This study surveyed 198 police officers of a single police department in Texas regarding their attitudes about the practice of community-oriented policing (COP) and its characteristics. Training on COP, rather than training duration, was found to affect officers' attitudes toward accepting COP programs. Using Cordner's four definitive dimensions of community policing (i.e. philosophical, strategic, tactical, and organizational) as a model, findings indicate that officers have familiarized themselves with the tactical dimension the most, especially the police-citizen partnership and problem-solving elements, while giving lowest priority to the information element of the organizational dimension. Others including the broader police function, personal service, and positive interaction elements are also less emphasized. The study reveals several problems the officers see as setbacks in implementing community policing and concludes that all of the COP characteristics must be looked at in the context of a whole system rather than as separate individual elements. T h e c u rren t is su e a n d fu ll te x t a rc h iv e o f th is jo u rn a l is a v a ila b le a t http://www.emeraldinsight.com/1363-951X .htm This paper was presented at the 2000 annual meeting of the Southwestern Association of Criminal Justice (SWACJ) in El Paso, Texas. The author would like to thank the editor and the referees for their helpful and constructive comments on the earlier draft of this article.
This study examined the attitudes of 581 residents of Midland and Odessa, Texas regarding their satisfaction with 14 police attributes and the importance of these attributes. Descriptive findings showed the citizens are generally satisfied with police performance but still rated the importance of attributes higher than the satisfaction. The satisfaction-importance graph revealed that the professional conduct factor (professional knowledge, professional conduct, honesty, quality of service, and fairness) received relatively higher satisfaction and importance scores compared to the friendliness factor (friendliness, putting one at ease, concern, politeness, and helpfulness) and the crime control/prevention factor (level of police protection, investigative skill, ability to fight crime, and ability to prevent crime). The friendliness factor received relatively moderate satisfaction scores as did the crime control/prevention factor but was considered the least important among the three factors. Finally, the findings showed the attribute that needs the most improvement is the ability to prevent crime.
This statewide study surveyed 215 principals of middle schools and high schools in Texas, USA. It examined the effectiveness of activities on school crime by three main methods:(1) what activities the school was doing to combat crime (e.g. police/guards, school uniforms, metal detectors, drug education programmes, character education programmes, closed campus, surveillance, student court activity, rewards for attendance, etc.); (2) cooperation with outside sources (i.e. police, parents, school district, judicial branch); and (3) principals' comments on what helps and hurts school efforts to alleviate school crimes. Data from these principals regarding drug crime and interpersonal crime in schools were correlated with the data on school activities and outside cooperation. The study also used nine critical elements of promising violence prevention programmes introduced by Dusenbury et al., as a framework to evaluate Texas school measures to combat school crimes. The study's findings and policy implications were discussed.
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