journal of CriminalJustice Vol. 20, pp.

367-372
All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A.

(1992)
Copyright

0047-2352/92
$5.00 + .OO
01992 Pergamon Press Ltd.

BOOK REVIEWS
Community
Policing:
A Contemporary
Perspective
by Robert
Trojanowicz
and
Bonnie Bucqueroux

Anderson Publishing Co, (2035 Reading Road,

Cincinnati,
Ohio 45202),
1990, 458 pp.,
softcover-$23.95.

This book is a forceful extended argument

that American
society requires a transformation in the customary way in which policing is viewed,
organized,
and conducted.
While examining
the origins, development,
and forms of community policing in the United
States, these authors go beyond description
to argue repeatedly and concretely that community policing, according to their formulation, is the best hope for solving problems of
crime and disorder,
knitting
together
the
fraying fabric of urban communities,
and revitalizing the police. Their approach is hortatory rather than empirical. Although aware
of the varied evidence for the effectiveness
of community policing programs, they prefer
to specify what the community
policing approach involves, to lay it against descriptions
of crime and disorder problems, and then to
argue for the potential promise of adopting
the community
policing approach.
Although the book is long, over 400 pages,
it is readable and accessible.
The table of
contents is informative
and major points are
presented as bullets for emphasis and ready
review. Not only do the authors know all there
is to know about community
policing,
they
are wonderfully
knowledgeable
about the social context within which policing must operate, and they describe crime problems in
modem America thoroughly and sensitively.

The scholarship
of Trojanowicz
and Bucqueroux is prodigious, drawing not only upon
empirical
research but on fiction,
biographies, and the mass media. The writing is
straightforward,
unjargonized,
and filled with
vivid illustrations
and analogies that help to
make points clear. The only criticism I have
of the books presentation
is that it needed a
bibliography.
Readers interested
in further
information
must thumb through pages of
references given at the end of each chapter.
After a short foreword by George L. Kelling and a preface by the authors, the book
begins with a listing of The Ten Principles
of Community
Policing. n The substantive
discussion
is organized
into five sections.
Policing
Section One, What Community
Means, contains three chapters devoted to
an elaboration
of the basic tenets of community policing, its origins, and its relevance
to the changes in American society.
Section Two, What Community
Policing
Does, explains in two chapters why community policing,
as these authors have explained it, offers a more promising approach
to dealing, first, with the objective incidence
of crime and, second, with the debilitating
fear of it.
Section Three, What the Research Shows,
contains two chapters. The first, Methods
and Measures, is by David L. Carter, whose
presence in the book, curiously, is never explained. Belying the title, the chapter does
not examine how community
policing might
be evaluated but instead summarizes research
findings from the Presidents Commission
on
Law Enforcement
and the Administration
of
Justice, 1967 to the present time on the failures and shortcomings
of traditional
police
strategies. The second chapter discusses Trojanowiczs
initial and extensive
experience

367

368

Book Reviews

with foot patrol, later called community

policing, in Flint, Michigan.
It also briefly
summarizes
notable community
policing experience in Newport News, Virginia; Madison, Wisconsin;
Baltimore
County,
Maryland; Houston, Texas; Newark, New Jersey,
and Detroit, Michigan.
In Section Four, Special People/Special
Problems, Trojanowicz
and Bucqueroux argue that community
policing can be much
more successful than traditional
policing in
addressing the unique security problems of
groups such as the homeless, juveniles,
and
minorities, but most especially in coping with
the troubling and vexing problem of drug use
and drug trafficking. Both in the single chapter on special people and the two chapters on
drug abuse, their discussion begins with an
insightful description of the problem and then
outlines the presumptive
benefits of adopting
a community
policing approach. In the case
of drug abuse, the usefulness of standard police strategies also is reviewed.
The three chapters of Section Five, The
Future of Community Policing, discuss, first,
the value of community
policing for motivating and utilizing police officers to their full
potential;
second, the problems of building
support for community
policing; and, third,
how competition
between public and private
police and erosion of tax bases in urban areas
make the adoption of the community
approach by local public police agencies urgently necessary. True to its visionary theme,
the book concludes
with two concrete and
ambitious proposals for expanding
community policing throughout the country-first,
by creating a special fund, through special tax
check-offs or the issuance of bonds, for community policing; second, by establishing
and
then gradually
transforming
neighborhood
community-police
centers into community
resource-centers
staffed by both public and
private service providers for the reorganizaand reintegration
of
tion , revitalization,
communities.
As lagniappe at the end of the book, oneand two-page descriptions of community
policing are given by nine chiefs of police or
their assistants in Philadelphia,
Los Angeles,

