grant 91-DD-
CX-0012. The full reports of the impact
evaluations, "Issues in Community Policing: Lessons
Learned in the Implementation of Eight Innovative
Neighborhood-Oriented Policing Programs, NCJ
157933, and of the process evaluation, "Innovative
Neighborhood-Oriented Policing: Descriptions of
Programs in Eight Cities," NCJ 157934, are available
through the National Criminal Justice Reference
Service (NCJRS), by calling 800-851-3420; or by
writing to NCJRS, Box 6000, Rockville, Maryland
20849-6000. They are also available by connecting
to the NCJRS Justice Information Center World Wide
Web site: http://www.ncjrs.org.
 
--------------------------------

Additional Information

Recent Developments in Tempe, Arizona

Tempe began its INOP project in November 1990 as a
pilot program in a single police ministation,
designated as Beat 16. Since then the police
department has used its experiences in Beat 16 to
expand community policing.

Expansion of community policing. The department
expanded community policing citywide in mid-1993
and continues to be committed to the approach. One
reflection of this commitment is the streamlining
of command: The number of ranks has been reduced
from eight to five, and the rank of detective has
been eliminated.

Continued community organizing. The citizens'
Coordinating Committee turned over its
responsibilities to the parent organization, the
Escalante Neighborhood Association (ENA). Since
then the Beat 16 officers and ENA have held
discussions concerning police activity and problem
solving. The department also has a citizen
volunteer program that has grown from three members
in 1988 to more than 200. Its motto, created by a
volunteer, is "We are not an arm of the police; we
are the heart of the community."

The department also continues to operate a Citizens
Police Academy, begun during the Beat 16 project,
that offers citizens an opportunity to learn about
the department and its responsibilities. Many
citizens who attend the 6-week evening course
become volunteers with the department.

The department recently initiated a citywide
multi-unit housing program that had been in the
planning stages for more than a year. It aims to
alleviate drugs and crime in apartments and other
multi-unit dwellings, and it includes landlord and
tenant education supported by community policing
activities.
-----------------------

Preparatory Steps: Training and Technical
Assistance        

To build knowledge and to develop skills in
organizing, strategy development, leadership, and
other areas, a systematic program of training and
technical assistance was carried out as an
integral part of INOP. The Police Executive
Research Forum and the National Crime Prevention
Council were awarded a grant, separate from that
of the evaluation, to design and deliver training
and technical assistance.

Needs assessment. The assistance, which was
tailored to the specific needs of each of the
eight sites, was preceded by assessments conducted
to identify these needs. Input for the assessments
came from individuals at each site--
representatives of the community, the police, and
other agencies and organizations. A range of needs
was identified, but two appeared to dominate the
agenda: strengthening collaboration among agencies
and citizen mobilization/leadership development
for both active and prospective community leaders.
In Hayward, California, for example, the police
expressed the desire that the current
collaboration of the department with the building
inspector's agency, a community preservation
group, and the city attorney be expanded to other
groups, including schools and churches.

Leadership development might require training in
such skills as chairing a meeting and in the roles
and responsibilities of tenants' organizations.
Citizens were also interested in receiving
training that was more directly related to crime
reduction and control. They wanted to find out,
for example, the effects of various illicit
substances and how to locate prevention programs,
geared to young people and to substance abuse,
that could be replicated in their jurisdiction.

The police departments also identified training
needs in the areas of crime control, management,
and information systems support. For example, they
wanted training in innovative narcotics abatement
strategies and in CPTED (Crime Prevention Through
Environmental Design), as well as in strategic
planning, problem identification and analysis, and
the development of computer-based information
systems.

Training/technical assistance received. Assistance
focused on the areas identified in the needs
assessment: building and sustaining interagency
collaboration and community partnerships,
mobilizing citizens/developing citizen empowerment
to address crime and crime-related problems and,
for both the police and citizens, enhancing
problem-solving capabilities. In Tempe, for
example, citizens were taught how to implement
drug abuse prevention strategies and how to build
and maintain positive police-community
relationships and relationships with public and
private agencies. Hayward received training in
team building and conflict resolution, problem
solving, and resource allocation. In Louisville,
training in cooperation between the police and
other agencies focused on where to go for what
type of assistance outside the police department
and where to go for what type of assistance inside
the police department.

