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Before the 1960s crime wave, American police officers were little trained and spent much of their time responding to citizen calls about crime. A Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP) in the 1970s began to upgrade police education. A round of studies questioned the effectiveness of police patrol tactics. Analysts advocated more sophisticated methods, called ‘problem‐oriented policing’ and later the more general ‘community policing.’ New York lawyer Adam Walinsky promoted a concept called the Police Corps that would encourage more college‐educated officers. The reform ideas coalesced in the presidency of Bill Clinton, who successfully argued for federal funding for an additional 100,000 community‐oriented local officers, an idea that Walinsky complained was a watered‐down form of his concept (which still was instituted on a smaller scale). Clinton's Attorney General, Janet Reno, was initially skeptical of the massive federal program called ‘Community Oriented Policing Services’ (COPS), but she eventually backed it. It was not certain how many officers were hired and permanently funded—it may have been closer to 50,000—but the program did have a significant impact on police hiring in the nation. Less clear was the effect of COPS on the crime rate. The program's supporters asserted success, but other factors like the economy, demographics and alternate policing methods might have been just as important.

This chapter examines potential harmful effects of the concentration of police resources in specific hot spots that could lead citizens to question the fairness of these practices. Complaints about excessive force and police corruption are not uncommon in high‐crime neighborhoods where police are sometimes viewed as an “occupying force.” Police executives seeking to engage effective police crime prevention practices need to consider community perceptions of the “fairness” of the content of hot spots policing strategies and the behavior of the officers who are implementing them. Unfortunately, police effectiveness studies have traditionally overlooked the effects of police practices upon citizen perceptions of police legitimacy. Based on the available research evidence, the chapter reviews the potential for problematic police practices in hot spots policing strategies and then discusses the key elements of community and problem‐oriented policing programs that can be incorporated into hot spots programs to improve citizen support and cooperation.

This chapter explores the relationship between democratization and decentralization. In Mexico, the government promoted deliberative citizen participation nation-wide in rural municipalities, well before national electoral democratization. Mexican decentralization empowered municipalities, but it turns out that municipal governance systematically excludes millions of rural people who live outside of the town centers that usually control municipal affairs. Those villages are most directly governed by sub-municipal authorities. In some states and regions these truly local authorities are chosen democratically, representing villagers to the municipality, in others they are designated from above, representing the mayor to the villagers. This chapter explores rural citizens' efforts to hold local governments accountable through three different comparative research strategies: analysis of resource allocation decision-making processes in a representative sample of local rural governments in the state of Oaxaca; comparison of changing municipal-sub-municipal power relations in four rural states (Oaxaca, Guerrero, Hidalgo, and Chiapas); and a nation-wide comparison of the state level laws that govern this invisible ‘sub-municipal regime’.

Chicago's community-policing initiative was formally inaugurated in April 1993. Dubbed CAPS (Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy), the program was developed, tested, and refined over a fifteen-month period in five experimental districts. Community policing was eventually expanded to encompass all twenty-five police districts and to involve almost every city agency. By 1998, however, the program was dead in the water. A new generation of leaders within the police department saw an opportunity to implement new management initiatives aimed at revitalizing CAPS and other important aspects of the department. Among their solutions was the introduction of a management-accountability system resembling—on the surface—New York City's famous CompStat process. This chapter describes the program and examines the obstacles to making it work, along with the police department's struggle to overcome those obstacles. Chicago's program touched base with the three major elements that make up community-policing initiatives around the country: community involvement, problem solving, and reorganization.

Recent police interest in hot spots policing is part of a larger set of changes and innovations that have occurred in policing over the last three decades. Some have described the period of change and innovation that began in the policing industry during the 1980s as the most dramatic in the history of policing. Hot spots policing is not the only recent innovation that has been concerned with the concentration of crime at place. Indeed, dealing with crime hot spots has been a key component of many recent police innovations such as Compstat, community policing, and problem‐oriented policing. However, to understand the emergence of hot spots policing, it is necessary to understand the crisis in American policing that required the police to innovate. It is also important to understand the relationship of hot spots policing to other strategic innovations such as community policing and problem‐oriented policing. This chapter examines crisis and change in American policing, reviews several key strategic police innovations, and then traces the theoretical and empirical insights that led to the emergence of hot spots policing.

