Can a Community Policing Initiative Reduce Serious Crime?

Because of the broad conception of community policing, there is extensive variation in strategies across agencies. Consequently, extant evaluations of community policing programs and techniques are limited, both in terms of their conclusions and generalizability. In addition, previous studies have primarily focused on large metropolitan police departments that have been given several types of resources to implement community policing models. This is not, however, reflective of most police departments. The current evaluation assesses community policing as an officer-initiated program in a suburban police department. Officers involved with the design and implementation of this community policing model were interviewed and crime data for the initiative location and two comparable police beats were collected over an 8-year period. Time series analyses indicated a significant reduction in violent and property crimes in the targeted area, but not in comparable areas in the county.