Graduate student Michelle Stewart, under the direction of Dr. Joseph Dumit, will undertake ethnographic research on how "community policing," a new policing policy, affects police and public relationships and mutual perceptions. Community policing requires police and residents to collaborate on crime prevention. This form of policing introduces ongoing training programs to encourage police and residents to become collaborators in crime prevention. The researcher will investigate the consequences of this collaboration, particularly in how it may result in redefining and altering expectations of police officers, community members, crime, and criminal activity.
The research has a comparative research design. It will carried out in two urban sites: Los Angeles, California, and Vancouver, Canada. The researcher will conduct interviews and observe at both police training and citizen's academies, stratifying the sample by age to detect changes in cognitive models of policing and crime that may have developed after the introduction of community policing. She also will observe community policing in action, using gang violence prevention as a focal case.
The research is important because it will contribute to ongoing social science research on changing configurations of governance. The research also will contribute to the work of those involved in advocacy and reform projects surrounding policing, crime prevention, and gang violence. In addition, the research supports the education of a graduate student.
