| In recent years, many law enforcement agencies have allocated a large amount of resources and consideration to community policing, which represents a major transformation in American policing (Maguire and King 2004). Despite considerable effort, findings show that the impact on aggregate crime trends is mixed and open to doubt. However, there is strong empirical evidence that community policing improves citizen satisfaction with police and decreases fear of crime and perceptions of disorder among citizens (Eck and Maguire 2006, 228; Weisburd and Eck 2004, 42).;This study examines the relationship between agency adoption of community policing and effectiveness of law enforcement agencies in Texas, and it employs (1) violent crime rate, (2) property crime rate, (3) total crime rate, (4) property crime clearance rate, (5) violent crime clearance rate, and (6) total crime clearance rate as measures of police effectiveness. Ratio of community policing officers, community partnership scale, and community policing activity scale are independent variables to test the research question: To what extent does community policing affect crime clearance and crime rates?;The findings of this dissertation are mixed. The ratio of community policing officers has a negative significant effect on violent crime rates according to both bivariate and multivariate analyses. That is, agencies with a high ratio of community policing officers have lower violent crime rates. In addition, multivariate regression analysis shows that there is a significant negative correlation between the ratio of community policing officers and total crime rates. For all other crime rates and crime clearance rates, findings reveal no significant relationship to support the hypotheses. Besides, community partnership scale has positive significant relationships with total, violent, and property crime clearance rates.;The findings support the conclusion in the literature that there have been inconsistent research results concerning community policing (Elechi 2007, 83) because it has different principles, policies, and components, and it has no single conceptual and operational definition that serves as a theoretical framework (Seagrave 1996, 6) for law enforcement professionals to implement. |
