Robert R. Friedmann

Who Participates, Who Does Not, and Why? An Analysis of Voluntary Neighborhood Organizations in the United States and Israel

Lack of participation in voluntary associations and the associated issues of why people do or do not participate are major areas of interest in the research literature concerning citizen participation. The present study used three types of variables (demographic, social psychological, and costs/benefits) to investigate the characteristics of participants and nonparticipants in neighborhood-type organizations in the United States and Israel. Findings from analysis of the demographic variables show some cross-cultural similarities (including a surprising lack of race/ethnic and education differences between participants and nonparticipants). There were striking cross-cultural similarities using the social psychological variables. The data from the Israel sample provide important information on the costs and benefits of participation. A discriminant analysis points to the predictive strength of social psychological and cost/benefit variables in comparison to demographic variables. Implications of these results for explanatory and predictive purposes are discussed.

Individual and Contextual Influences on Sentence Lengths: Examining Political Conservatism

This study examined the impact of legal, extralegal, and contextual variables on prison sentence lengths for violent felons sentenced in Georgia from 1981 to 1989. Multiple linear regression analyses were conducted for all violent crimes and separately for four types of violent crime: murder and manslaughter, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery. Results indicated that the legally relevant factors—seriousness of the crime and number of convictions—had the strongest influence on sentence lengths. Across most violent crimes, male, older, and better-educated offenders received longer sentences than those without such characteristics. Political conservatism had a positive effect on sentence lengths for overall violent crime, robbery, and aggravated assault. Interaction effects for political conservatism and the number of convictions were significant, indicating that sentence length increased disproportionately as a courts conservatism and the felons number of convictions increased. Findings suggest that political conservatism is an important contextual feature affecting prison sentence length.

Local Action on Behalf of Local Collectives in the U.S. and Israel: How Different Are Leaders from Members in Voluntary Associations?

While leadership in voluntary organizations is important to the understanding of voluntary action, not enough is known about differences between leaders and members in voluntary organizations. This study explored the differences between leaders and members in local voluntary organizations in the U.S. and Israel. Using discriminant function analysis on demographic characteristics, social psychological variables, and cost-benefit relationships it was found that leaders differ significantly from members in several of these areas. Patterns of greatest similarity were found between the American and Israeli participants on the social psychological variables. Gender distinguished members from leaders in Israel; occupation and education did so in the U.S. A very significant finding in the area of costs and benefits was that leaders perceived their activism as more costly than did members; leaders viewed costs to their participation as being equal to benefits while members perceived more benefits than costs.

Community policing in Canada

In Canada, community policing has replaced professional crime control policing as the dominant ideology and organizational model of progressive policing (Murphy, 1988b). What is interesting about Canadian policing — but not unique to it — is that despite the relative lack of external pressures1 for police reform the country has gradually adopted a shift towards community policing. With heavy reliance on ‘US-tested and proven’ police innovations, technologies and strategies, Canadian policing is argued to have used ‘innovation through imitation’. Possibly this took place due to the proximity to the American experience and the growing readiness on the part of police chiefs and administrators to adopt strategies and tactics that seemed to work for their southern neighbour. This, in turn, was perceived as encouraging a wholesale and uncritical import of policing philosophies and technologies — mostly from the country’s American neighbour — which are not always appropriate to Canadian policing (Murphy, 1988b). At the same time, Canada is also not less influenced by the tradition and heritage of British policing and is following developments there quite closely. In fact, a recent community policing conference (organized by Loree and Murphy, 1986) dedicated a greater portion of its proceedings to developments in the London Metropolitan Police Force than to other relevant US advances in community policing.

Concepts and theoretical considerations in community policing

Policing is a much older concept than can be assumed by the nineteenth-century organization and establishment of what became the modern police forces as we now know them in most of the Western world. It is an important concept in the production of formal social control in both large and small societies. Policing is taken for granted as necessary to maintain an orderly society, or what we presently tend to refer to as the maintenance of ‘law and order’. The Judaeo-Christian tradition of policing is anchored in Deuteronomy 16: 18: ‘Judges and officers shalt thou make thee in all thy gates.’ But the real question to ask of judges who interpret the law and officers who enforce it, is the extent to which their actions have a true impact on reducing violation of the law; that is, to what extent can officers control crime when they are not those who produce it. In other words, assuming that community produces crime, does police work have a better impact on the crime rate with or without the assistance of various elements of the community?

Policing and Society

This article examines policing as a formal social control institution in society. It explores the history of and development of policing and identifies some of the major phases in the policing movement. Attention is given to the role of policing as a traditionally reactive societal force; reference is also made for viewing police as a proactive element that not merely reacts to crime but actively seeks to reduce crime causing conditions. Policing is examined in several countries and historical developments serve as a basis for offering future prospects for policing.

External and internal environments of community policing

There is a growing realization that police are, perhaps, more effective in reducing fear of crime than having an unequivocal effect on actual crime figures, and a greater understanding that perceptions of police — and, in turn, perception of citizens — are a crucial component in the coproduction of public safety. There is also the recognition among public safety officials, individual citizens and civic organizations that crime fighting strategies and tactics have, paradoxically, limitations as well as potential. Yet it is still possible — or even necessary — to improve society’s capability to fight crime.

Community policing in the United States

Sixteen years after the establishment of the first paid police force in London, the first police force in the United States was organized in New York City in 1845. Since then, police forces flourished in American urban and rural areas alike. The roots of the relationship between police and community in the United States can be traced to the Bill of Rights, to the Peel policing model that emphasized moral and democratic principles and to the English police tradition with its emphasis on the importance of service (Das, 1986). Unlike England and Israel, and to some extent Canada, the American police is as diverse and multi-faceted as is the American governmental system.1 In addition to the federal police forces such as the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the office of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the US Customs Inspection, the US Postal Inspection, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) inspection and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) inspection, there are independent state, county and city police forces, state patrol and sheriff departments. There is also a multitude of other specialized police forces such as university on-campus forces and a growing absolute and relative number of private security forces in hotels, shopping malls, city blocks and high security residential and business buildings.

Community policing in Israel

Modern Israel, the youngest of the four countries reviewed here, is a product of nineteenth-century and post-Second World War nationalism forces, an extensive and unique history, geo-strategic location,1 and colonial forces, that shaped not only its national character and fate in the region but also its legal and policing heritage. The strong influence of the Turkish Ottoman Empire was reflected in early pre-state policing arrangements that were mostly agricultural in nature, attempting to protect property and crops from sabotage and theft. These arrangements were overhauled with the takeover by the British Empire in 1917 and the installation of the British Mandatory Government. By 1922 the purely colonial police force had added local elements (Arab and Jewish) which became the prevalent police force in the mandatory territory by 1926 following the British police order (Brewer et al., 1988; Shane, 1980). That order remains in effect as the basic code for police functioning in Israel as the newly established government adopted the British system as the law of the land in 1948.

Current trends and implications

Even a cursory examination cannot avoid observing the similarities in the development patterns of community policing in the four countries examined in this book. Police reform was initiated in reaction to — publicly exposed — internal police corruption (Walker, 1976), or as an attempt to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the police in its handling of crime and fear of crime, and responding to the local — neighbourhood-based — service needs of citizens (Kelling and Stewart, 1989). The unprecedented, genuine, reaching out to the community is a common characteristic — to one degree or another — to all the countries reviewed here, as if their police chiefs, inspector generals and other high police and public officials held an international conference and decided jointly to embark on community-oriented policing. It is clear that the new direction employs a significant transition in policing strategies and tactics from those of previous practices. What underlined all such widespread efforts was the search for a proper response to the perceived need to ‘improve relations with the community’.