A paper describing a "new professionalism" in U.S. policing is being developed by Christopher Stone of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Stone discussed the effort yesterday at the National Institute of Justice's annual conference in Crystal City, Va. As outlined by Stone, the professionalism model is consistent with community policing but is intended to be a broader mandate for how police leaders should operate. Stone and Travis say the "new professionalism" includes four major elements: accountability, public legitimacy, innovation, and "national coherence."
Stone suggested that coherence is a way to apply good policing principles across a nation where law enforcement is "fractured" among more than 18,000 agencies. Ronald Davis, police chief of East Palo Alto, Calif., observed at the conference that the new theory of police leadership is welcome, in part because in the current era of tight fiscal constraints, "we need to take community policing to a new level." The Stone-Travis paper is being produced under the auspices of NIJ and the Harvard Executive Session on policing. It is not yet publicly available but is due to be released in September.
