Community policing from the ‘bottom-up’ in Sarajevo Canton

Abstract

This article analyses the implementation of a Swiss community policing model in Sarajevo Canton, Bosnia-Herzegovina. It accounts for how officers from one community policing unit were able to facilitate cultural legitimation for their community policing role within their sector by linking it to established, subcultural definitions of police work. This was achieved through the officers' interactions with colleagues and supervisors as well as their partnership-building activities in the community. The difficulty experienced by a second unit which attempted to replicate their success further indicates that rank-and-file police officers may also represent an obstacle to ‘bottom-up’ reform. The article makes a contribution to a growing body of research on police reform in developing and transitional countries by providing empirical support for the idea that the agency of enthusiastic and perceptive officers can act as a mechanism for cultural transformation. This in turn may establish a foundation for developing contextually appropriate models for locally responsive policing in developing and transitional countries.

Keywords:

• community policing
• police reform
• police culture
• agency

Acknowledgements

Previous drafts of this paper were presented at the Welsh Centre for Crime and Social Justice Conference (2013) and the European Society of Criminology Conference (2013). The research was supported by a studentship from the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh. The ethnographic field work was made possible by institutional support from UNDP and the Ministry of the Interior for Sarajevo Canton. The author wishes to thank Andy Aitchison, Alan Clarke, Chris Harding, Alistair Henry and Nathan Pino for their comments on previous drafts of this paper. He would also like to thank the editor Jenny Fleming, the anonymous reviewers and his PhD examiners Trevor Jones and Richard Sparks for their comments and suggestions. Finally, he would like to thank Adnan Fazlic for his support in the field.

Notes

1. The data yield consisted of 30,000 words of field notes including the author's observations, ethnographic interviews with officers from RPZ1 and RPZ2 and personal reflections. Interviewees included the station commanders for both units (n = 2), members of other RPZ units working based in different sectors in the Canton (n = 3),the Canton's designated ‘RPZ Coordinator’, a project associate from the SDC and a member of the project's external evaluation team.

2. I searched English-language scholarly databases and asked fellow researchers from BiH to search local academic libraries for any Serbo-Croat resources on policing in the former-Yugoslavia. The only Serbo-Croat reference that I have located on policing in the former Yugoslavia (pre-1991) was an National Criminal Justice Reference Service Abstract for Anzic (1992). The abstract indicates that the article describes the repressive function of high policing in Yugoslavia but I was unable to access the full text.

3. Prior to liberalisation, public policing was overseen by the Federal Secretariat of the Interior. The six constituent republics of the SFRY included the Socialist Republics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.

4. I encountered anecdotal evidence of this historical aversion to police contact during an interview with a senior police officer in Sarajevo. The officer suggested that even today, older generations in BiH continue to mistrust the police because they associate sector-based policing with neighbourhood policing styles of the Yugoslav era (‘Station Supervisor’, personal communication, 4 Apr 2011).

5. This is not to suggest that an objective benchmark or threshold exists for measuring the ‘democratic’ character of this institution, rather that it was not intended to be ‘democratic’ and nor does the limited anecdotal evidence suggest that it was viewed as democratic by citizens of the SFRY or prominent Western political scientists of the era like Rummel (1997) who associated the RBD with ‘democide’.

6. A more expansive list of subcultural values that are commonly associated with the rank-and file is provided by Fielding (1994, p. 47):‘(i) aggressive, physical action; (ii) a strong sense of competitiveness and preoccupation with the imagery of conflict; (iii) exaggerated heterosexual orientations, often articulated in terms of misogynistic and patriarchal attitudes towards women; and (iv) the operation of rigid in-group/out-group distinctions whose consequences are strongly exclusionary in the case of out groups and strongly assertive of loyalty and affinity in the case of in-groups’. This list is for the most part consistent with that provided by Reiner (2010) as well as the themes of ‘danger and authority’ and ‘masculinity’ which have been identified by Skolnick (1966) and Herbert (2001), respectively.

7. The differences between ‘street cop culture’ and ‘management cop culture’ are well documented, but it is important to consider that there may exist some important commonalities between the two. In other words, the subcultural values that are used by the rank-and-file officers to construct their role are familiar to management cops who, in the vast majority of police organisations, were once themselves rank-and-file officers. While their understanding of police work is likely to have changed due to the nature of their role, it must be acknowledged that police managers may also prove resistant to changes that are perceived to be a threat to the romanticised values.

8. The 10 most significant challenges to implementing community policing identified by Mastrofski et al. (2007, p. 227) include: ‘getting sufficient resources to do CP right’; ‘'getting the support of rank-and-file officers’; ‘meeting calls for service demands and conducting criminal investigations while doing CP’; ‘getting officers to accept a greater role for the community in setting police priorities, shaping policies, and assessing results’; ‘getting rank-and-file officers to try innovative approaches to problem-solving’; ‘getting accurate data on the CP performance of officers’; ‘getting middle managers to take the initiative of solving problems’; ‘getting the support of middle managers’; ‘getting officers to accept the importance of dealing with problems that the community thinks are most important’ and ‘getting officers to take the initiative of solving problems’. Further down their list, Mastrofski et al. (2007, p. 227) identify the four main ‘external’ challenges to implementing community policing reforms: ‘overcoming the objections of the union when changes are required’; ‘getting the support of the community’; ‘getting cooperation from other organizations’ and ‘getting the support of elected/appointed officials’.

9. Like RPZ1, this unit was composed of young, enthusiastic officers who volunteered for the RPZ role. Members of this newly established unit shadowed the officers from RPZ1 as part of their training, which explains why they exhibited similar attitudes about implementing the model.

10. Previous work by Pino (2001, pp. 202–203) describes the emphasis on trust-building in community policing as ‘social capital-building’.

11. Research by Wycoff and Skogan (1994) supports the idea that participatory management and operational autonomy can have a significant positive impact on the receptiveness of community police officers themselves to change and the extent to which they perceive the significance of their work.

12. Elsewhere referred to as ‘betting shops’ in the UK.

13. Approximately15,000 EUR.

14. This was confirmed during a follow-up interview with one of the unit's shift supervisors who observed that members of the public who were familiar with community policing were more willing to come forward with information to RPZ officers than patrol officers because they trusted them to protect their identity (interview, RPZ1 shift supervisor).

15. This study does not sufficiently account for the question of sustainability as this would require longitudinal research. As an exploratory study, it does highlight a number of potential threats to sustainability including the effects of promotion or retirement of highly capable RPZ officers, leadership changes, budgetary constraints and the lack of formal recognition for the RPZ role within the MUP KS Regulation of the Job Classification document. The latter concern was subsequently addressed by the MUP KS and the RPZ role was officially recognised by the Sarajevo Canton Police in July 2011 (Pekic 2011).

16. Insofar as the sector was home to numerous international organisations as well as government agencies and commercial premises, one might even question whether it could even be accurately described as a ‘community’.