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This article examines changes in organizational priorities related to the three core functions of American policing-crime control, the maintenance of order, and the provision of services-during the era of community-oriented policing (COP). The change in priorities is analyzed using panel data from three national surveys of more than 200 municipal police departments conducted in 1993, 1996, and 2000. The primary finding is that police core-function priorities remained largely unchanged during this period. However, the systematic implementation of COP programs reflects an all-out effort to address all three core functions of policing at a higher level of achievement.
If the ability to change is an essential trait for organizations that are seeking to remain competitive and to ensure a fit with their respective environments, then the ability of American police organizations to adapt to societal change is an important trait to study. By the end of the 1980s, change in the societal environment in which American police departments operated created significant pressures to adopt innovative practices. Two decades of rising crime and an ever-worsening drug abuse problem prompted a dramatic increase in public fear of crime. The apparent inability of traditional police organizations to control crime (e.g., Greenwood, Chaiken, & Petersilia, 1977; Kelling, Pate, Dieckman, & Brown, 1974) led to the gradual erosion of public confidence (Crank & Langworthy, 1992).
During this period, numerous scholars speculated about the extent to which the broad adoption of community policing, a dramatic form of organizational change, would succeed in reforming police organizations and restoring public confidence in law enforcement (for a review, see Greene, 2000).1 Among these scholars were Kelling and Moore (1988), who proposed a "three-era" framework to conceptualize the history of police reform in the United States. It is not surprising that community policing was identified as the most recent substantial reform era in police practices. The three eras identified by Kelling and Moore were the political era (from the 1860s to the early 1900s), the professional era (from the early 1900s to the mid-1980s), and the community era (from the mid-1980s to the present day). Kelling and Moore argued that reform in each era is reflected in substantive changes in two primary areas: the reorientation of police strategies and activities and the reordering of the...