Roger B. Parks

Experience, quality of life, and neighborhood context: A hierarchical analysis of satisfaction with police

We test three different conceptual models—“experience with police,” “quality of life,” and “neighborhood context”—for directional accuracy and ability to explain satisfaction with the police. We also investigate whether these models help to explain the common finding that African-Americans are more dissatisfied with the police than are Caucasians. To do so, we use hierarchical linear modeling to simultaneously regress our outcome measure on clusters of citizen- and neighborhood-level variables. The analysis was conducted using recently collected information from the Project on Policing Neighborhoods (POPN). The data file consisted of survey responses from 5,361 citizens residing in 58 neighborhoods located in Indianapolis, Indiana and St. Petersburg, Florida. At the citizen level, the psychologically based “quality of life” model accounts for the greatest proportion of explained variance and provides the greatest directional accuracy. Also, residents of neighborhoods characterized by concentrated disadvantage express significantly less satisfaction with the police. In addition, neighborhood context reduces the negative effect of African-American status on satisfaction with police when a sparse citizen-level specification is used; racial variation in satisfaction with police persists, however, when citizen-level hierarchical models are specified more fully.

Can Community Policing Help the Truly Disadvantaged

Community policing advocates argue that reforms designed to break down barriers between police and citizens can produce favorable outcomes. The authors test a series of related hypotheses in a multivariate context by using four independent data sources— community surveys, patrol officer interviews, Census Bureau, and police crime records— to estimate hierarchical linear models. The results show that citizens who perceive police partnerships favorably report fewer problems related to incivilities and also express higher levels of safety. Findings from models including cross-level interaction terms indicate that the positive outcomes associated with police partnerships are not restricted to citizens residing in affluent neighborhoods. In our ecological analysis, we find that police-community collaboration is associated with higher aggregate quality of life assessments and that community policing as a form of public social control mediates the adverse effects of concentrated disadvantage. The findings support social-psychological and ecological theories on which community policing practices are partially based.

Metropolitan Organization and Governance A Local Public Economy Approach

New conceptualizations are needed to encompass cumulating research findings that complex, multijurisdictional, multilevel organization is a productive arrangement for metropolitan areas. A local public economy approach recognizes (I) the distinction between provision and production, and the different considerations that bear on each; (2) the distinction between governance and government, and the multiple levels of governance; (3) the difference between metropolitan fragmentation and complex metropolitan organization, and the prevalence of the complex organization over fragmentation; and (4) the necessity for citizen choice and public entrepreneurship in crafting productive organizational and governance arrangements. It may contribute to a rethinking with respect to governance structures adapted to the diversity characteristic of American metropolitan areas.

Examining Police Effectiveness as a Precursor to Legitimacy and Cooperation with Police

Numerous studies by Tyler and colleagues, as well as other scholars, support a normative, process model to account for variation in the public’s cooperation with police in the USA and other developed nations. However, a recent study in Ghana suggests that in developing countries fraught with high levels of violent crime and corruption, cooperation may instead be accounted for by a utilitarian, rational-choice model. Our study examines whether public cooperation with police in the developing nation of Trinidad and Tobago is associated with the process model or rational-choice model. Using in-person structured interviews with residents, we examined whether victims’ decisions to report to police were related to individuals’ perceptions about police effectiveness or police legitimacy. We found support for the process model. We discuss possible explanations for the divergence with Tankebe’s research in Ghana and suggest avenues for future research.

Regionalism, Localism, and Metropolitan Governance: Suggestions from the Research Program on Local Public Economies

LIKE MOST NEW intellectual or political movements, the recent movement called New Regionalism is a mixed bag of old prescriptions and new remedies to address problems both new and longstanding, not to mention both real and imaginary. Part of New Regionalism is hardly new at all. Instead, it is the long-abiding faith in metropolitan consolidation and central city expansion (see Rusk 1995) applied to the latest generation of metropolitan problems. Part of the movement responds to growing problems that occur on a more regional scale and that seem to require some sort of regional solution—in particular, transportation and infrastructure problems that derive, at least in part, from sprawling patterns of development. New Regionalism also represents progress in conceptualizing the general problem of metropolitan governance, reflected in the very choice of the term “governance” (and the associated complexities it implies) rather than “government” (Altshuler et al. 1999). Yet, some of those who now embrace institutional solutions other than metro government do so mainly because of the political infeasibility of massive jurisdictional consolidation (see Downs 1994), not out of an intellectual conversion to alternative approaches. Regionalism, Localism, and Metropolitan Governance: Suggestions from the Research Program on Local Public Economies

Systematic Social Observation in Criminology

Systematic social observation (SSO) came to criminology at the hand of Albert J. Reiss, Jr., who, in the 1960s, encouraged social scientists to shed some “nonsensical” views about the limits and benefits of different forms of observing social phenomena (Reiss 1968, 1971b). Reiss objected to the notion that direct observation of social phenomena in their natural setting was work for solo researchers using qualitative methods, while survey research was suitable as a group enterprise with many researchers using a systematized protocol to gather quantified data. Reiss argued that both direct social observation and survey research were in fact forms of observation that must confront the same set of challenges to produce interpretable information, that both were amenable to either solo or group practice, and that both could be used effectively for discovery or validation of propositions about social phenomena. Beyond these insights, Reiss’s important contribution to criminology was the development and practice of the techniques of SSO. Acknowledging that others before him had associated social field observation with the sorts of systematic protocols that had become popular in survey research, Reiss demonstrated how SSO could be used to answer important questions about what influences police–citizen interactions, with implications for theories about police–citizen relationships and for public policies concerning justice, race relations, and crime control. Since Reiss, criminologists have expanded the application of SSO more broadly, but it is still used relatively infrequently.

Metropolitan Structure and Systemic Performance the Case of Police Service Delivery

Does the organization of systems of agencies for the delivery of public services affect the quantity and quality of services supplied? If so, in what ways? Do different forms of organization lead to differences in costs for the same quantity and quality of service? Can, for example, changes in the current structure of police service delivery arrangements in metropolitan areas be expected to produce changes in police performance or the cost of policing? If so, in what directions?

Policing: Is There a System?

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses whether policing is a system. If a system is defined as a single, overarching hierarchical decision-making unit, then the police industry in the most United States metropolitan areas is not a system. However, the concept of a system is not limited to that of a simple hierarchy. Any collection of entities defined by a boundary and regular, predictable relationships among them is a system. The set of agencies producing specified services for a metropolitan area are a bounded collection and the police agencies included in such a collection have regular, predictable relationships among themselves in most Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Such a police industry should be considered a system. For too long, proposed changes in the way police are organized in metropolitan areas have been made with a view toward an idealized hierarchical system, and without any careful research on current operational practices. There is room for improvement in the way police services are delivered in many metropolitan areas.