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In recent times, police policy makers have been encouraged to use public opinion surveys to identify, and target the allocation of resources to, activities that members of the public believe are important. However, these surveys have concentrated on the types of problems that the public would like addressed, and have not determined what types of activities they would prefer the police to be undertaking. In the present study, a comprehensive list of police activities formed the basis of a survey used to examine attitudes toward police priorities in Australia. Comparisons were made between police and public understanding of the police role, and between present and preferred priorities. The results suggest that the public has an understanding of policing which differs from that of police officers. However, the picture of what they want police to be doing is similar to that of the police, albeit giving higher priorities to almost all of the activities. Police managers may need to educate the public about the functions of the police service, emphasizing functions other than investigating crime and providing advice. At the same time, the police may need to alter their resource allocation and modify organizational structure and reward systems to encourage operational officers to be more involved in the activities that the public see as high priority. This should result in better ties with the community, a better understanding within the community of the police role, and more realistic expectations on both sides of the outcomes of policing.

States that proponents of community policing contend that implementation of this strategy should substantially change the nature of police work. Unfortunately, there remains only limited knowledge about what community policing officers actually do, and in fact, many researchers suggest that community policing is merely a new name for traditional forms of policing. Using observational data collected in a medium sized municipal police department, examines the work of community officers and compares it to the work of traditional “beat” officers. Discusses the activities of community officers in light of existing literature which has examined the workload of police officers.

This study aimed to identify a model investigating effects of organizational characteristics on COP activity, and to compare the model in different social contexts to broaden the understanding of COP implementation. In addition, this study was intended to address an ecological fallacy committed in the prior studies so as to carry out a theoretically and methodologically rigorous comparative study of COP implementation between South Korea and the USA.

Unlike prior studies, which utilized direct measures of organizational characteristics, this study analyzed data on police officers' perceptions on organizational characteristics to investigate COP activities among police officers. For data collection, this study utilized an organizational survey developed by the School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University and collected data from 206 police officers in South Korea and 231 police officers in the USA. Structural equation modeling was used to identify the best fitting model to the combined data set, and multiple group analysis was performed to compare the model in both countries. For direct comparison and test of comparability, this study used matching for sampling and multiple group analysis method of SEM.

Findings indicated that both organizational flexibility and decentralization were important factors influencing COP activity in the USA, but decentralization of authority was the only important factor affecting COP activity in South Korea. Also, it was found that organizational philosophy had greater influence on organizational structure in the USA than in South Korea. In both countries, decentralization influenced feedback mechanism, but feedback mechanism did not influence COP activity. Likewise, flexibility influenced reward system, but the system did not influence COP activity in both countries.

Although this study utilized matching and multiple group analysis for comparison between two countries, it may be possible that direct comparison regarding police organization would be difficult due to unmeasured aspects of organizational contexts.

Although many studies have been conducted to investigate effects of organizational factors on COP implementation, there has been a lack of study in South Korea. In addition, there is a vacuum of empirical study on comparison across different countries regarding the factors. In this sense, this study produced important comparative knowledge on COP implementation.

Presents findings from a community survey of citizens who rated the importance of a variety of police practices commonly associated with community policing. Findings show that citizens give lower ratings to preventive community policing activities that are usually thought of as having an indirect effect on crime, and they give the highest ratings to proactive enforcement activities. Estimates several different regression models in order to detect systematic differences in patterns of ratings: gender has the most consistent effect across the different models. Discusses the need for studies that include cross‐community comparisons.

The purpose of the current study is to address limitations identified in the literature on officers' attitudes and their effects on community policing activity. Prior studies are limited in that attitudes toward COP strategy were treated as outcome variables and that factors affecting officers' attitudes were under‐investigated. The current study employed officers' attitudes toward individual and departmental policing as well as perception of community relationship to investigate path mechanisms among these exogenous variables and their direct and indirect effects on COP activity.

The data utilized for structural equation modeling were collected from 206 South Korean police officers, who were designated as COP officers or who were under COP training at the time of the survey. Variables were measured by an organizational survey developed by the Michigan Regional Community Policing Institute. Based on results of the literature review, a hypothesized structural model was proposed and tested to identify a best‐fitting model, explaining the greatest amount of variance in COP activity.

The results of SEM indicated that officers' positive attitude toward managerial leadership was one of the direct influences on COP activity, and cynicism toward departmental policing and its effectiveness directly and negatively influenced COP activity. In addition, cynicism was negatively influenced by community ownership and job satisfaction, and it in turn negatively influenced commitment to COP. Finally, community ownership directly and positively influenced strategic commitment among South Korean police officers.

Although the current study utilized data collected from a random sample, the number of data are relatively small, so as to make generalization of the findings to the entire population of South Korean police departments.

The current study investigated attitudinal factors that have not been examined in previous studies on COP implementation. In addition, using SEM, the current study attempted to identify a path mechanism among various attitudinal variables relevant to COP activity.

We explore the relationship between urbanicity and police officers’ perceptions of changes in their reactive and proactive work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using the 2021 survey of 1,262 Croatian police offices (436 police officers from a large urban community, 471 police officers from small towns and 155 from rural communities), we examine the perceived changes in their reactive activities (e.g. responses to the calls for service, arrests for minor crimes) and proactive activities (e.g. community policing activities, directed patrols) during the peak month of the pandemic compared to before the pandemic.

