| Police departments across the United States are adopting community policing. In a recent paper Parks and Mastrofski reported that 75 percent of police chiefs in a large, representative sample of departments reported being relatively far along in implementing this "new paradigm." What are they implementing, and from whom do they learn what community policing implementation means? This paper reports diffusion patterns in community policing, drawing upon responses from some 1,800 chief executives who were asked which departments were particularly influential in helping them structure their community policing implementation. I hypothesize that we may trace various styles of implementation back to a small set of "source" departments that by reputation or by proselytizing influence community policing in many more agencies. |
Updated 05/20/2006