A Comparative Study on Awareness towards Community POLICING, Socio-Depending on Demographic Characteristics of the Police in KOREA

Abstract

Community policing has been accepted as new paradigm of policing in many countries, including the United States, JAPAN, U.K., FRANCE. In KOREA, there has also been a growing awareness towards importance of community policing, and efforts have been made to adopt and establish community policing. However, community policing has not yet been fully established. Therefore, the study intended to compare differences in awareness towards community policing based on socio-demographic characteristics of the police as part of measures to establish community policing. In order to achieve such objectives of this study, the study set the community policing awareness factors as the goals and entity of community policing. Survey was conducted to the life safety departments, patrol divisions, and precinct stations of the police stations in Seoul, Gyeonggi-do, Incheon. The results were examined for statistical analysis such as t-test and ANOVA using the SPSS21.0, a statistical program. The results of analysis showed that the objectives of community policing showed a significant differences only in 4 items, i.e., age of police officers, local administrative districts in service, type of local urban area in service, and working period of police officers. The entity of community policing was found to show a significant difference in 5 items, i.e., gender, age, local administrative districts in service, type of local urban area in service, and organization in service. Among the items that showed a significant difference, the 3 times, i.e., age, local administrative districts in service, and type of local urban area in service were found to be common to community policing awareness factors. By age, extent of awareness was higher in those in their 20s and 40s than in those in their 50s. Meanwhile, those serving in Incheon had higher extent of awareness in terms of the 2 factors in connection with local administrative districts in service. Moreover, extent of awareness was higher in industrial regions and agricultural/fishery regions in connection with type of local urban area in service. Based on that, various types of programs need to be developed to improve awareness towards community policing, depending on working environment, region of work and age of the police officers, in order to increase awareness towards community policing. In addition, right community policing should take root through improvement of awareness towards community policing by the police force.