Electronic community-oriented policing : theories, contemporary efforts, and future directions / Xiaochen Hu and Nicholas P. Lovrich ; [foreword by Gary Cordner].
"Despite steady social and economic progress ever since municipal police departments were created in the early 1800s, police still get summoned in response to violence, stealing, and drunkenness, regularly coming face-to-face with human misery, much as they always have. Husbands still beat wives, adults still abuse and neglect children. The police world is still filled with danger, uncertainty, anger and deceit. Despite professionalization, modernization of police strategies, big data and sophisticated metrics, ordinary police work is still mostly routine, with hours of boredom interrupted by occasional, unpredictable moments of sheer terror. And despite substantial improvements in pay and benefits, police officers in 2020 still insist that morale is the lowest it has ever been - which is basically the same way police officers felt in the 1800s and the 1900s ... There's a critical 'force multiplier' at work that has magnified the impact of systematically recording police activity - the Internet and social media ... The authors of this book take stock of this challenging situation and emphasize an important corollary - every story has two sides and social media is a double-edged sword. Social media is here to stay and has become one of the main ingredients of digital citizenship and digital democracy. Democratic policing has always needed to engage people where they live and work and communicate - today, all of that increasingly occurs online. Consequently, police need to respond when social media conveys false or incomplete information, and they need to use social media in a systematic, proactive, responsible way to enhance public safety and public trust. Many police agencies have already figured this out, as illustrated by examples throughout this book. Professors Hu and Lovrich have taken a careful look at current practices adopted by law enforcement agencies and they also offer many suggestions for expanding what they term 'electronic community-oriented policing' (E-COP). Both practitioners and scholars will find a wealth of information in the book about one of the newest and fastest-evolving dimensions of policing and police administration" --from the foreword.
Series:
Policing perspectives and challenges in the twenty-first century
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.