The majority of police officers in the study, regardless of the size of the community where they lived, reported no changes before and during the pandemic in reactive and proactive activities. Police officers from urban communities and small towns were more likely to note an increase in domestic violence calls for service. Police officers from urban communities were also more likely than the respondents from small towns and rural communities to report an increase in the responses to the disturbances of public order. Finally, police officers from small communities were most likely to observe a change in the frequency of traffic stops during the pandemic.

This study is the first one to explore the differences in perceptions of COVID-19-related changes in reactive and proactive police activities in a centralized police system.

There is an evolving literature on criminal entrepreneurship which situates it as a sub-topic of the organised crime literature and either mythologies and elevates the criminal entrepreneur to Mafioso status or ascribes it to being an activity carried out by criminal cartels; or else it trivialises and minimises it as being ‘White-Collar Criminality’. In reality, entrepreneurship pervades everyday criminal life as it pervades the everyday practices of policing. In this chapter, the author acknowledges the existence of a ‘Crimino-Entrepreneurial Interface’ populated by a cast of criminal actors including the ubiquitous ‘Businessman Gangster’. These criminally entrepreneurial actors operate within a specific milieu or ‘Enterprise Model of Crime’ and operate alongside the legitimate ‘Entrepreneurial Business Community’. Within the two conjoined systems, there is a routine exchange of interactions either parasitical or symbiotic and these coalesce to form an ecosystem of enterprise crime in which it is not only the ubiquitous criminal entrepreneur who is present but a veritable cast of entrepreneurially motivated criminal actors. As well as the established business community there is a parallel, alternative community which is situated in the so-called ‘Criminal Areas’ where the traditional criminal fraternity carry out their nefarious entrepreneurial activities. Within such areas, an underclass exists which provides the criminal workforce for organised crime. The traditional criminal ecosystem is the natural habitat for the police, and it is around this activity that police are traditionally organised. A perpetual cycle of crime is set up which requires policing, but this leaves an unpoliced void which the entrepreneurial criminals exploit. It is necessary to understand the criminal places and spaces exploited by Organised Crime and what roles other criminal actors and facilitators play in the enterprise model. It is also necessary to understand the so-called ‘Perverse Model of Policing’ which distorts and magnifies the true scale of the problem and to appreciate how Serious and Organised Crime corrupt and infiltrate the legitimate ‘upperworld’ before one can understand the true scale of entrepreneurialism in policing and criminal contexts.

Aims to understand whether there is any linkage between theoretical models and realistic perceptions of policing. Presents the results of a survey in which both police officers and community members were sampled to rate police activities and organizational principles that represent police professionalism, community policing, problem‐oriented policing, and the security orientation. The data were collected in the Rutgers community in Newark, New Jersey, USA, through a survey questionnaire, and analyzed through factor analytical models to see whether different police activities and organizational principles clustered under different factors. Suggests that the result prompted some rethinking about the policing models factored in this study. Discusses how they relate to each other conceptually and how they should be utilized operationally in the context of the research setting. Suggests further studies of policing models using factor analyses.

Empirical research suggests that traffic enforcement is the most common type of proactive activity police officers engage in on a daily basis. Further, agencies often use traffic enforcement to achieve both traffic safety and crime control. Given these goals, the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether (and to what extent) officers are accurately targeting their proactive traffic enforcement with crime and vehicle crashes in two agencies.

The study examines traffic enforcement patterns in two agencies to see whether proactive traffic enforcement aligns spatially with crime and vehicle crashes. This study employs negative binomial regression models with clustered standard errors to investigate this alignment at the micro-spatial level. Key variables of interest are measured with police calls for service data, traffic citation data and vehicle crash data from two law enforcement jurisdictions.

High levels of spatial association are observed between traffic accidents and crime in both agencies, lending empirical support to the underlying theories of traffic enforcement programs that also try to reduce crime (i.e. “DDACTS”). In both agencies, traffic accidents also appear to be the most prominent predictor of police proactive traffic enforcement activities, even across different times of day. However, when vehicle crashes are accounted for, the association between crime and traffic stops is weaker, even during times of day when agencies believe they are using proactive traffic enforcement as a crime deterrent.

No prior study to authors knowledge has examined the empirical association between police proactive traffic activities and crime and traffic accidents in practice. The current study seeks to fill that void by investigating the realities of traffic stops as practiced daily by police officers, and their alignment with crime and vehicle crashes. Such empirical inquiry is especially important given the prevalent use of traffic enforcement as a common proactive policing tool by police agencies to control both traffic and crime problems.

Violence against the police represents an ongoing and serious problem in the USA. In 2014, over 48,000 law enforcement officers assaulted while on duty. Although over one in four of these resulted in injury, little is known about the conditions under which injury is likely to occur. The purpose of this paper is to provide an assessment of the individual and situational factors that predict injurious assaults against law enforcement.

Using logistic regression, the current study analyzes data from the 2012 National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) on all assaults against the police (n=8,987) in order to understand, within a routine activities theoretical framework, how individual-level characteristics (i.e. officer and offender characteristics) and situational influences (i.e. assignment type, activity type, and location) predict the likelihood that an assault will result in injury.

Overall, findings suggest support for a routine activities theory of violence against the police. Initiating an arrest, one-officer vehicle type, and incidents occurring on highways/roads were all more likely to result in injurious assaults against the police. Other predictors of injury include officer and offender demographics as well as the time the incident took place.

This research was unable to control for some factors that may influence the likelihood of injury such as wearing body armor. Additionally, NIBRS data are not nationally representative, which limits the generalizability of the findings.

This is one of the first papers to use national data to examine the individual and situational factors that predict injurious assaults against law enforcement.