Community Policing in Switzerland's Major Urban Areas: An Observational Study of the Implementation and Impact Using Geospatial Data Mining

La présente étude est à la fois une évaluation du processus de la mise en oeuvre et des impacts de la police de proximité dans les cinq plus grandes zones urbaines de Suisse - Bâle, Berne, Genève, Lausanne et Zurich. La police de proximité (community policing) est à la fois une philosophie et une stratégie organisationnelle qui favorise un partenariat renouvelé entre la police et les communautés locales dans le but de résoudre les problèmes relatifs à la sécurité et à l'ordre public. L'évaluation de processus a analysé des données relatives aux réformes internes de la police qui ont été obtenues par l'intermédiaire d'entretiens semi-structurés avec des administrateurs clés des cinq départements de police, ainsi que dans des documents écrits de la police et d'autres sources publiques. L'évaluation des impacts, quant à elle, s'est basée sur des variables contextuelles telles que des statistiques policières et des données de recensement, ainsi que sur des indicateurs d'impacts construit à partir des données du Swiss Crime Survey (SCS) relatives au sentiment d'insécurité, à la perception du désordre public et à la satisfaction de la population à l'égard de la police. Le SCS est un sondage régulier qui a permis d'interroger des habitants des cinq grandes zones urbaines à plusieurs reprises depuis le milieu des années 1980. L'évaluation de processus a abouti à un « Calendrier des activités » visant à créer des données de panel permettant de mesurer les progrès réalisés dans la mise en oeuvre de la police de proximité à l'aide d'une grille d'évaluation à six dimensions à des intervalles de cinq ans entre 1990 et 2010. L'évaluation des impacts, effectuée ex post facto, a utilisé un concept de recherche non-expérimental (observational design) dans le but d'analyser les impacts de différents modèles de police de proximité dans des zones comparables à travers les cinq villes étudiées. Les quartiers urbains, délimités par zone de code postal, ont ainsi été regroupés par l'intermédiaire d'une typologie réalisée à l'aide d'algorithmes d'apprentissage automatique (machine learning). Des algorithmes supervisés et non supervisés ont été utilisés sur les données à haute dimensionnalité relatives à la criminalité, à la structure socio-économique et démographique et au cadre bâti dans le but de regrouper les quartiers urbains les plus similaires dans des clusters. D'abord, les cartes auto-organisatrices (self-organizing maps) ont été utilisées dans le but de réduire la variance intra-cluster des variables contextuelles et de maximiser simultanément la variance inter-cluster des réponses au sondage. Ensuite, l'algorithme des forêts d'arbres décisionnels (random forests) a permis à la fois d'évaluer la pertinence de la typologie de quartier élaborée et de sélectionner les variables contextuelles clés afin de construire un modèle parcimonieux faisant un minimum d'erreurs de classification. Enfin, pour l'analyse des impacts, la méthode des appariements des coefficients de propension (propensity score matching) a été utilisée pour équilibrer les échantillons prétest-posttest en termes d'âge, de sexe et de niveau d'éducation des répondants au sein de chaque type de quartier ainsi identifié dans chacune des villes, avant d'effectuer un test statistique de la différence observée dans les indicateurs d'impacts. De plus, tous les résultats statistiquement significatifs ont été soumis à une analyse de sensibilité (sensitivity analysis) afin d'évaluer leur robustesse face à un biais potentiel dû à des covariables non observées. L'étude relève qu'au cours des quinze dernières années, les cinq services de police ont entamé des réformes majeures de leur organisation ainsi que de leurs stratégies opérationnelles et qu'ils ont noué des partenariats stratégiques afin de mettre en oeuvre la police de proximité. La typologie de quartier développée a abouti à une réduction de la variance intra-cluster des variables contextuelles et permet d'expliquer une partie significative de la variance inter-cluster des indicateurs d'impacts avant la mise en oeuvre du traitement. Ceci semble suggérer que les méthodes de géocomputation aident à équilibrer les covariables observées et donc à réduire les menaces relatives à la validité interne d'un concept de recherche non-expérimental. Enfin, l'analyse des impacts a révélé que le sentiment d'insécurité a diminué de manière significative pendant la période 2000-2005 dans les quartiers se trouvant à l'intérieur et autour des centres-villes de Berne et de Zurich. Ces améliorations sont assez robustes face à des biais dus à des covariables inobservées et covarient dans le temps et l'espace avec la mise en oeuvre de la police de proximité. L'hypothèse alternative envisageant que les diminutions observées dans le sentiment d'insécurité soient, partiellement, un résultat des interventions policières de proximité semble donc être aussi plausible que l'hypothèse nulle considérant l'absence absolue d'effet. Ceci, même si le concept de recherche non-expérimental mis en oeuvre ne peut pas complètement exclure la sélection et la régression à la moyenne comme explications alternatives. The current research project is both a process and impact evaluation of community policing in Switzerland's five major urban areas - Basel, Bern, Geneva, Lausanne, and Zurich. Community policing is both a philosophy and an organizational strategy that promotes a renewed partnership between the police and the community to solve problems of crime and disorder. The process evaluation data on police internal reforms were obtained through semi-structured interviews with key administrators from the five police departments as well as from police internal documents and additional public sources. The impact evaluation uses official crime records and census statistics as contextual variables as well as Swiss Crime Survey (SCS) data on fear of crime, perceptions of disorder, and public attitudes towards the police as outcome measures. The SCS is a standing survey instrument that has polled residents of the five urban areas repeatedly since the mid-1980s. The process evaluation produced a "Calendar of Action" to create panel data to measure community policing implementation progress over six evaluative dimensions in intervals of five years between 1990 and 2010. The impact evaluation, carried out ex post facto, uses an observational design that analyzes the impact of the different community policing models between matched comparison areas across the five cities. Using ZIP code districts as proxies for urban neighborhoods, geospatial data mining algorithms serve to develop a neighborhood typology in order to match the comparison areas. To this end, both unsupervised and supervised algorithms are used to analyze high-dimensional data on crime, the socio-economic and demographic structure, and the built environment in order to classify urban neighborhoods into clusters of similar type. In a first step, self-organizing maps serve as tools to develop a clustering algorithm that reduces the within-cluster variance in the contextual variables and simultaneously maximizes the between-cluster variance in survey responses. The random forests algorithm then serves to assess the appropriateness of the resulting neighborhood typology and to select the key contextual variables in order to build a parsimonious model that makes a minimum of classification errors. Finally, for the impact analysis, propensity score matching methods are used to match the survey respondents of the pretest and posttest samples on age, gender, and their level of education for each neighborhood type identified within each city, before conducting a statistical test of the observed difference in the outcome measures. Moreover, all significant results were subjected to a sensitivity analysis to assess the robustness of these findings in the face of potential bias due to some unobserved covariates. The study finds that over the last fifteen years, all five police departments have undertaken major reforms of their internal organization and operating strategies and forged strategic partnerships in order to implement community policing. The resulting neighborhood typology reduced the within-cluster variance of the contextual variables and accounted for a significant share of the between-cluster variance in the outcome measures prior to treatment, suggesting that geocomputational methods help to balance the observed covariates and hence to reduce threats to the internal validity of an observational design. Finally, the impact analysis revealed that fear of crime dropped significantly over the 2000-2005 period in the neighborhoods in and around the urban centers of Bern and Zurich. These improvements are fairly robust in the face of bias due to some unobserved covariate and covary temporally and spatially with the implementation of community policing. The alternative hypothesis that the observed reductions in fear of crime were at least in part a result of community policing interventions thus appears at least as plausible as the null hypothesis of absolutely no effect, even if the observational design cannot completely rule out selection and regression to the mean as alternative explanations.

