Promoting a Service Culture for Community Policing in Thailand

DOI10.1350/ijps.7.1.24.63493
Date01 March 2005
Published date01 March 2005
Subject MatterArticle
Promoting a service culture for community
policing in Thailand
Sarit Puthpongsiripornand Truong Quang
Rathaburi Provincial Police, 213 Amarin Road, Rathaburi, Thailand, 70000. Tel: (66–32)
338–991; Fax (66–32) 337–195; email: sarit_p51@hotmail.com
(Corresponding author) School of Management, Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand,
PO Box 4, Klongluang, Pathum Thani, 12120, Thailand. Tel: (66–2) 524–6016; Fax: (66–2)
524–5667; email: qtruong@ait.ac.th
Received 28 April 2004; revised and accepted 20 May 2004
Sarit Puthpongsiriporn
obtained his PhD from
the School of Management, Asian Institute of
Technology, Thailand. He is a captain in the Thai
Royal Police, Thailand.
Truong Quang
is Associate Professor in Human
Resource Management and Organisational
Behaviour at the School of Management, Asian
Institute of Technology. He is Coordinator of the
EMBA-HRM Programme.
A
BSTRACT
This paper examines the relevance of cultivating
a service-oriented culture in the police organisa-
tions as a promoting force to the successful
implementation of community policing. A survey
was conducted with 656 police off‌icers working
in metropolitan police divisions of the Royal
Thai Police, which has been selectively imple-
menting community policing, to address the
issue. The f‌indings show that three out of the
seven dimensions of service culture values corre-
late positively with the extent of community
policing commitment. Specif‌ically, the more the
police exhibit the values of service quality,
service orientation, and external communication,
the more they demonstrate their commitment
to the practice of community policing. Drawing
on the survey f‌indings, the paper makes several
recommendations on the use of service culture to
facilitate the implementation of community
policing.
INTRODUCTION
In the last decade, many police organisa-
tions around the world have decided to shift
toward community policing. This kind of
policing promotes cooperation between the
police and citizens and rearranges police
priorities by putting greater emphasis on
the service dimension of police work.
Although this new policing is claimed to be
the most suitable solution to deal with the
need to raise public expectation and to deal
with grievances, many researchers argue
that community policing has rarely been
implemented successfully. Instead, commu-
nity policing is thought by many to be little
more than a theoretical exercise (Seagrave,
1996). The police still hold on to traditional
methods of working, such as working as
crime f‌ighters.
This failure is attributed to the fact that
the key components of police organisations,
which are essential to community policing,
especially the impact of police culture, have
not been aligned with the new policing
(Hancock, 2001). When looking at the
concept of police culture one quickly f‌inds
International Journal of Police Science & Management Volume 7 Number 1
International Journal of Police
Science and Management,
Vol. 7 No. 1, 2005, pp. 24–35.
© Vathek Publishing,
1461–3557
Page 24

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