Typically, participants included representatives
of local governments and government agencies,
business, representatives of religious
organizations, and community residents, as well as
sworn and civilian police personnel. In Hayward,
for example, the mayor, the deputy police chief,
leaders of the religious community,
businesspeople, and community residents were among
those taking part. In Louisville, staff from the
city's public housing authority, other community
agencies, and the schools were trained, as were
patrol officers, first-line supervisors, and two
district commanders.

"Cluster conferences." These meetings of INOP
project participants were held to promote
information sharing among the sites. A series of
these conferences was held throughout the course
of the projects and functioned as "peer technical
assistance." In addition to representatives of
each site, participants included the evaluation
researchers, representatives of the Bureau of
Justice Assistance and the National Institute of
Justice, and the technical assistance providers.

Spaced 6 to 9 months apart and beginning early in
the life of the INOP projects (December 1990), the
conferences were an opportunity to present project
updates that covered successes achieved thus far,
challenges faced, and steps to be taken next.
Workshops were held on such topics as landlord
training, an overview of drug supply and demand,
effective drug demand reduction, and sustaining
interagency collaboration.
--------------------------------------

Attitudes Towards INOP

Citizens. As part of the Beat 16 project in Tempe,
citizens were asked how they felt about the
project and its effects. This was done through
surveys--conducted just after the project began
and again a little over a year later--after INOP
was in full operation. The initial survey was
conducted to provide baseline data, the second to
register any change over time.

The results were encouraging. For example, when
residents were initially asked about the number of
times they saw police officers patrolling their
neighborhood, 38 percent answered more than 10
times per month, but in the survey conducted after
the INOP project was in operation, the percentage
rose to 65. In the baseline survey, 24 percent of
the respondents said they personally had seen drug
activity in the neighborhood, but this number
dropped by almost half (to 13 percent) in the
second survey. Only 9 percent initially said they
were active in the neighborhood association, and
this number doubled when the second survey was
taken.

Officers. The nine beat officers involved in the
INOP project were also asked, about 2 years after
Beat 16's inception, how they felt about the
project. All nine said it was working well. They
especially liked the idea of staying in one beat
and having time to get to know the area and the
residents. One officer noted, "I now take
ownership of problems instead of slapping a band
aid on them."

All nine officers thought the attitudes of
residents toward the police had become more
favorable, and they felt more empowered and free
to pursue more independent avenues of policing and
dealing with citizens. Several said they felt more
effective now than before when they were limited
to random patrol. The officers also believed they
enjoyed a greater sense of responsibility for
their work. Among the weaknesses they identified
were reluctance of officers from other beats to
help out, the feeling that not all officers were
"pulling their own weight," the need for more
training, and the feeling that at times things
were moving too fast.
  
Notes

1. Wycoff, Mary Ann, "Community Policing
Strategies," draft final report, U.S. Department
of Justice, National Institute of Justice,
November 1994 (grant 91-IJ-CX-K0008): 45. The data
for this Police Foundation study are from a survey
conducted in 1993. The figure is for municipal
police departments with staffs of 100 or more.
Figures for county police and sheriffs'
departments with staffs of this size are 23
percent and 20 percent, respectively. The
community policing provisions of the Violent Crime
Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 will
undoubtedly cause these figures to rise. A
two-page summary of the report is available from
the National Criminal Justice Reference Service.
Call 800-851-3420. Ask for FS 000126.

2. This description of the INOP program was drawn
from the Bureau of Justice Assistance's initial
solicitation for proposals to establish INOP
programs.

3. The total amount awarded to the eight INOP
sites was $2.4 million. All but one received
funding for 2 years.

4. The police reaction to INOP documented in this
section was obtained in individual interviews and
focus group sessions (comprising up to eight
people) conducted at all the sites, which included
the officers involved in INOP and those not
involved. Supervisors (sergeants and lieutenants)
were interviewed both individually and in groups.

5. The information regarding familiarity with INOP
and community policing was obtained from focus
groups and interviews with individuals--police
officers and police management, representatives of
other local government agencies, and community
leaders and other residents.

6. Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling,
"Broken Windows," Atlantic Monthly, March 1982:29-
38.

7. These law enforcement efforts were not
specifically mandated by the Bureau of Justice
Assistance, but they were part of the overall
demand reduction strategy.