Community policing for law enforcement managers /

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Community policing in Chicago.

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Community policing in Chicago, year one : an interim report /

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The GeoArchive handbook : a guide for developing a geographic database as an information foundation for community policing /

"Funded in part by the Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Analytic Projects for State-Level Criminal Justice Statistical Analysis Centers (SAC-2 program)."--Verso of t.p.

Community policing in Northern Ireland: a resistance narrative

Policing in stable democratic societies is predominantly concerned with the implementation and practice of the globally accepted philosophy of community policing. However, the subtle complexities of Northern Ireland's transitional landscape present acute problems for the community policing concept, both as a vehicle for police reform and as a tool for increasing the co-production of security through improved community interaction with the police. This article will examine the current position of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and their Policing with the Community policy. Providing an overview of contextual and contemporary developments, it will assess the efficacy with which the PSNI have realised community policing, as espoused in Patten Recommendation 44. It concludes by determining the role and extent of community engagement with policing in Northern Ireland and the resistances and contestations to the implementation of the community policing in a post-conflict society.

Diversifying From Within: Community Policing and the Governance of Security in Northern Ireland

The subtle and complex nature of Northern Ireland's transitional landscape presents acute difficulties for the community policing concept. As the core to the police reforms in the country, its implementation has faltered in the face of institutional inertia within the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). This has been further exacerbated by a failure of the police to adequately increase the co-production of security through improved engagement and utilization of Northern Ireland's diverse community infrastructures. This paper will assess the delivery of community policing by the PSNI, while exploring their engagement with Northern Ireland's grass-roots community organizations, and specifically those involved with the governance of security at the local level. Thus, through a framework of adaptation, engagement and delivery of community policing by the PSNI within the unique context of Northern Ireland's security ‘otherness’, the paper will explore the key issues to police–community interaction associated with the broader vision of the Independent Commission on Policing (ICP) on community policing.

