Community Policing In Local Police Departments 1997 And 1999

Every 3 to 4 years, the Bureau of Justice Statistics surveys a nationally representative sample of state and local law enforcement agencies. This report presents data from the 2007 BJS survey describing local police departments in terms of their personnel, budgets, operations, policies and procedures, computers and information systems, and equipment. Comparisons are made with prior years where appropriate, and as data are available. The selected local police sample includes all departments employing 100 or more full-time sworn personnel and a systematic random sample of smaller agencies stratified by size. Charts and tables. This is a print on demand edition of an important, hard-to-find report.

The development of crime policy in the United States for many generations has been hampered by a drastic shortage of knowledge and data, an excess of partisanship and instinctual responses, and a one-way tendency to expand the criminal justice system. Even if a three-decade pattern of prison growth came to a full stop in the early 2000s, the current decade will be by far the most punitive in U.S. history, hitting some minority communities particularly hard. The book examines the history, scope, and effects of the revolution in America's response to crime since 1970. Henry Ruth and Kevin Reitz offer a comprehensive, long-term, pragmatic approach to increase public understanding of and find improvements in the nation's response to crime. Concentrating on meaningful areas for change in policing, sentencing, guns, drugs, and juvenile crime, they discuss such topics as new priorities for the use of incarceration; aggressive policing; the war on drugs; the need to switch the gun control debate to a focus on crime gun regulation; a new focus on offenders' transition from confinement to freedom; and the role of private enterprise. A book that rejects traditional liberal and conservative outlooks, The Challenge of Crime takes a major step in offering new approaches for the nation's responses to crime.