This study, funded under the Measuring What Matters Program, was conducted to identify general neighborhood strengthening, or community building, processes and police contributions to them. The purpose of the study, also known as the Police-Community Interaction Project (PCIP), was to conceive, identify, or define recognizable patterns of interaction and to find ways to treat these as quantities that vary in amount and can be shown to fluctuate over time or across places. To that end, researchers conducted surveys of block clubs, neighborhood associations, and umbrella groups to gauge the issues that were important to them, steps they were taking to address these issues, and the ways in which they interacted with the police. Researchers also attended the meetings and events held by the Westside Cooperative Organization (WESCO), an umbrella group, and gathered coded data about the meetings, events and issues discussed. Specific variables in the study include demographic variables about the blocks, neighborhoods, and districts represented by the organizations, descriptive variables on the organizations themselves, variables describing issues of importance to the organizations and steps those organizations were taking to address the issues, variables to describe the interaction between the organizations and police, and variables describing police involvement in community activities.

This study's purpose was twofold: to investigate the nature of police patrol work in a community policing context and to field-test data collection instruments designed for systematic social observation. The project, conducted in Richmond, Virginia, where its police department was in the third year of a five-year plan to implement community policing, was designed as a case study of one police department's experience with community policing, focusing on officers in the patrol division. A team of eight researchers conducted observations with the police officers in the spring and summer of 1992. A total of 120 officers were observed during 125 observation sessions. Observers accompanied officers throughout their regular work shifts, taking brief field notes on officers' activities and encounters with the public. All of an observed officer's time during the shift was accounted for by either encounters or activities. Within 15 hours of the completion of the ridealong, the observer prepared a detailed narrative account of events that occurred during the ridealong and coded key items associated with these events. The study generated five nested quantitative datasets that can be linked by common variables. Part 1, Ridealong Data, provides information pertinent to the 125 observation sessions or "rides." Part 2, Activity Data, focuses on 5,576 activities conducted by officers when not engaged in encounters. Data in Part 3, Encounter Data, describe 1,098 encounters with citizens during the ridealongs. An encounter was defined as a communication between officers and citizens that took over one minute, involved more than three verbal exchanges between an officer and a citizen, or involved significant physical contact between the officer and citizen. Part 4, Citizen Data, provides data relevant to each of the 1,630 citizens engaged by police in the encounters. Some encounters involved more than one citizen. Part 5, Arrest Data, was constructed by merging Parts 1, 3, and 4, and provides information on 451 encounters that occurred during the ridealongs in which the citizen was suspected of some criminal mischief. All identification variables in this collection were created by the researchers for this project. Variables from Part 1 include date, start time, end time, unit, and beat assignment of the observation session, and the primary officer's and secondary officer's sex, race/ethnicity, years as an officer, months assigned to precinct and beat, hours of community policing training, and general orientation to community policing. Variables in Part 2 specify the time the activity began and ended, who initiated the activity, type, location, and visibility of the activity, involvement of the officer's supervisor during the activity, and if the activity involved problem-solving, or meeting with citizens or other community organizations. Part 3 variables include time encounter began and ended, who initiated the encounter, primary and secondary officer's energy level and mood before the encounter, problem as radioed by dispatcher, and problem as it appeared at the beginning of the encounter and at the end of the encounter. Information on the location of the encounter includes percent of time at initial location, visibility, officer's prior knowledge of the initial location, and if the officer anticipated violence at the scene. Additional variables focus on the presence of a supervisor, other police officers, service personnel, bystanders, and participants, if the officer filed or intended to file a report, if the officer engaged in problem-solving, and factors that influenced the officer's actions. Citizen information in Part 4 includes sex, age, and race/ethnicity of the citizen, role in the encounter, if the citizen appeared to be of low income, under the use of alcohol or drugs, or appeared to have a mental disorder or physical injury or illness, if the citizen was representing an establishment, if the citizen lived, worked, or owned property

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the long-term organizational transition of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) to a community policing model. The Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) was an ambitious plan to reorganize the CPD, restructure its management, redefine its mission, and forge a new relationship between police and city residents. This evaluation of the CAPS program included surveys of police officers, residents, and program activists. In addition, observational data were collected from beat meetings, and aggregate business establishment and land-use data were added to describe the police beats and districts.

This study sought to examine community policing from a street-level officer's point of view. Active community police officers and sheriff's deputies from law enforcement agencies were interviewed about their opinions, experiences with, and attitudes toward community policing. For the study 90 rank-and-file community policing officers from 30 law enforcement agencies throughout the United States were selected to participate in a 40- to 60-minute telephone interview. The survey was comprised of six sections, providing information on: (1) demographics, including the race, gender, age, job title, highest level of education, and union membership of each respondent, (2) a description of the community policing program and daily tasks, with questions regarding the size of the neighborhood in terms of geography and population, work with citizens and community leaders, patrol methods, activities with youth/juveniles, traditional police duties, and agency and supervisor support of community policing, (3) interaction between community policing and non-community policing officers, (4) hours, safety, and job satisfaction, (5) police training, and (6) perceived effectiveness of community policing.

