The Changing Nature of Communities: Implications for Police and Community Policing

Clearly, the concept of community is intrinsic to community policing. But few criminological or policing works go beyond recognising that communities are a complex phenomenon (or, indeed, phenomena). Little consideration is given as to how exactly communities have changed over time and how, in response, community policing has had to change and adapt. This chapter is a modest attempt at filling this gap. It will briefly survey the evolution of communities as social entities and show how their changing characteristics have impacted on police work. Building on a comprehensive and modern typology of communities, how police have adapted their understandings of community policing to recognise and work with these modern realities will be explored.