Policing an Pobal: Community Policing and Legitimacy in the United States and Ireland
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Community policing has been a widely accepted police reform ideal in the United States since the 1980s—but in most American police departments, it has never really taken root. Today, even notoriously aggressive, racist, and invasive police departments, like that of Ferguson, Missouri, claim to practice community policing while engaging in practices indistinguishable from its opposite. Still, community policing, when implemented well, promises enormous benefits, including improved police-community relationships, increased state legitimacy, decreased reliance on the criminal justice system, and safer and more cohesive communities. This thesis uses qualitative interviews and observations to compare community policing in Denver, Colorado and Dublin, Ireland, which treats community policing as a specialization, with its own training, promotion schemes, and units within each police station. This qualitative study suggests that: 1) community policing is fundamentally an ethos of trust and respect for the community, and its successful implementation will look different in different contexts, 2) the Dublin model of specialized community policing units working in a specific patch is more effective toward the goals of community policing than Denver’s less structured, more response-oriented model, 3) merely adding community policing to a non-community police force is not sufficient to reap the benefits of community policing, and 4) applying the label of community policing to a reform effort without making more fundamental changes undermines the goals of community policing and police reform.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 2020 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Culhane, Molly |
|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Sklansky, David Alan |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law |
Subjects
| Subject | community policing |
|---|---|
| Subject | legitimacy |
| Subject | police reform |
| Subject | An Garda Síochána |
| Subject | Denver Police Department |
| Subject | Dublin |
| Subject | Denver |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Culhane, Molly. (2020). Policing an Pobal: Community Policing and Legitimacy in the United States and Ireland. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/jp767mw2584
Collection
Stanford University, Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. (CDDRL)
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- Contact
- molly@teamculhane.com
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