SURVEILLANCE OF, AND THE IMPACT OF COMMUNITY POLICING ON ARREST-RELATED DEATHS (ARDS): Exploring the surveillance of ARDs and the opportunities to prevent them in the United States

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-08

Policing, Terrorism and the Conundrum of 'Community': A Northern Ireland Perspective

The book chapter examines the conundrums and contradictions for PSNI in delivering their community policing agenda within a post-conflict environment which simultaneously demands the delivery of counter-terrorism policing in view of the current dissident terrorist threat.

Problem Solving Policing: Views of Citizens and Citizens Expectations in Germany

For the last two decades American police experts developed new police philosophies in order to tackle more successful the increasing crime problems. Community Policing tries to improve the cooperation between the population and the police and to increase the trust in the police. A crucial factor is a meaningful cooperation between the police and the citizens. Problem Oriented Policing aims at structural changes in the organisation and the procedures of the police in public. The police have to investigate the hidden problems and conflicts of an individual offence and to create proactive and long term concepts for the social area of conflicts beyond the specific case. It is doubtful whether these philosophies can be implemented in Germany since the legality principle prohibits meaningful, trustworthy relationships between citizens and police officers. However, if one examines the results of surveys on citizens views and expectations towards the police one finds that the majority of the German citizens favour the postulates of community and problem oriented policing. They expect through these measures an improvement of their life situation in the community and the feelings of safety. If one takes these results seriously one has to question if the legality principle is still appropriate. It seems to hamper new, more promising policing styles which seem to improve life of it's citizens and reflect what the citizens want and expect from their police force.

Community justice : striving for safe, secure, and just communities /

"March 1996."

Sex offender community notification : assessing the impact in Wisconsin /

This article discusses the effects of Wisconsin's community notification statute that authorizes officials to alert residents about the release and reintegration of sex offenders in their communities.

Grundriss innovativer Polizeiansätze. Eine kritische Begutachtung verschiedener Strategien und Tätigkeiten und deren Implementierung in der Schweiz in Theorie und Praxis.

This thesis contains three parts. The first one offers the theoretical basement, where the history of the police from their beginning in the early 19th century to this day is shown. The emphasis however is laid on the last 40 years, which gave birth to a multitude of innovations, such as community, problem-oriented, hot-spots or zero-tolerance policing. Those innovations are described in detail and are critically commented. At the end of this section, I present a scheme, where all the approaches are classified as strategic or methodic innovations, but united under a model called "modern policing". The fact that the innovations are not competitive but rather complementary is the most important finding of this examination. The second part of this work deals with a unique survey about the implementation of four innovations and eight problem- and community-oriented activities in 85 Swiss police forces. This explorative study shows that in the last 15 years the Swiss police forces have increasingly adopted innovative approaches. The most frequent innovation is community policing, which has been implemented all over the country. Due to the results, we can also assume that the implementation of the innovations is mostly substantial and profound. However, particularly in the area of problem-solving there is still a need for improvements. The third section consists of a scientific evaluation of a temporary special unit of the municipal police Zurich, which, during nine months, fought against public drug dealing and illegal prostitution in a particular neighborhood called Langstrasse. The effects of this hot-spot project were measured with police data, observations and several population surveys. In general, the special unit achieved a positive outcome and helped to defuse the hot-spot. Additionally, a survey conducted within the police department showed that the personal attitude towards the special unit differed widely between the policemen. We found significant differences between both police regions East and West, rank-and-file and higher ranking officers, different ages and the personal connection to the special unit. In fact, the higher the rank, the lower the age, and the closer the relationship, the more positive the officers were towards the unit.

La co-production dans les prestations relevant de la puissance publique : l'exemple de la police de proximité en Suisse

Si dans certains domaines (ex. les services de l'emploi) la co-production est bien implantée, elle paraît plus ardue dans d'autres types de services publics, comme la police. La co-production de la sécurité est-elle faisable ? Quelles sont les volontés de part et d'autre pour développer ce partenariat ? À l'aune de la police de proximité en Suisse et sur la base de données quantitatives et qualitatives, cet article apporte des résultats innovants. If in some administrations (eg. employment services) it is clearly well established, the co-production seems to be more difficult in other services, like the police. Thus, is the co-production of security services feasible ? Are both parties (police forces and citizens) ready for such a process ? In the light of community policing in Switzerland and on the basis of quantitative and qualitative data, this article will provide innovative results and research avenues in the field.