To explore the idea of community policing and to get an understanding of citizens' policing needs, representatives from the Ada County Sheriff's Office and Boise State University formed a research partnership and conducted surveys of county residents and sheriff's deputies. The county-wide survey of residents (Part 1) was designed to enhance the sheriff's current community policing program and to assist in the deployment of community policing officers by measuring citizens' perceptions and fear of crime, perceptions of deputies, knowledge of sheriff's services, and support for community policing. Questions in the citizen survey focused on feelings of safety in Ada County, such as perception of drugs, gangs, safety of youth, and safety at night, satisfaction with the Sheriff's Office, including ratings of the friendliness and fairness of the department and how well deputies and citizens worked together, attitudes regarding community-oriented policing, such as whether this type of policing would be a good use of resources and would reduce crime, and neighborhood problems, including how problematic auto theft, vandalism, physical decay, and excessive noise were for citizens. Other questions were asked regarding the sheriff's deputy website, including whether citizens would like the site to post current crime reports, and whether the site should have more information about the jail. Respondents were also queried about their encounters with police, including their ratings of recent services they received for traffic violations, requests for service, and visits to the jail, and familiarity with several programs, such as the inmate substance abuse program and the employee robbery prevention program. Demographic variables in the citizen survey include ethnicity, gender, level of schooling, occupation, income, age, and length of time residing in Ada County. The second survey (Part 2), created for the sheriff's deputies, used questions from the citizen survey about the Sheriff's Office service needs. Deputies were asked to respond to questions in the way they thought that citizens would answer these same questions in the citizen survey. The purpose was to investigate the extent to which sheriff's deputies' attitudes mirrored citizens' attitudes about the quality of service.

This survey collected descriptive information from municipal police departments and sheriffs offices across the United States to determine whether the departments had implemented community policing, how their investigative functions were organized, and the ways in which their investigative organizational structure may have been modified to accommodate a community policing approach. The research project involved a national mail survey of municipal police departments and sheriffs offices in all jurisdictions with populations of more than 50,000 and 100 or more sworn officers. The survey was mailed in the late fall of 1997. Data contain responses from 405 municipal departments and 196 sheriffs offices. Questionnaires were similar but were modified depending on whether they were sent to municipal or sheriffs agencies. Data generated by the questionnaires provide descriptive information about the agencies, including agency type, state, size of population served, number of full-time and part-time sworn and civilian personnel, number of auxiliary and rescue personnel, number of detectives, whether the sworn personnel were represented by a bargaining unit, and if the agency was accredited. Respondents reported whether community policing had been implemented and, if so, identified various features that described community policing as it was structured in their agency, including year implementation began, number of sworn personnel with assignments that included community policing activities, and if someone was specifically responsible for overseeing community policing activities or implementation. Also elicited was information about the organization of the investigative function, including number of sworn personnel assigned specifically to the investigative/detective function, the organizational structure of this function, location and assignment of investigators or the investigative function, specialization of detectives/investigators, their pay scale compared to patrol officers, their relationship with patrol officers, and their chain-of-command. Finally, respondents reported whether the investigative structure or function had been modified to accommodate a community policing approach, and if so, the year the changes were first implemented.

This study sought to evaluate the Madison, Wisconsin, Police Department's creation of a new organizational design (both structural and managerial) that was intended to support community-oriented and problem-oriented policing. One-sixth of the organization serving approximately one-sixth of the community was used as a test site for the new community policing approach. This Experimental Police District (EPD) was charged with implementing "quality policing," which emphasized quality of service delivery, quality of life in the community, and quality of life in the workplace. For the first part of the program evaluation, attitude changes among officers working in the EPD were compared with those of officers working in the rest of the police department. Part 1, Commissioned Personnel Data, Wave 1, contains responses from 269 commissioned personnel surveyed in December 1987, before the creation of the EPD. Part 2, Commissioned Personnel Data, Wave 2, consists of responses from 264 police officers who completed a Wave 2 survey in December 1988, and Part 3, Commissioned Personnel Data, Wave 3, supplies responses from 230 police officers who completed a Wave 3 survey in December 1989. Although the analysis was to be based on a panel design, efforts were made to survey all commissioned personnel during each survey administration period. Police personnel provided their assessments on how successfully quality leadership had been implemented, the extent to which they worked closely with and received feedback from other officers, the amount of their interaction with detectives, the amount of time available for problem-solving, ease of arranging schedules, safety of working conditions, satisfaction with working conditions, type of work they performed, their supervisor, commitment to the department, attitudes related to community policing and problem-solving, perception of their relationship with the community, views of human nature, attitudes toward change, attitudes toward decentralization, and demographic information. As the second part of the program evaluation, attitude changes among residents served by the EPD were compared with those of residents in the rest of the city. These data are presented in Part 4, Residents Data, Waves 1 and 2. Data for Wave 1 consist of personal interviews with a random sample of 1,166 Madison residents in February and March 1988, prior to the opening of the EPD station. During the second wave, Wave 1 respondents were interviewed by telephone in February and March 1990. Residents provided their perceptions of police presence, frequency and quality of police-citizen contacts, estimates of the magnitude of various problems in their neighborhoods, evaluation of the problem-solving efforts of the police, perception of neighborhood conditions, levels of fear of crime, personal experience of victimization, knowledge of victimization of other residents, and demographic information.

