| Social capital is used as a theoretical framework to reveal the importance of networks of relationships among officers and their supervisors for performing community policing. Police social capital refers to the quality of officers' relationships within the police organization; for example with their peers and their supervisors. It is expected that officers with higher levels of social capital will be able to accomplish more community policing than their peers who have lesser amounts of this resource, controlling for officer characteristics and features of their work environment. Using data from the Project on Policing Neighborhoods (POPN), two measures of community policing were developed: acts of community policing provided to citizens (comfort, referrals, and information) per citizen encountered, and time spent on community policing activities (attending community meetings, problem-solving, and crime prevention) per shift. Separate models were tested on these two measures to determine the relative influence of social capital (trust, cooperation, group cohesion, social support), officer characteristics (sex, race, education, tenure, assignment, training) and work environment (department, shift, beat problems, organizational support of community policing) on officer performance of community policing. Interaction models were also tested to determine the extent to which social capital interacts with characteristics of the officer and features of their work environments.;Results from Negative Binomial and Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial regression models did not support the central hypothesis of this research: social capital was not a significant predictor of either measure of community policing. Instead, work environment characteristics tended to offer more consistent explanations of community policing performance. Specifically, community policing varied significantly according to the department in which the officer worked, whether officers were assigned to be community policing specialists, and their levels of tenure. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of their relevance to organizational factors with promote or hinder the implementation of community policing. |
