ABSTRACT
Strategies for Enforcement and Working with Communities The riots in American cities in the 1960s and 1970s forced police leaders to examine their departments’ relationships with the community. National commissions, local media, and police chiefs’ direct experience pointed to the distrust and fear many people felt for the nation’s police.1 As a result, police leaders began to experiment with ways to build and improve relationships between the police and community. The United States Congress developed a set of educational incentives that supported a federally financed, college-level program designed to recruit future leaders into the field of policing. Studies of police practices indicated that the seemingly tried-and-true strategy of random patrol of neighborhoods was virtually ineffective in preventing crime.2 In addition, the total reliance on the 911 call system began to fall out of favor with police departments as departments responded to calls but made little impact on preventing crime. As a result of these realizations, police chiefs like William Bratton began to explore new accountability methods to manage resources and prevent crime. The Compstat accountability strategy was introduced, and it carefully managed and monitored police managers’ allocation of police resources as well as their development of targeted strategies to reduce crime. In other words, the processes and strategies for reducing crime were as important as the outcomes. Developing supportive community partnerships was also one of the cornerstones of these new police strategies. However, police leaders still struggled to visualize what community collaboration would really look like.
