Select one (1) question from the four questions given below. Write an answer of approximately 500 words for the question you have selected. Or, you may select two (2) questions from those given below and write an answer of approximately 250 words for each of the two questions you have selected. Your answer (or answers) should be in paragraph form.
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Questions
- . Referring to this article, and to Trojanowicz and Moore’s “The Meaning of Community in Community Policing” (1988), comment on how police officers today tend to be separated from personal community contact in large urban areas.
- The following quote appears in civic activist Jane Jacobs’s famous book,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities:
Broken glass everywhere… [enlarge] Photo: katutaide (cc)
The first thing to understand is that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves. . . . [Where] the keeping of public sidewalk law and order is left almost entirely to the police and special guards . . . such places are jungles.
No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal casual, enforcement of it has broken down.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
(1961, pp. 31-32)
What do you think Jacobs meant by the phrase “almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, enforced by the people themselves”?Do you think modern suburban landscapes give rise to a sense of detachment among people? Explain how that might affect the notion of community control over the public peace, and what role the police might be required to play.
- Compare the Google maps of the Arctic hamlet of Holman (Ulukhaktok, pop. 400) and Los Angeles (pop. 3.9 million). You may also wish to locate online video clips of the 1992 Los Angeles riots or any other relevant incidents you may wish to explore. Discuss the challenges that police officers might face in each jurisdiction, and explain why their worlds are so different.
- Tracy Kidder’s article “Small Town Cop,” published in the April 1999 edition of The Atlantic Monthlymagazine, presents an intimate look at the work of Tom O’Connor, a police officer in Northampton, Massachusetts (pop. 28,978 in 2000). In a postscript at the end of the article, Kidder mentions that O’Connor left the police department in 1997 to join the FBI. Kidder comments on O’Connor’s decision to leave with these words: “His reasons were complex. They might be summarized by saying that he knew and loved the town so well that he had to leave it” (Kidder, 1999, p. 64).
- What message do you think Kidder intended to convey in this postscript?
- Why do you think O’Connor left the department? What might this imply about the challenge of implementing community policing as an operational paradigm?
