Police and Policing

A contributed work, this new book looks at the most recent knowledge of American policing and law enforcement research. The opening section of the book focuses on the issues concerning the policy as individuals, including the educational level of police officers, and how this has impacted on the performance of officers and the abilities of agencies to reach their goals. Issues concerning college and policing, the role of women and policing, and the use of psychological testing for the selection of police are explored. The book's second section looks at and reviews traditional approaches to policing. Topics cover, for example, the results of the Kansas City Preventative Patrol Experiment--perhaps the most well known and most controversial of police experiments. Other topics in this section include the range of activities that police actually do while on patrol, as well as the latest research by England's Home Office on how cases are solved by investigators.

Section three of the volume focuses on the experimental methods of policing currently being tried around the country. The next section looks at policing the police, and gives the reader an opportunity to think about the ethical issues and the problems of controlling police power in a free society. The social implications of covert police actions are considered, and personal accounts of the individual impacts are provided in this section. The fifth section of the volume, focuses on citizen involvement in the law enforcement process, and important questions about citizen effectiveness and control are analyzed. Finally, the last section of the book looks at major issues of police management. This book is ideal for anyone interested in current issues in American policing and law enforcement.

DENNIS JAY KENNEY is the Project Director for the Police Foundation in Washington, D.C. He was formerly an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln as well as Director of Research and Planning for the Savannah, Georgia Police Department. Dr Kenney's articles on criminal justice have appeared in both scholarly journals and the popular press. He is also the author of Crime, Fear, and New York City Subways, a Praeger Book.