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12 Just. Q. 695 (1995)
Community Policing against Guns: Public Opinion of the Kansas City Gun Experiment

handle is hein.journals/jquart12 and id is 705 raw text is: COMMUNITY POLICING AGAINST GUNS: PUBLIC OPINION OF THE KANSAS CITY GUN EXPERIMENT* JAMES W. SHAW** The University of Texas-Pan American Sherman and Rogan report that proactive patrols focused on firearm recovery reduced gun crimes significantly in Kansas City. Regardless of the strategy's potential for reducing crime, however, its value will be limited if the price of success is community hostility to the police. Using a pre/post quasi-experimental design, this research examines the community reaction to police efforts in Kansas City. The findings show that the community was aware of the enhanced policing, that proactive police methods, generally, received strong support, and that residents perceived an improvement in the quality of life in the experimental neighborhood. Although the findings do not address the views of persons stopped by police patrolling hot spots of gun crime, they suggest that residents of communities suffering high rates of gun crime welcome intensive police efforts against guns. Over the last decade, Americans have been besieged with con- stant reports of firearm crime wreaking havoc on their streets. These reports range from accounts such as the execution-style mur- der by fellow gang members of 11-year-old Robert Sandifer, who himself was wanted by Chicago police for the murder of a 14-year- old girl the previous month (LEN 1994:8) to reports of errant gun- fire taking the lives of innocent bystanders. In Fresno, California, in late 1994, an 11-year-old girl was struck by gunfire as she took out the trash; an eight-year-old boy was shot in the head as bullets whizzed through his home; and another young child was grazed on the back as she and her family cowered on the floor trying to escape flying bullets (LEN 1995:1). Such incidents have led the FBI to con- clude that every American now has a realistic chance of murder * The author is grateful to Dr. Lawrence W. Sherman and the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department for making this research possible. The research was supported in part by Grant 91-DD-CX-K056 to the University of Maryland-College Park from the National Institute of Justice, Washington, DC. Opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author and not necessarily those of Department of Justice nor the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department. ** The final revision of this paper at the time of the author's death was com- pleted by Amy Patterson, Jon Sorenson, and Lawrence W. Sherman. JUSTICE QUARTERLY, Vol. 12 No. 4, December 1995 © 1995 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences

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