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Contemporary police strategies of crime control in U.S. and China: a comparative study

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Abstract

This study takes a comparative approach to examining the contemporary police change in controlling crime in American and China. We attempt to achieve two primary objectives. First, we critically evaluate American and Chinese police innovations including the theoretical framework, police operations, and associated effectiveness. Second, we attempt to identify the utility of innovative strategies that can be shared by both sides. Five innovative strategies adopted by American police agencies in the past 25 years are summarized and reviewed. On the other side, the primary strategy utilized in crime control is Chinese style of community policing. After comparison of the policing strategies in the two countries, it is self evident that the implementation of community policing in China is broader and more in-depth than American police. Chinese police organizations can benefit from the implementation of problem-oriented policing accumulated from their American counterpart. Finally, we argue that hot spots policing and predictive policing do not have significant utility in the Chinese setting.

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Notes

  1. There are other reforms that happened during the last quarter of the 20th century such as the structural reform in American police organizations (e.g., [31]) and the improvement of police-community relations under the philosophy of coproduction of order (e.g., [63]). These reforms attempt to regain the legitimacy of American police among citizens. In addition, making use of public survey to tap into citizens’ attitudes toward the police is another important area of reform (for a comprehensive review: Cao, [8]). In this study, we focus on the police innovations of crime control.

  2. The primary reason to group these innovative strategies together is that the level and intensity of these strategies are not as in-depth and comprehensive as community policing which calls for a complete overhaul of previous police practices [35]. The selection of these five strategies is largely based on the literature of American police on crime control. POP is extensively discussed (e.g., [18]) as well as Hotspots policing (e.g., [4]). Intelligence-led policing emerged as an effective means of crime control because it uses data to determine the deployment of police personnel [24]. Predictive policing is another strategy that depends on the use of statistical analysis of data [2].

  3. It is important to note that community policing in China also plays other important functions such as social control and information gathering based on mass line participation [67]. This review only focuses on crime control.

  4. The name of the neighborhood organization that provides the assistance to the police may vary from the neighborhood committee to volunteer center or peace volunteers. They represent the same concept of provision of services related to keep peace and order in a neighborhood.

  5. It is important to note that not all police departments in China are implementing all four strategies. Some of them may use one or two. The two authors note that these four strategies represent the direction of future policing, using the community policing as the starting point [46, 59].

  6. Violent crimes were the cases in which the offenders were sentenced to more than 5 years of prison sentence including life sentence and death sentence.

  7. Violent crimes include rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault recorded from National Crime Victimization Survey.

  8. It is important to note that the official data of police arrests and crime represent the crime events and arrests recorded by the police but they may not reflect the extent of delinquent behaviors unobserved by the police. Therefore, we also used results derived from the self-administered surveys to capture that [48].

  9. The high crime area in China often means the border area between urban and rural areas or city business circles without a clearly defined geographic location similar to the concept of hot spots in U. S (e.g., street segments). In addition, Chinese relevant research on high crime areas tends to focus on the identification of the causes of the high crime area and then a discussion of geographic locations of the area. Though a few studies that identified the location of high crime areas, the discussion is limited to the formation of crime events and is not involved with the assessment of police intervention like hotspots research in U.S. [53]. This is different from Hotspots research reported in U.S. that attempts to locate the hotspots primarily based on previous crime events [66].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shanghai Police College, 100 Chongjing Road, Pudong District, Shanghai, China, 200137

    Liang Wang

  2. Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, College of Criminal Justice, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, 77341, USA

    Jihong Solomon Zhao

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  1. Liang Wang
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Correspondence to Jihong Solomon Zhao.

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Wang, L., Zhao, J.S. Contemporary police strategies of crime control in U.S. and China: a comparative study. Crime Law Soc Change 66, 525–537 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-016-9641-7

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