| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Power, he argues, is heavily concentrated at the top of the police department structure in terms of decision-making, while ‘beat cops’ have little power to take decisions in their jobs and must comply with standard responses to crime. Community policing practices, however, require that police officers have enough decision-making power to be able to call in other kinds of resources present in the wider community and that police officers have the power to decide how they will police a situation from a range of possible options. Implementing community policing, Cartner argues, would necessitate the restructuring and redistribution of power in police departments that are already highly resilient to structural changes of any kind (Cartner, 2000; see also Guyot, 1979; Skolnick & Bayley, 1986, p. 211).
The apparent unwillingness of the Grayville police department to implement practices that would accompany strong rhetorical commitments to the community policing philosophy is also the result of a current funding crisis in Australian policing funding generally and in Grayville particularly. In a letter published in the internally circulated Police Journal, Superintendent Fred Trueman, who is highly respected within the Grayville department, especially by general duty and patrol officers who have the most public contact, has argued that the gap between proactive rhetoric and reactive poling action has not gone unnoticed or unpunished by members of the public. Trueman (2000, pp. 6–7) points out that the costs of implementing proactive community programmes are as immediately apparent as those involved with ‘reactive’ policing programmes, but their benefits are far vaguer, more difficult to statistically validate and typically occur as future, rather than immediate, effects. Reactive policing, however, generates an immediately tangible set of products, which evidence its efficiency at dealing with crime. The greatest of all these products is, of course, arrest, which is usually accompanied by a ‘crime cleared’ classification if the arrest proves an appropriate or correct one. Incarceration and court costs are potential future costs that governments bear as a result of arrests, but these costs do not precede the tangible arrest product. Governments under economic pressure are faced with a decision to choose between the immediate and easily identifiable costs and diffuse and vague future benefits of community policing programmes on the one hand and the clear-cut benefits and deferred costs of reactive policing’s primary product of arrest on the other. According to Trueman’s (2000) letter to the Police Journal, the choice has been easy: