Can community policing increase residents’ informal social control? Testing the impact of the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy

Abstract

This study examines whether community policing can build informal social control. Specifically, this paper assesses the impact of the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) in Chicago neighborhoods. The data for this research are drawn from both the Community Survey of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) and the CAPS Prototype Panel Survey. Bivariate and multivariate methods are used to analyze data gathered from 8782 residents nested within 343 neighborhood clusters. Initially, community policing was found to increase informal social control, but this effect was rendered non-significant after controlling for theoretically and empirically relevant variables. Several social (dis)organization variables, as well as satisfaction with policing services, yielded significant effects in a multilevel regression model. Further analysis found that the community policing effect on informal social control was mediated through satisfaction with the police. These findings indicate indirect support for the ability of community policing to build informal social control and suggest that general satisfaction with the police is important to neighborhood crime control strategies.

Keywords:

• Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy
• community policing
• informal social control

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to express our appreciation to the anonymous reviewers and journal editor for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript. This version has been considerably improved because of their efforts.

Notes

1. One reason why Renauer’s (2007) study may have failed to find a relationship between community policing and informal social control is due to his methodology. His data collection utilized one neighborhood informant per neighborhood to provide an assessment of neighborhood social climate and police-resident relationships. He also used OLS regression to examine neighborhood social control, which is not able to detect both between-neighborhood and within-neighborhood variation in informal social control.

2. It should be noted that while similar to the concept of collective efficacy, informal social control is only half of the collective efficacy equation (Ansari, 2013; Sampson et al., 1997). Collective efficacy has often been defined as social cohesion combined with a willingness to intervene on behalf of the community (i.e., informal social control). In a supplemental analysis, we created a collective efficacy measure by combining these two variables. We re-ran the analyses with this new collective efficacy measure as the dependent variable, and the results were substantively similar.

3. Multicollinearity–statistical associations between the independent variables–can be an issue when estimating multiple regression models. According to Allison (1999), researchers should begin to become concerned when Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) statistics are greater than 2.50. As illustrated by the correlation coefficients in Table 3 and the VIF statistics in Table 4, multicollinearity was not an issue within these analyses.