Police as Problem Solvers: How Frontline Workers Can Promote Organizational and Community Change
Hans Toch, Douglas Grant, J. Douglas GrantBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
"Faced with the problems associated with grinding poverty and a no-win drug war, police departments are adapting and changing. Foot patrol officers again walk the streets and talk to citizens, and neighborhood crime watches are valued as the eyes and ears of enforcers. Most seminal is the "quiet revolution" that has been called problem-oriented policing. This revolution makes police officers pioneering professionals who systematically study and address social problems in their localities. Cops become social scientists who work with other agents in the community to address root causes of crime." "Police as Problem Solvers is a book written by two pioneers of the approach. The authors conducted the first experiment in which police officers became researchers and "agents of change." Using verbatim transcripts of officers working through problems both in the community and among their own ranks, they recount highlights of the experiment and trace its impact." This revolution has implications not only for social policy and criminal justice but also for work reform because it expands the jobs of frontline workers (police officers), showing that authoritarian management is obsolete.Synopsis
Influenced by Herman Goldstein's Improving Policing: A Problem- Oriented Approach (1979), Toch (criminal justice, U. of Albany, State U. of New York) and Grant (Wright Institute; California Department of Corrections) present data and transcripts from the first empirical study of problem-oriented policing. They discuss the impact of this innovative approach, in which police act as researchers/change agents addressing problems on their beat. The foreword is by a trainer with the New York Police Department, who disagrees with the authors on some issues. This work should be of interest to social scientists, organizational experts, and community activists. The date of the first addition is not given. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR