Issues of Citizen Involvement in Policing

People ask four things of police: to relieve fear and risk of crime, to manage disputes, to provide services, and to be accountable. Here the meeting of each of these objects is modeled as a subsystem of police/citizen interaction. Properly modeled, these four subsystems become isomorphic, or complementary. Taken together, the models provide a vision of how police and citizens can work together to give citizens greater control over their own disputes. While the vision may be quite different from current American police practice, the vision provides a blueprint for progress toward improved police-community relations and crime control.