Police Consolidation in the United States:The Never Ending Debate-fiscal Imperatives versus Political Agendas and Public Policy Implications
Some 23 years ago a cross-cultural study of centralized police services examined those programs as they existed in the US, the United Kingdom and in Germany from efficiency and effectiveness perspectives (Meine, 199025).Despite a number of unresolved questions about the efficacy of Americas extremely localized and decentralized administrative model, that study suggested that efficiency and effectiveness of police services was not greatly influenced by the level of centralization.With the socio-economic times having now changed significantly in the ensuing years and within the contemporary context of strained public resources, the question of consolidating police services or contracting for them has emerged once again as a topic of both scholarly interest and pragmatic concerns.This time, however, the question appears to be considerably less about the effectiveness of such services, and considerably more about the need for fiscal responsibility.With the authors recent and firsthand experiences with this contentious process on the local level providing the impetus, this paper looks at the question of police consolidation and contracting for police services by examining experiences and efforts in a number of communities who, in response to increasingly difficult economic times, are proactively seeking to balance the mandate to control spending with the traditional imperative to maintain local control of police services and suggests an appropriate next step in the efforts to resolve this rapidly escalating public administration phenomenon.
Police consolidation Contracting police services Local control Politics vs.Fiscal restraints Police effectiveness
Manfred F.Meine Thomas P.Dunn
Master of Public Administration Program,Department of Political Science,College of Arts and Sciences Department of Sociology,College of Arts and Sciences,Troy University,Troy,Alabama,USA,36082
国际会议
2013 International Conference on Public Administration (9th)(2013年第九届公共管理国际会议)
南非
英文
391-400
2013-10-31（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）