Community policing is the most important development in law enforcement in the past quarter century. Cities across the country report that they are moving toward this new model, which supplements traditional crime fighting with problem-solving and prevention-oriented approaches that emphasize the role of the public in helping set police priorities. This book uses Chicago as a laboratory to address several fundamental questions about the reality of community policing. First, can police departments—and especially big departments—really change? Second, can it work? What do cities that claim they are “doing community policing” actually do? Across the United States, community policing has proved to have three core strategic components: decentralization, citizen involvement, and problem solving. Chicago provides an important test of community policing because it consists of three groups: African Americans, Latinos, and whites. The book examines the effectiveness of community policing in addressing two of its more important targets: social disorder and physical decay.

One goal of Chicago's community-policing initiative, CAPS (Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy), was to build popular confidence in the responsiveness and effectiveness of the police. This chapter examines the changing views of Chicagoans about their police as CAPS took root in the city. Police gained significant support over time, and they did so among all major groups. This can be attributed in large part to improving neighborhood conditions. Many—but not all—Chicagoans felt their neighborhoods were growing cleaner, safer, and more comfortable as places to live, and official rates of crime were declining. These improvements in quality of life benefited the police. Some of the remaining gaps between views of whites and African Americans can be ascribed to personal experience. At least some of the improved rating of the Chicago police was “earned” by improving neighborhood conditions, and a bit was earned by effective community outreach. It is necessary to consider the enduring gap between the city's whites, Latinos, and African Americans.

In Chicago's community-policing model, beat meetings are the vehicle for grassroots consultation and collaboration between police and the community. At the meetings, the two sides are to come together to identify local priorities, discuss how both police and residents can best address them, and review their progress in doing so. This chapter explores two questions: Who is “the community” that is being represented? How well are they represented? The possibility that CAPS (Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy) participants would be unrepresentative of the community was encouraged by the way in which Chicago resolved the potentially complicated question of “Who is the community?” The chapter examines the relationship between the demographic representation of beats and the background of those who attend the meetings, including homeowners and Latinos. There was a limited correspondence between residents' views of crime and those of beat-meeting participants.

This chapter describes the condition of the city and the state of police–community relations in Chicago in the early 1990s, providing a baseline from which to assess what happened during the remainder of the decade and into the next, as community policing took hold in the city. In brief, the situation looked grim. In the early 1990s, crime hit record levels. Chicago's population had been declining for forty years, and better-off African Americans already had joined white families in the flight to the suburbs. Those who remained behind were sharply segregated by race, and the racial composition of the city's neighborhoods provided a template that described the distribution of almost every social and physical ill. The relationship between the police and the public was also bad. This was especially true in the eyes of African Americans and Latinos, although there was evidence that Chicagoans of all races thought that, in important ways, police were not doing a very good job. As Chicago's community-policing program developed, whites, African Americans, and Latinos adopted distinctive patterns of involvement in it.

In the CAPS (Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy) model of community policing, police are to move beyond driving to the scene quickly in response to individual 911 calls, and instead, have to adopt a proactive, prevention-oriented stance toward neighborhood problems. Their first step is to identify problems and prioritize them, and then to analyze their locations, victims, and offenders. Subsequently, police design strategies that might deal with the chronic character of priority problems, thinking “outside the box” of traditional police-enforcement tactics. They then implement their strategies and assess their effectiveness. This widely used model of problem solving was developed to address traditional crimes. However, an important feature of Chicago's community-oriented approach to problem solving is that the police have taken responsibility for a wide range of neighborhood problems. The police took on new responsibilities because they needed to be able to respond to the concerns expressed by residents at beat meetings and other public venues, and because Chicago took seriously the “broken windows” view of crime and neighborhood decline.

In describing Chicago's new community-policing program, the police department's 1993 strategic plan Together We Can reassured readers that CAPS (Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy) was not soft on crime. It stressed the importance of good traditional police work and effective crime fighting, and also argued for a preventive approach to crime control. Police could hope that neighborhood mobilization around CAPS might contribute to greater watchfulness and wariness among the public. It might also lead to a greater willingness of residents to report crimes and (especially) step forward as witnesses, rather than just lying low and hoping to not be victimized. This chapter describes trends in crime and fear of crime in Chicago, considering a measure of crime: assessments of its seriousness gathered through surveys. Moreover, it examines the link between race and trends in crime, focusing on whites, African Americans, and Latinos.

