Because police are the most visible face of government power for most citizens, they are expected to deal effectively with crime and disorder and to be impartial. Producing justice through the fair, and restrained use of their authority. The standards by which the public judges police success have become more exacting and challenging. Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing explores police work in the new century. It replaces myths with research findings and provides recommendations for updated policy and practices to guide it. The book provides answers to the most basic questions: What do police do? It reviews how police work is organized, explores the expanding responsibilities of police, examines the increasing diversity among police employees, and discusses the complex interactions between officers and citizens. It also addresses such topics as community policing, use of force, racial profiling, and evaluates the success of common police techniques, such as focusing on crime "hot spots." It goes on to look at the issue of legitimacyâ€"how the public gets information about police work, and how police are viewed by different groups, and how police can gain community trust. Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing will be important to anyone concerned about police work: policy makers, administrators, educators, police supervisors and officers, journalists, and interested citizens.

Proactive policing, as a strategic approach used by police agencies to prevent crime, is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. It developed from a crisis in confidence in policing that began to emerge in the 1960s because of social unrest, rising crime rates, and growing skepticism regarding the effectiveness of standard approaches to policing. In response, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative police practices and policies that took a more proactive approach began to develop. This report uses the term "proactive policing" to refer to all policing strategies that have as one of their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on investigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred. Proactive policing is distinguished from the everyday decisions of police officers to be proactive in specific situations and instead refers to a strategic decision by police agencies to use proactive police responses in a programmatic way to reduce crime. Today, proactive policing strategies are used widely in the United States. They are not isolated programs used by a select group of agencies but rather a set of ideas that have spread across the landscape of policing. Proactive Policing reviews the evidence and discusses the data and methodological gaps on: (1) the effects of different forms of proactive policing on crime; (2) whether they are applied in a discriminatory manner; (3) whether they are being used in a legal fashion; and (4) community reaction. This report offers a comprehensive evaluation of proactive policing that includes not only its crime prevention impacts but also its broader implications for justice and U.S. communities.

This book should be made a part of any college level library that features holdings in social sciences. . . . Americans View Crime and Justice presents a national public opinion survey and its results on the issues. These edited results of a survey conducted in 1995 examine such issues as gun control, capital punishment, and juvenile crime, offering public opinion along with the analyses of a panel of criminologists. --The Midwest Book Review Readable and carefully edited, Americans View Crime and Justice reports and analyzes results from the recent National Crime and Justice Survey (NCJS), the richest and most wide-ranging investigation of public opinion on crime and justice issues in more than a decade. Conducted in June 1995, the survey features responses from 1,000 adults in the United States on now-volatile issues such as fear of crime, gun control, capital punishment, juvenile crime, and additional related topics of national concern. A distinguished panel of criminologists analyzes the collected data in this volume to present a comprehensive report on the development and current status of public opinion on these timely issues. Divided into three sections—context and framework; findings; and opinion, policy, and science—this authoritative volume also analyzes the implications of the survey data. Providing interesting insights and timely quantification of Americans′ view of crime and justice, this volume offers a unique view of public opinion particularly important to the work of researchers, law enforcement personnel, policy makers, public officials, and students of criminology and criminal justice, law, and political science.

Race and Policing in America is about relations between police and citizens, with a focus on racial differences. It utilizes both the authors' own research and other studies to examine Americans' opinions, preferences, and personal experiences regarding the police. Guided by group-position theory and using both existing studies and the authors' own quantitative and qualitative data (from a nationally representative survey of whites, blacks, and Hispanics), this book examines the roles of personal experience, knowledge of others' experiences (vicarious experience), mass media reporting on the police, and neighborhood conditions (including crime and socioeconomic disadvantage) in structuring citizen views in four major areas: overall satisfaction with police in one's city and neighborhood, perceptions of several types of police misconduct, perceptions of police racial bias and discrimination, and evaluations of and support for a large number of reforms in policing.