This data collection contains responses to victimization surveys that were administered as part of both the planning and evaluation stages of the Hartford Project, a crime opportunity reduction program implemented in a residential neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1976. The Hartford Project was an experiment in how to reduce residential burglary and street robbery/purse snatching and the fear of those crimes. Funded through the Hartford Institute of Criminal and Social Justice, the project began in 1973. It was based on a new "environmental" approach to crime prevention: a comprehensive and integrative view addressing not only the relationship among citizens, police, and offenders, but also the effect of the physical environment on their attitudes and behavior. The surveys were administered by the Center for Survey Research at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. The Center collected Hartford resident survey data in five different years: 1973, 1975, 1976, 1977, and 1979. The 1973 survey provided basic data for problem analysis and planning. These data were updated twice: in 1975 to gather baseline data for the time of program implementation, and in the spring of 1976 with a survey of households in one targeted neighborhood of Hartford to provide data for the time of implementation of physical changes there. Program evaluation surveys were carried out in the spring of 1977 and two years later in 1979. The procedures for each survey were essentially identical each year in order to ensure comparability across time. The one exception was the 1976 sample, which was not independent of the one taken in 1975. In each survey except 1979, respondents reported on experiences during the preceding 12-month period. In 1979 the time reference was the past two years. The survey questions were very similar from year to year, with 1973 being the most unique. All surveys focused on victimization, fear, and perceived risk of being victims of the target crimes. Other questions explored perceptions of and attitudes toward police, neighborhood problems, and neighbors. The surveys also included questions on household and respondent characteristics.

The survey was designed to explore the thesis that effective prevention and control of crime requires a community-wide effort that involves law enforcement agencies, other elements of government, and the citizens in a coordinated attack on problems of crime. The data include information on program start-up, implementation, and the community itself, as well as information on the specific activities undertaken by the programs.

This study was designed to analyze the impact of four televised public service announcements (PSAs) aired for three months in Lima, Ohio. The researchers sought to answer three specific research questions: (1) Were the PSAs effective in transferring knowledge to citizens about the police? (2) Did the PSAs have an impact on resident satisfaction with the police? and (3) Did the PSAs have an impact on the behavior of citizens interacting with the police? To assess public attitudes about the Lima police and to determine whether the substance of the PSAs was being communicated to the residents of Lima, three waves of telephone interviews were conducted (Part 1). The first telephone interviews were conducted in April 1996 with approximately 500 randomly selected Lima residents. These were baseline interviews that took place before the PSAs aired. The survey instrument used in the first interview assessed resident satisfaction with the police and the services they provided. After completion of the Wave 1 interviews, the PSAs were aired on television for three months (June 5-August 28, 1996). After August 28, the PSAs were removed from general circulation. A second wave of telephone interviews was conducted in September 1996 with a different group of randomly selected Lima residents. The same survey instrument used during the first interviews was administered during the second wave, with additional questions added relating to whether the respondent saw any of the PSAs. A third group of randomly selected Lima residents was contacted via the telephone in January 1997 for the final wave of interviews. The final interviews utilized the identical survey instrument used during Wave 2. The focus of this follow-up survey was on citizen retention, over time, of the information communicated in the PSAs. Official data collected from computerized records maintained by the Lima Police Department were also collected to monitor changes in citizen behavior (Part 2). The records data span 127 weeks, from January 1, 1995, to June 7, 1997, which includes 74 weeks of pre-PSA data and 53 weeks of data for the period during the initial airing of the first PSA and thereafter. Variables in Part 1 include whether respondents were interested in learning about what to do if stopped by the police, what actions they had displayed when stopped by the police, if they would defend another person being treated unfairly by the police, how responsible they felt (as a citizen) in preventing crimes, the likelihood of calling the police if they were aware of a crime, perception of crime and fear of crime, and whether there had been an increase or decrease in the level of crime in their neighborhoods. Respondents were also asked about the amount of television they watched, whether they saw any of the public service announcements and if so to rate them, whether the PSAs provided information not already known, whether any of the PSA topics had come up in conversations with family or friends, and whether the respondent would like to see more PSAs in the future. Finally, respondents were asked whether the police were doing as much as they could to make the neighborhood safe, how responsive the police were to nonemergency matters, and to rate their overall satisfaction with the Lima Police Department and its various services. Demographic variables for Part 1 include the race, gender, age, marital status, level of education, employment status, and income level of each respondent. Variables in Part 2 cover police use-of-force or resisting arrest incidents that took place during the study period, whether the PSA aired during the week in which a use-of-force or resisting arrest incident took place, the number of supplemental police use-of-force reports that were made, and the number of resisting arrest charges made.