American University.
Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA.
Behav Sci Law. 2019 Nov;37(6):665-680. doi: 10.1002/bsl.2444.
Community policing is often seen as a way to repair fractured relationships between law enforcement and the public. Despite its relationship-building promise and widespread department-level adoption, individual officers show varying levels of support for community policing which can harm policy implementation. Why are some officers more supportive of community policing than others? Prior research suggests that demographic factors such as the officer's gender, race, age, and education can explain this variance. Across these studies, however, there are several contradicting or non-replicating findings. Conflicting findings may result from differences by department or differences in methodology or temporal variance - but most policing studies focus on a single department. We begin to adjudicate between the possible explanations for conflicting findings using roll-call survey data from 741 officers across three neighboring police departments in 2016 and then a replication with 452 officers from one of the original departments in 2019. We find that experience with community policing consistently influences support for the practice while officer gender, age, and education consistently do not. Other results do not replicate across department or time, although we do find non-replicating significant factors associated with officer support for community policing. Our findings also suggest that departmental and temporal aspects help to explain why policing studies often do not replicate or generalize to other places or contexts.
社区警务通常被视为修复执法部门与公众之间破裂关系的一种方式。尽管社区警务具有建立关系的承诺，并在部门层面得到广泛采用，但个别警察对社区警务的支持程度存在差异，这可能会损害政策的实施。为什么有些警察比其他人更支持社区警务？先前的研究表明，警察的性别、种族、年龄和教育等人口统计因素可以解释这种差异。然而，在这些研究中，存在一些相互矛盾或无法复制的发现。相互矛盾的发现可能是由于部门之间的差异、方法学上的差异或时间上的差异造成的——但大多数警务研究都集中在一个部门。我们使用 2016 年来自三个相邻警察局的 741 名警察的点名调查数据，并在 2019 年使用其中一个原始部门的 452 名警察进行复制，开始对相互矛盾的发现的可能解释进行裁决。我们发现，社区警务经验始终会影响对该实践的支持，而警察的性别、年龄和教育则始终不会。其他结果在部门或时间上无法复制，尽管我们确实发现了与警察支持社区警务相关的非复制显著因素。我们的研究结果还表明，部门和时间方面有助于解释为什么警务研究经常无法复制或推广到其他地方或环境。
