Community Policing, International

Mitch Librett & Rainer Kroll

Community policing is essentially a conceptual frame for a new paradigm of policing that was developed in academic circles in the United States. The tumultuous events of the 1960s, including mass civil disorder and rising crime rates, prompted political effort to reevaluate police's effectiveness as an institution. Media coverage of overly reactive and forceful police response to apparently peaceful civil rights demonstrations and violent disorder in some of the largest cities resulted in widespread public perception of the police as a violent and ineffectual institution. Worse, there was little confidence that policing was capable of suppressing the upsurge in violent, interpersonal crime that seemed to accompany the vivid scenarios viewed nightly on the national news. Hence, during the Johnson administration, the work of a Congressional commission (the Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice), whose findings prompted funding of academic research that resulted in the development of innovative ...

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