The Level Of Officer Commitment Towards Community Policing Criminology

Commitment has continued to gain prominence in all human organizations. Organization managers and researchers have been keen to study the relationships that exist between commitment to organization and strategy as well productivity and efficiency. Community policing came to police organizations around the world as a promising new program which is cable of improving law enforcement, reducing crime rate in the society and addressing the deteriorating police-community relations. Community policing have widely gained acceptance both philosophically and practically by many police organizations around the world, nevertheless questions still remain as to the extent to which it has been accepted and if all police officers who are at the lower level saddled with the responsibility of implementing it are committed to the program. This study is therefore interested in examining the commitment of Malaysian police towards community policing, specifically, the study is going to (a) find out whether commitment of police officers in Malaysia is affected by their rank and position in the hierarchy of the organization, and (b) to determine if there is any difference in commitment of officers based on district of duty. The survey method was adopted using a questionnaire adopted from previous studies on officer commitment, a total of 197 police officers responded from three districts of Alor Gajah, Jasin and Malacca Tengah. Officers used in this study were chosen by administrative recommendation. Findings reveal that majority of police officers in Malaysia have high commitment to community policing, results from the study also showed that there is a no significant difference in commitment level by rank of officers and district of duty.

Key words: community policing, commitment, engagement