Baltimore
County, New York City, Madison, McAllen (Texas), Newport News, Edmonton
(Alberta,
Canada),
and Evanston
(Illinois).
Although the authors are well informed and
practical in much that they say about community policing, the hortatory tone of the book
often leads to what seem like inflated, or at
least unsupported,
claims for community policing. Not only is the argumentation
for particular benefits presumptive,
but community
policing seems to constitute all that is creative and promising in policing. One gets the
impression that if its smart, it must be community policing.
This impression
is encouraged
by the authors failure to distinguish
between community policing as they conceive it to be and
community
policing as it has emerged operationally in the real world. Faced with potential problems in community policing, such
as overselling it as a panacea, using it exclusively as a public relations slogan, or creating
the impression that enforcement is not needed,
Trojanowicz
and Bucqueroux simply dismiss
them as not being community policing. The
problems are defined out of existence, rather
than treated as impediments
to the institutionalization
of community policing that need
to be addressed. The authors do in fact know
better, but they often come across as being
uncritical about the process of implementation. I also think they work too hard to distinguish community
policing from problemoriented policing, which is part of the turf war
that has grown up around these conceptions.
Im one of those who mistakenly
think they
are identical, at least as a matter of practice
in the field (8).
Although the book refers to several evaluations of community
policing programs, it
never examines the strength of these efforts.
It uncritically
accepts evaluation results, as in
the Flint case, even though serious doubts have
been raised about them. It is even more surprising that the authors do not discuss whether
evaluation
really is a particularly
difficult
problem for community
policing,
as many
police officers believe-mistakenly,
in my
view. Altogether,
this sidestepping
of issues
of evaluation,
especially
in the chapter by

Book Reviews

Carter devoted to methods and measures,

seems disingenuous,
as if there were something to hide. Admittedly,
the evaluation results have not been compelling,
but then neither have those from traditional
police
methods. Evaluation
is critical to the credibility of community
policing, and it needed
to be discussed.
In conclusion,
this book is the fullest presentation to date of the idea of community
policing,
its potential benefits, and the reasons for its arrival on the scene at this point
in American history. With power and intelligence,
the book shows what policing
in
America might become if only the police, and
we, had greater vision and the courage.
David H. Bayley
State University of New York at Albany
School of Criminal Justice
Albany, N.Y. 12222

Courts, Corrections and the Constitution:

The Impact of Judicial Intervention
on
Prisons and Jails edited by John J. DiIulio,
Jr.
Oxford University Press, (2001 Evans Road,
Cary, North Carolina 27513), 1990, 338 pp.,
hardcover-$32.50
This is an edited volume of eleven essays
by various contributors
addressing one or another aspect of the prisoner litigation
that
has become a permanent
feature of the operation of jails and prisons in the United States
since the late 1960s. As in any edited volume, it is difficult to judge the volume as a
whole, since it is made up of several distinct,
although
interrelated,
topics
and styles.
However, in this instance,
without waiving
any objections or criticisms, it is easy to recommend this book on the basis of its serious
treatment of the uneasy relationship
between
federal courts and the institutions
created to
hold persons against their will.
The eleven essays address a number of different topics, but in the main they fall into
two groups. The six essays in the first group
discuss the specific impact of four major total prison conditions
cases that came before

369

federal district courts in the 1970s and 1980s.

These four cases are: Ruiz v. Estelle, challenging the operation of the Texas Department of Corrections; Guthrie v. Evans, which
concerned
conditions
at the Georgia State
Prison at Reidsville;
Rhem v. Malcolm, addressing conditions
at the Manhattan House
of Detention for Men (the Tombs) and later
at the House of Detention for Men on Rikers
Island; and Crain v. Bordenkircher,
which
attacked physical conditions at the West Virginia Penitentiary.
Three essays address the
Ruiz litigation and one essay discusses each
of the remaining three cases.
The five essays in the second group concern various features of prison administration
or evaluate the process and effect of prison
litigation, whether on corrections, the courts,
or that most nebulous of all concepts-justice. Thus, Feeley and Hanson lead off the
volume with an overview of prisoner litigation, which attempts to provide a framework
for assessing the impact of these cases on
various institutions.
Edward Rhine provides
a much more detailed and empirical evaluation of disciplinary
practices at a New Jersey
state prison before and after the Supreme
Courts leading case on disciplinary
due process, Wolff v. McDonnell.
Clair Cripe, general counsel of the Federal Bureau of Prisons,
offers his evaluation of the effects of prisoner
litigation and the proper role of the courts from
the standpoint
of a partisan practitioner,
as
does DiIulio, from his observation
post, in a
concluding
essay. Robert Bradley attempts a
statistical
background
analysis
of federal
judges in an effort to determine whether there
is any support for the view that the party affiliation of the appointing president has a significant impact on the policymaking
behavior
of the judges in prisoner cases.
The three essays describing and assessing
the Ruiz litigation and its impact on the Texas
Department
of Corrections
offer competing
analyses of what is the largest total conditions case ever tried in an American court.
While the authors of the three essays agree
on some of the facts, and certainly
share
common aspirations for better prisons in Texas
and elsewhere, they are substantially
at odds
over other facts and over what conclusions to