Community Policing: Comparative Aspects of Community-Oriented Police Work.

Edited by D. Dolling and T. Feltes (Holzkirchen: Felix Verlag, 1993. 205 pp. DM44.)

Dolling and Feltes' book is a modest contribution to comparative research in policing, with chapters on Germany, the US, Holland, Britain, Ireland, Belgium, Austria, Japan, Poland, and Hungary, as well as conceptual chapters. Clumsy writing and sloppy editing (the chapter on Japan is absent from the table of contents) will not deter readers interested in its focus on transferring community policing (CP) to European countries. Unfortunately the editors' introduction has little to do with CP and nor do several of the chapters. Kruissink on Holland appears to have nothing to do with CP, being concerned with measures of police performance, Kube on planning the police organization says little about CP, and the chapters on Ireland talk past the topic as well, one of them being about probation.

The truism that CP is no panacea underscores Kerner on the constraints on crime prevention (organized crime, white collar and environmental crime are particularly unlikely targets for CP). To many, Jager's argument that the public has a role in routine policing will be familiar orthodoxy. That it needs saying for a continental European readership reveals more about differences in the legal and social role of policing than anything else. It falls to Jack Greene to rehearse the potential benefits of CP. Critics see these as fiddling at the margins: reduced fear of crime, increased j ob satisfaction for officers, better police/public relations are all as nothing if CP fails to curb crime and pacify the ghetto. Those who find such criticism misplaced will enjoy Greene on the linkages between such ameliorations and a lower crime rate, but despite offering an …