The Will County community supports community policing efforts and wants their law enforcement agencies to be transparent, service-orientated, and committed to their diverse neighborhoods. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore current policing methods and tactics to improve community relationships within Will County, Illinois. Six different focus group studies were completed where 33 participants completed questionnaires and follow-up, in-depth interviews were conducted to gather data on personal police experiences and perceptions. The questionnaire responses were separated into three categories including Likert-scale response questions, dichotomous (yes and no answers), and ranking police tactics by levels of importance. Nine statistically data driven tables were generated into percentage totals that created comparisons of police methods, police tactics, and issues. The main policing tactics that Will County residents expected from their policing agencies were rapid response for service and police professionalism (appearance, conduct, communication skills). The participants expected that police agencies solve major crimes (high-profile murders, assaults, robberies). The lowest ranked police tactics discovered in all 4 subcategories surveyed were aggressive enforcement efforts (even for minor offenses) and traffic enforcement. The participants demonstrated support for community policing efforts that requires law enforcement agencies to work with their neighborhoods. The results of this study can be used to create a policing culture that incorporates traditional policing efforts and combines these efforts with the newer community policing methods that are positively impacting the Will County communities.

Police officers‟ perceptions of gender-motivated violence against women have been overlooked in hate crime research. In an attempt to fill a gap in the hate crime, violence against women, and policing hate crime literature, I examine how nine police officers understand gender-motivated violence in Canada using vignettes, sentence-competition tasks, and an interview guide. Here, participants are asked about their perceptions of and experience with hate crime and gender-motivated hate crime against women. Results indicate that the majority of participants do not perceive hypothetical instance of violence against women as hate crime, all of which is a product of: victim-perpetrator relationships, ambiguous motives and alternative motives, and definitional constraints with legal terms. Equally, factors and conditions that influence police officers‟ perceptions relate to: the typical victims of hate notion, police routine and experience with hate crime and gender-motivated violence, hate crime legislation, hate crime policies and procedures for police, and hate crime training for police. / UOIT

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 1999. Graduate Programme in Sociology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 190-202). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ43413.

This PhD submission is on the basis of a selection of the candidate's published works. It is argued that the accumulated papers and the more recently published book, "Policing and the media: facts, fictions and factions" together display coherence and progression, and have made an original contribution to knowledge through the development and promotion of a distinctive Anglo-Japanese perspective on policing styles and images. Innovation is further demonstrated through critical evaluation and updating of earlier studies on policing styles and images in Britain and Japan, by professors Reiner and Bayley respectively.

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This thesis coinsiders the two areas of CCTV research, town centre statistical studies and public attitude surveys and how CCTV has through widespread introduction, impacted upon the concept of privacy. The concept of privacy taken by this thesis is wider that the legal definition and is most briefly but relevantly defined as the 'freedom from surveillance by closed circuit television.' Town centre studies aim to look at the effectiveness of CCTV as a method of crime control. Public attitude surveys aim to use quantitative research questionnaires to discover the opinions of CCTV users, to gauge CCTV's effect upon the fear of crime and to analyse the public's expectations and actual experiences of CCTV and to consider if the social benefit of CCTV over the threat to privacy is on balance, worth the loss in privacy. Town centre and public attitude studies are the only types of published research thus far conducted upon CCTV. Three innovative studies have attempted to disperse the view that CCTV had specific uses, benefits and limitations. These studies focused on CCTV as a benefit to retail consumerism, the attitudes of offenders and the opinions and practices of CCTV operators. This thesis considers whether the threat to privacy is greater when surveillance is operated by private security companies in quasi-public places. The thesis considers how the general public's desire to shop has increased the likelihood of their submitting to such quasi-public space surveillance in return for the benefits of consumption

