engleski

Community Policing Strategy in Croatia: What Do We Know and What Do We Not Know After 15 Years of Implementation?

Purpose: This paper presents an overview of the most important community policing research in Croatia, including the most recent one comparing police officers’ attitudes towards community policing before adoption of the community policing strategy in 2002, and at the beginning of 2016, as well as the level of implementation of community policing in Croatia from the police organization’s point of view in 2003 and 2016. Methods: A representative sample of 500 Croatian police officers from six police administrations participated in the 2002 and 2016 surveys. The respondents evaluated the level of implementation of community policing in Croatia from the police organization’s point of view through a checklist, which includes relevant sets of indicators of the implementation of community policing at the organizational level. Findings: Despite obvious difficulties with the implementation of community policing, today, police officers in Croatia consider the community policing model as really necessary and desirable both before the introduction of the community policing strategy (2002), as well as at the beginning of the implementation of community policing (2003). It is also interesting that some vulnerable populations like Roma in Croatia perceive the quality of police contact much better than the majority of the Croatian population. Limitations: Some of the presented community policing surveys in Croatia have been conducted on small samples of respondents, particularly those that were aimed at obtaining data on Croatian citizens’ perception of community policing. Originality: This paper summarizes the results of the most important published and unpublished community policing evaluations in Croatia. The paper also, for the first time, presents comparisons between the very beginnings of community policing in Croatia and the present level of community policing implementation in Croatia.

Croatia; community policing; evaluation; police attitudes; public perceptions

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