Issues in Policing

An introduction to research on the police, both basic research and applied, evaluative research. Since police discretion was discovered in the 1950s, basic research has focused on factors that explain the discretionary use (and abuse) of police authority, and particularly on factors that would signify bias in police decision-making, and also on the mechanisms by which police may be held accountable to the public. Evaluative research, beginning with the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment in the 1970s, has been concerned with estimating the effects of programmatic and tactical innovations on social conditionssuch as crime, fear of crime, satisfaction with police services and quality of life.