Abstract The role of policing within western democratic countries has become increasingly clouded. This nebulous role of policing has been impacted upon by such issues as, the diversity and complexity of social change, the advances achieved within the technology field and the increasing amount of legislation that has been passed in an endeavour to accommodate such changes. Over the decades these developments have required policing organisations to shift their focus from the original crime prevention in conjunction with community collaboration to one which is predominantly incident driven and enforcement focused. Through the adoption of various strategies utilising technology, beginning with the motor vehicle, the police organisation has also progressively widened the gap between itself and the community being policed. With the widening of this gap such traits as trust, familiarity, co-operation and information exchange between the two parties has declined. This appears to have a domino effect on the fear of crime and social disorder within the community, thus impacting on the quality of life of community members. Within recent decades some of the traditional policing practices - including random preventive patrol, rapid response and the need for additional police because of increasing crime - have been questioned and researched. The findings of these research projects have not supported the effectiveness of such policing strategies. The role of policing, thus comes into question and a return to the historical role of policing espoused when Sir Robert Peel established the London Metropolitan Police and drafted the Principles of Policing, which was issued to each newly appointed constable, is being revisited. This has been promoted in the form of the 'community policing' concept. This community policing concept is stated as consisting of three core components - personalised policing through a police officer being stationed within a set geographic area; police-community partnership and problem-solving. However, in order to establish and maintain a viable partnership, both parties must participate and be aware of what the partnership entails. Similarly, with problem-solving both the community and police must identify and prioritise the local community problems. Both of these core components are bonded together through the appointment of a police officer within the community providing personalised policing. This shift in policing focus would necessitate changes both within the police organisation and the community itself. It must be remembered that the reactive, incident driven model of policing has been in existence for several decades and changing such a model will require some time. Thus, the effective implementation of community policing requires an agreement as to what community policing means and then a marketing and training program so that at the outset both parties are on an equal footing. As for the problem solving component of community policing, the parties to the partnership need to accommodate the differing foci of the opposite party. From the policing perspective, this requires accepting input from the community rather than maintaining a controlling demeanour. The police therefore, need to adopt an approach espoused by Wilson and Kelling (1982) in their article titled, 'Broken Windows: The Police and Neighbourhood Safety' which has been discussed in several literary works dealing with the community policing concept [Edwards 2001; Kenney (ed) 1989; Trojanowicz & Bucqueroux 1994]. The community also needs to be involved and this can be achieved initially, by maintaining support and enthusiasm for the community policing activities initiated. The success of implementing community policing relies on the adoption of the core components. The two community policing components, police-community partnership and problem-solving are impacted on by the third core component of personalised policing within a particular area. The personalised policing component is the need to have stable and reasonably enduring police personnel deployed to respective community locales. By adding this factor to the community policing components there is provided a degree of continuity and thus both parties develop a degree of familiarity which can lead to trust and confidence. The implementation of community policing to this extent needs to be holistically addressed through the police organisational dimensions, namely the philosophical, the strategic and the programmatic. Through these dimensions a comprehensive development of the community policing concept can be undertaken.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 249-261). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

abstract: The controversy over law enforcement use of TASER devices and the potential for the devices to cause death has proliferated in recent years. In 2005 the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) and International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) published national-level policy guidelines for the use of TASER devices, with one of the goals being to reduce the occurrence of deaths proximal to their use. What remains unknown in regard to these guidelines is whether or not departments that adhere to these guidelines are experiencing fewer TASER-proximate arrest related deaths (ARDs) than departments who are not. This study seeks to determine preliminary answers to this question by conducting a comparison of the policies of departments with three or more TASER-proximate ARDs to a matched sample of police departments that deploy the TASER, but have no (or one to two) TASER-proximate ARDs. The departments were matched on the number of full time sworn officers, geography (region, division, or state), and department type. Once matched, all department policies were coded based on how closely they adhered to the following areas of PERF and IACP guidelines: use of force against vulnerable/at risk populations, policies governing the TASER device deployment, training, reporting, and post-exposure requirements. Study departments, when compared to matched departments, had a greater number of policy areas with higher failure to comply rates. The same was true when looking at the category totals, as well as the overall totals, with the difference in failure to comply rates being larger for PERF than IACP. These findings show an association between departments with three or more TASER-proximate ARDs and higher failure to comply rates with national model policies. Additionally, it appears that many departments are failing to heed research findings or advice from outside their department. Based on this, future research may want to address the ways in which greater compliance with national policies can be obtained nationwide. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Criminology and Criminal Justice 2012