scholarly journals Police Reform and Community Policing in Kenya: The Bumpy Road from Policy to Practice

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingvild Magnæs Gjelsvik
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Marianne Bevan

<p>This thesis investigates how New Zealand and East Timorese police officers involved in United Nations’ police reform understand and conceptualise masculinities. It explores how these conceptualisations compare to how masculinities are defined and outlined in United Nations’ gender policies. The United Nations have increasingly attempted to address gender in their policing work; however, within these policies, gender has continued to be equated with women and women’s issues while men’s gender identities remain invisible. My research contributes to emerging discussions about how an understanding of masculinities could be better incorporated into gendered police reform. I explore this through the case of the New Zealand Police Community Policing Pilot Programme (CPPP), a capacity building programme carried out within the wider United Nations Police mission in Timor-Leste. By speaking to New Zealand and East Timorese police officers, this research articulates how police officers themselves conceptualise policing masculinities and interpret how masculinities are framed in gender policy. My research finds that within both the East Timorese Police and the New Zealand Police involved in the CPPP, there is evidence of a variety of policing masculinities. These findings highlight the fluidity of masculinity and the processes that police officers can go through in order to challenge problematic constructions of masculinity. This provides important theoretical and practical insights into how positive masculinities can be promoted through gendered approaches to police reform. By investigating the ways in which the police interpret the United Nations’ approach to gender, this research finds that the continued framing of gender as a women’s issue in policy acts as a barrier to the police seeing masculinities as part of gendered reform.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 230-243
Author(s):  
Jack Greig-Midlane

In the austerity era in England and Wales, both socio-economic change and shifts in the policing field have triggered a range of police reform narratives. For resource intensive manifestations of community policing, police disinvestment in England and Wales has led to concerns of a swing away from neighbourhood security functions and proactive police work and toward crime management functions and a more reactive approach (Punch, 2012; IPC, 2013). The paper uses an institutional perspective of change in police organisations (March and Olsen, 2011; Crank, 2003) to highlight the importance of values and narratives in processes of reform, mediation, and resistance. The empirical element of the paper explores how changes in the austerity era impact on the reform and delivery of ‘Neighbourhood Policing’ and cultural storytelling in an English police force. The analysis reveals a discursive struggle over the principles and delivery of neighbourhood policing. Police in policymaking and managerial roles subscribe to narratives that suggest Neighbourhood Policing can be reformed to be more scientific, efficient, professional, and effective to counter the impact of austerity, but this is challenged by street level accounts of the impact of austerity on delivery as well as the distinctive cultural values of Neighbourhood Policing Teams.


Author(s):  
Kevin Hearty

This chapter critically evaluates how the interaction between memory politics and police reform processes shapes current views of community policing within Irish republican communities. Establishing the overarching context of post-conflict police reform within which opposing narratives on community policing are pieced together, the chapter critiques the impact that changes in police symbolism, police composition and the nature of the core policing function fulfilled by the PSNI has had on views of policing within working class republican communities. It examines how the Patten programme of police reform has interacted with individual and collective memory to fashion opposing narratives on community policing. The chapter suggests that there are currently two competing master narratives on community policing that prevail within modern Irish republicanism; the ‘critical engagement’ narrative proffered by those in favour of policing that uses the memory of past ‘suspect community’ policing by the RUC to frame itself with assertions of newness, change and of the primary policing function now being to provide a policing service to local communities and the ‘cosmetic reform’ narrative espoused by those who continue to reject post-Patten policing in Northern Ireland that uses memory in a more ideologised manner in order to dismiss police reform as an attempt to normalise ‘British’ policing in Ireland.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Marianne Bevan

<p>This thesis investigates how New Zealand and East Timorese police officers involved in United Nations’ police reform understand and conceptualise masculinities. It explores how these conceptualisations compare to how masculinities are defined and outlined in United Nations’ gender policies. The United Nations have increasingly attempted to address gender in their policing work; however, within these policies, gender has continued to be equated with women and women’s issues while men’s gender identities remain invisible. My research contributes to emerging discussions about how an understanding of masculinities could be better incorporated into gendered police reform. I explore this through the case of the New Zealand Police Community Policing Pilot Programme (CPPP), a capacity building programme carried out within the wider United Nations Police mission in Timor-Leste. By speaking to New Zealand and East Timorese police officers, this research articulates how police officers themselves conceptualise policing masculinities and interpret how masculinities are framed in gender policy. My research finds that within both the East Timorese Police and the New Zealand Police involved in the CPPP, there is evidence of a variety of policing masculinities. These findings highlight the fluidity of masculinity and the processes that police officers can go through in order to challenge problematic constructions of masculinity. This provides important theoretical and practical insights into how positive masculinities can be promoted through gendered approaches to police reform. By investigating the ways in which the police interpret the United Nations’ approach to gender, this research finds that the continued framing of gender as a women’s issue in policy acts as a barrier to the police seeing masculinities as part of gendered reform.</p>


Author(s):  
Luis Daniel Gascón ◽  
Aaron Roussell

This chapter opens with the CPAB asking to be a part of the investigation into the Dorner incident but being denied that ability given LAPD’s existing (internal) review structure. Using this scene, in the lobby of a local McDonald’s owned by a Black former LAPD administrator, the authors show how even the CPABs, meant to be platforms for the community to shape law enforcement policy, are alienated from the process altogether. The authors look back at community governance strategies since the civil rights era and show how community policing is just the latest formulation of these. They show that without attempts at formally aligning community groups, they devolve into conflict with one another seeking the little power available in police-civilian partnerships. The authors call for activist strategies for police reform, which ensure that community interests become institutional priorities.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (6) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Inese Boluža

Community orientated policing is widely held as the relatively new and interesting philosophy for Latvian policing. For the fifteen years the community policing movement has been gaining momentum acquiring the support of politicians, reformers, and the society. Unfortunately there are problems that continually plague the philosophy of community policing. Some of the largest obstacles that police organizations face with the community policing program are the initial implementation and understanding of community policing, the ability to change and adapt to the new format of policing, and the acceptance.As part  reform programs, State police of Latvia seek to introduce community policing. There is no clear or consistent definition of what constitutes a community policing programme. However, most community policing initiatives aim to improve relations between the police and residents, engage community members or civic organizations in evaluation of police services, and expand information sharing. Community policing control activities are not always linked to police reform initiatives; somestimes the two activities occur simultaneously in isolation on each other. There have been more increasing attempts to link or find synergies between control initiatives and realised programs, especially (community-based) weapons collection programs and disarmament and demobilization projects. Policing reform has been a rather neglected area of security sector reform that has been addressed on an ad hoc basis. Some analysts see the need to reduce the number of firearms in circulation as a way to improve public security, and thus training in the management of safeguarding police stockpiles, keeping accurate inventories of weapons and appropriate weapons handling need to be reinforced.Public safety cannot be taken for granted. It can only be achieved not only through the professionalism of our finest, but through successful collaboration with their neighboring counterparts as well. They all deserve our respect and gratitude, and not calumny and frivolous criticisms.


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