Abstract
Beyond Community Policing is a sequel to James Chriss’s first book, Social Control, where he depicts his latest substantive concerns on policing and society in general and community policing in particular. The book, organized in 10 chapters, showcases the growing scholarly interdisciplinary literature on policing from early American beginnings to the 21st century, drawing heavily from sociology, criminology and law. Although it analyzes the history of policing systems in modern society, the principal aim of the book is to develop a conceptual scheme for explaining the structure and function of modern municipal policing, particularly in the United States.
The paradoxical and the precarious place the police hold in modern society is highlighted in the introductory chapter, along with related conceptual, contextual, and theoretical discussions. Chriss defines police as ‘sworn uniformed law enforcement officers with arrest powers covering some legal and/or territorial jurisdictions’ (p. 4). By necessity, the police mandate is diffuse, uncertain, and even unmanageable. He relies among other theoretical sources on Parsons’ AGIL paradigm and Bittner’s principles in order to derive the ‘first principles’ of police and society. Community policing in the United States is known by other nomenclatures, such as community-oriented policing or problem-oriented policing. Community policing emphasizes citizen coordination with police to solve pressing problems in the community through debureaucratization, professionalization, democratization, and service integration (p. 39).
The subtitle of the book is substantiated in Chapter 2, where the author provides a historical outline of municipal policing from the 1830s to the present day. The author attempts a critical appreciation of three eras of policing history in the United States: political spoils (1830s–1920s), reforms and early professionalization (1920–1964), and community policing, which emerged in the 1970s out of the turbulent situations of the 1960s. The first era was known as the political spoils or ‘spoils system,’ because bribery, corruption, political interference, favors, coercion, and brutality were rampant and to the political victors went the spoils. In striving for professionalism and innovations during the Reform Era, the police appeared to have lost touch with the citizens they were supposed to be serving. Lack of communication with citizens fostered mistrust and community violence (i.e., riots). To repair their damaged relations with a large segment of the population, police had to rediscover their community roots. Although the facts in this history are generally not disputed, the interpretation of each era does raise some questions.
In Chapter 3, Chriss points out that there is an overemphasis on the history of American policing in the Northeast (e.g., Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City) to the neglect of discussions of American policing west of the Mississippi River between 1840 and 1910. Accordingly, he criticizes the three-era typology in the context of the Western frontier on both analytic and substantive levels. The reason attributed to this was that the so-called Western frontiers did not represent the original 13 American colonies nor did they contain the early large urban metropolises. Eventually, of course, as the populations of American cities grew, so did the need for public order and the willingness to devote resources to the establishment of sworn police forces. Chriss discusses here policing in the Wild West, the so-called ‘unsettled and inhospitable to civilized society.’
Chapter 4 discusses the strategy of integrity testing of police officers adopted by American police departments for maintaining better accountability and ensuring personal integrity given that the police are vested with the coercive power of the state with ability to arrest (either officially or ‘off the books’). Two types of testing are done: (1) random testing as a monitoring mechanism, and (2) targeted integrity testing through entrapment. Here Chriss situates the security issues, police planning, and preparedness in view of the threat of international terrorism and performs a functional analysis utilizing Parsons’ schema.
Chapter 5 analyzes the fourth era of community policing, the so-called post-9/11 policing. The 9/11 terrorist attacks (and Hurricane Katrina in 2005) had demonstrated how ill-prepared police departments were for large-scale disasters. This era understandably connects to the title of the book, Beyond Community Policing. The 9/11 attacks posed a grave challenge and triggered ‘a flurry of government activities culminating of course in the “top-down” directives of the Patriot Act and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security’ (p. 108). Applying Parsons’ AGIL schema, Chriss argues (p. 111) that under the post-9/11 model of policing, police field-service operations serve the adaptation function (A), law enforcement serves the goal attainment function (G), information sharing serves the integrative function (I), and the provision of security serves the latent pattern maintenance function (L).
Chapter 6 extends the discussion of Chapter 4 on police discretion and notes that police officers operate with the highest level of discretion compared to other agents of the criminal justice system (e.g., legal and correctional agents), a point often overlooked by scholars (p. 121). The concept of proactivity in its positive (responding to citizens’ calls for help) and negative (acting to prevent bad things from happening) forms is discussed in Chapter 7. However, it may be difficult to accept Chriss’s characterization of the negative form of proactivity. Proactivity has positive connotations in all its aspects intended, attempted, and recognized. Police can intentionally and directly change things through the creation of new circumstances, through timely interventions, or the active alteration of current circumstances. Chriss persuasively argues that community-oriented policing or problem-oriented models demand an increase in education and training, and open the door for greater proactivity.
The characteristic significance of community-oriented policing is dealt with in Chapter 8, which situates police organizations within the broader heterogeneous, fragmented, and diverse institutional environments of the emerging modern communities within which they are embedded. Accordingly, the police, as proactive boundary-spanning multitaskers, are equipped to deal with the random arrivals of individuals across the network configurations within communities and to help promote community solidarity while still fulfilling the traditional goals of crime control and order maintenance (p. 210). The penultimate chapter delves into the increasing privatization of security and its importance in transforming safety services, police operations, and budgetary efficacy. In fact, partnerships among private security, public police, and community agents are an area ripe for advancing community policing and addressing reciprocal goals. The private security field, in fact, is much more diverse than what many may believe.
Each chapter of the book provides a set of statements that can be used as hypotheses for research in a researcher’s own country, culture, and time context. The book discusses broader issues of control than community policing. Most sections and several themes have introductory theoretical generalizations, but the theoretical observations are often disparate. However, the author must be commended for having stitched together such a wide variety of sources, including books, articles, case studies, reports, and focus group discussions. In the book’s extensive bibliography, covering a total of 408 entries, one may be interested to find references to authors like H Goldstein, R Trojanwicz, D Rosenbaum, M Palmiotto, and several pathbreaking studies and reports published by the National Institute of Justice in Washington, DC. On the whole, this book could be a corer text in a course on policing.