Community-oriented policing
Community-oriented policing is one of the strategies introduced to ground positive encouragement and form non-enforcement contact between law enforcement and the public. The idea has also been used as a policy intervention to create solid public trust and facilitate police legitimacy. Ultimately, being in the criminology field, the COP has given little evidence to maintain the change in the police’s attitude. One of the evaluation program conducted by Peyton et al. (2019) was on field experiment concerning community policing and police legitimacy. The research design they used was a combination of randomized experiments and parallel survey experiments. They applied these particular research designs to measure the effect of the visit they paid to residents living at home after engaging them with brief dialogue.
The research designs used, I think they were important in understanding the community policing and attitude towards police legitimacy. The randomized experiment facilitated the researcher to locate the participants and ask the predetermined questions randomly. The parallel survey experiment was also crucial in measuring police visits’ effectiveness by evaluating the aspect of community policing and attitude towards police. The research designs are equally important because the intervention significantly impacts the police’s general attitudes as measures by an index in all primary outcome measures.
The findings show that lack of experimental designs in past evaluations compounded difficulties in assessing the causal effect of COP in public attitudes towards the police. Ultimately, even though police legitimacy is extensively acknowledged as a necessary factor for lower crime and increased public safety, the lack of rigorous evaluations of well-defined COP strategies has left many law enforcement professionals doubtful of their value. Therefore, the intervention labeled here delivers an example of how a relatively simple change to police behavior can substantially affect measures of both values-based and behavioral legitimacy.