Examining community policing policy implementation and racial disparities in officer-involved lethal encounters

Abstract

Purpose

The goal of this study is to examine how community policing policies (CPP) can be effective in addressing racial disparities in police killings in the United States.

Design/methodology/approach

The study utilized multi-level mixed modeling techniques.

Findings

The study finds that CPP training for in-service officers is effective when the police chief is black, in contrast to the presence of written CPP statements and CPP training for newly recruited officers. This article concludes that the effectiveness of policy implementation is dependent upon policing leaders who manage policy implementation.

Research limitations/implications

This research is limited in that it only includes data from people who were killed by police. In addition, it was extremely difficult to collect data on the race of the officer. Hence, it reduced the number of viable cases that we could include in the analysis.

Practical implications

The most significant practical limitation to our research is the ability to generalize to police departments within a city and between cities. In some cases, police killings were confined to one or two areas in a city.

Social implications

Disproportionality in police killings is important in every country where certain groups are overrepresented in the number of police killings. This is particularly true today, where we see groups like Black Lives Matter highlighting higher levels of lethal force in minority neighborhoods.

Originality/value

Using representative bureaucracy theory, this research shows leaders select and emphasize specific goals among a set of organizational goals, seek to build trust rather than fight crimes and support goals to improve policy outcomes, which fills a theoretical gap in the theory.

Citation

Rhee, Y.-C. and Menifield, C.E. (2024), "Examining community policing policy implementation and racial disparities in officer-involved lethal encounters", Policing: An International Journal, Vol. 47 No. 6, pp. 949-965. https://doi.org/10.1108/PIJPSM-05-2023-0057