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Heralded as the answer to rising crime rates in the 1990s, community policing is increasingly being downplayed as police departments experiment with COMPSTAT and intelligence-led policing. In fact, [8] Kerlikowske (2004) argues that we should end the era of community policing because people are weary of social experiments that are out of touch with the problems they face. Is Kerlikowske correct? Is it time to put community policing to rest? Suspicion of community policing is not new. Even during its heyday, community policing had its detractors. In fact, the National Institute of Justice reports that many police departments ignored the original vision of working closely with community residents and adopted the more familiar order maintenance strategy that is associated with broken windows theory ([31] Taylor, 1999, p. 2). This movement does not come as a surprise. Asking the police to work closely with neighborhood residents to accomplish what has been described as the "coproduction" of public safety has been a difficult challenge; one that is far less understandable than asking officers to arrest large numbers of disorderly people. (Coproduction of public safety refers to citizen activity that is intended to enhance the quantity and quality of police service.) As a result, there have been few evaluations of community policing programs that concentrate on citizen involvement in crime control.
This paper tests the effectiveness of community policing programs that concentrate on citizen involvement in crime control through a reassessment of the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) program. We argue that community policing programs that center on building strong community ties create satisfaction with the police. The paper begins with an explanation of CAPS followed by a review of the theoretical framework that supports the community policing hypothesis.
To conduct our analysis, we use data collected for the 1993-1994 CAPS Prototype Panel Survey. Both OLS and logistic regression are used to analyze the data. Although the CAPS survey has been analyzed before, we believe that subsequent research justifies a reassessment of the CAPS data. Studies by [12] Resig and Parks (2000) and [36] Xu et al. (2005) have provided a rationale for analyzing community policing that was not apparent at the time of the original CAPS analysis. Additionally, the original evaluation did not differentiate between citizen's...