The chicken or the egg? The relationship between COP funding and COP research

Abstract

We investigate the stability of community oriented policing (COP) as a mainstay of police research within the context of fluctuations in federal funding between 1995 and 2007. Using time-series analyses, we found an increase in the proportion of COP publications before funding suggesting the popularity of COP may have been one contribution to the perceived need for research funding. COP publications began to decline in 2005, corresponding to the earlier declining trend in funding. Policymakers may be using research to inform program-related funding decisions, but researcher interest in COP appears less tied to funding.

Keywords:

• community oriented policing
• federal funding
• police
• police literature review
• problem oriented policing

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Editor and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the original submitted manuscript. The authors also extend special thanks to Dr Jean McGloin, Brad Bartholomew, and Stephanie Pratt for comments on a draft of this paper, David Buchanan of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, US Department of Justice, for providing the annual COPS budget data, and Dr Jennifer Varriale Carson and Mathew R. Gugino for their assistance on an earlier version of this paper presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Atlanta, Georgia.

Notes

1. The future of COP-related publications and funding for this major policing innovation is not clear. COP has remained one of the dominant categories of the policing literature for many years, and continues to have a presence even as funding declines. As demonstrated with NIJ funding, a clear categorization of COP-related projects may taper off and, in the case of NIJ, no longer exist, but the work being conducted is still related to COP and within the realm of the intentions of COP. It will be interesting to watch the evolution of the policing literature for changes given the recent elimination of the COPS program for 2012.

2. In the 2007 published policing literature, the most popular topic was ‘policing and society’. The drastic drop in proportion of community policing research may be due to the subjective nature of the ‘Trends’ reviews or – we think – changes in funding.

3. NIJ began funding terrorism research (‘counterterrorism technologies’) in 1998, around the same time there was a large drop in COP funding (COP funding declined from about $7 million in 1997 to about $2 million in 1998).

4. COPS funding decreased from a peak of $1.63 billion dedicated to practitioners in 1998 to under $350 million in 2008 (Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 2008; see also Evans & Owens, 2007) and steadily decreased from $15 million awarded by NIJ to researchers in 1995 to less than $500,000 in 2007.

5. A total of 1056 abstracts were part of such compilations. Unfortunately, we were unable to obtain the abstracts – or the actual source – to code the chapters from 24 compilations (five compilations were clustered in 1996 and another five were published in 2000, accounting for almost half of the ‘non-locatable’ compilation abstracts). Accordingly, each entire compilation was counted as only one publication, instead of counting each individual chapter as separate publications. This decreases the total sample size of the policing literature reviewed in this piece.

6. In 2009, the COPS office published an updated taxonomy of community oriented policing (Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 2009). This taxonomy overlaps with the 2007 taxonomy. The 2009 taxonomy contains the following categories: organizational transformation, problem solving, and community partnerships. These three main elements are consistent with the main elements in the 2007 taxonomy. The 2007 taxonomy was used for this study because it is broader and allows for a more nuanced assessment of the literature.

7. We resolved the discrepancies by reviewing each duplicate and its abstract and making a joint, final decision about the appropriate code.

8. We also plotted the two funding sources separately to examine their independent relationships between funding and publications (data not shown). The patterns observed remain unchanged from that displayed in Figure 2 because NIJ funding is substantially less than COPS funding.

9. This would be particularly true for more rigorous research designs like survey/correlate or outcome evaluations and less applicable to thought or descriptive pieces.