Community policing in the United States

Abstract

Sixteen years after the establishment of the first paid police force in London, the first police force in the United States was organized in New York City in 1845. Since then, police forces flourished in American urban and rural areas alike. The roots of the relationship between police and community in the United States can be traced to the Bill of Rights, to the Peel policing model that emphasized moral and democratic principles and to the English police tradition with its emphasis on the importance of service (Das, 1986). Unlike England and Israel, and to some extent Canada, the American police is as diverse and multi-faceted as is the American governmental system.¹ In addition to the federal police forces such as the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the office of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the US Customs Inspection, the US Postal Inspection, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) inspection and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) inspection, there are independent state, county and city police forces, state patrol and sheriff departments. There is also a multitude of other specialized police forces such as university on-campus forces and a growing absolute and relative number of private security forces in hotels, shopping malls, city blocks and high security residential and business buildings.