How did Chicago do after more than a decade of community policing? This chapter explores the most important challenges facing the city and its police department, to find out whether CAPS (Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy) was effective and how the city changed over a ten-year period. It revisits the data to see who benefited from community policing and to determine the distribution of outcomes by race. The first challenge facing the city was to actually implement the program and stick with it over the long haul. In 1996 and 1997, Chicago expanded its staff of civilian community-outreach workers charged with turning residents out for marches and rallies, and sustaining participation in beat meetings. Community involvement was a crucial factor in community policing. Surveys showed that, early on, crime was the number-one issue on Chicagoans' minds. Police focused on social disorder and physical decay, which previously had low priority. Things got better between African Americans and police, but confidence had also grown among whites. The city's Latinos presented the most daunting challenge to CAPS.

A central feature of community policing is the breadth and variety of avenues it provides for citizen participation. The public may be expected to be proactive—to act independently on behalf of the community by getting involved in problem-solving projects. These self-help initiatives can range from Saturday-morning alley cleanups to marches confronting drug dealers or street prostitutes. This chapter focuses on citizen involvement in Chicago's community-policing program, CAPS (Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy), which envisioned an extensive role for the public in its operations. The city's model called for neighborhood residents to help identify problems and formulate solutions to them. They were also called upon to play an active role in solving these problems. In Chicago's plan, beat meetings are the most important mechanism for building and sustaining close relationships between police and the public. Television played little role in encouraging Chicagoans to attend the meetings.

This chapter focuses on the actions that can be adopted to prevent crime. These measures are very closely connected to the crimogenic factors are considered to be responsible for overall functioning of the criminal justice system, as well as crime. It begins with a look at the approaches adopted for the prevention of crime, including deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution. The next is on the role of police in preventing crime, which also addresses some practical issues. Popular crime prevention approaches and other community policing schemes that are adopted by the Delhi police are also considered. Finally, chapter ends with a section on the helpline services for certain groups and the deployment of police and the crime rate in Delhi.

The high crime rates of the early 1990s and a string of sensational crimes from coast to coast set the stage in 1994 for the most extensive and costly federal anticrime bill ever. Bill Clinton had made crime fighting a top priority, particularly after his health care reform bill had faltered. Congress had taken the initiative, led by Democrats Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware and Representative Charles Schumer of New York. The Democrats came up with a way to put $30 billion for anticrime programs into a ‘trust fund’ created by a reduction in the federal bureaucracy. Soon it seemed that Clinton's 100,000 community police officers, a Republican demand for more prisons, and various other programs to combat violence against women and other crime problems all could be funded. Republicans backed off support of big allocations for crime prevention ideas like ‘midnight basketball’ for teens, and the National Rifle Association fought against a proposed ban on assault‐style weapons. The result was a donnybrook that kept Congress in session through most of the summer. Republicans eventually won a series of concessions on funding, although the assault weapon provision survived and the law was passed. In the process, Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill was seen as so flawed that the crime law played a significant part in the Republicans’ seizing control of the House of Representatives in the 1994 elections. Five years later, the crime law's impact on crime rates was uncertain; in fact, crime had begun to fall long before many of its provisions could have had much effect.

This chapter focuses on community policing, a multifaceted innovation adopted by numerous police departments in the 1990s. Community policing involves proactive crime prevention; enhanced collaboration between police officers and neighborhood residents; and the acknowledgment that problems of social order (e.g. graffiti, vandalism, and public drunkenness) can make neighborhoods vulnerable to criminal elements and thus should be a priority for problem-solving collaborations between police, neighborhood residents, and other city agencies. Community policing is one of a number of urban programs ostensibly aimed at mobilizing citizens for civic engagement. However, there is scant evidence that community policing has the intended effect on civic engagement. There is also little evidence that community policing helps build social capital in terms of trust in neighbors or indeed trust in police.