2023 CJAG Conference

We are less than two months away from the 2023 CJAG Conference. Please join us on Thursday, October 5 and Friday, October 6, 2023 at the University of North Georgia. Thursday morning’s events include a parallel POST session offering three hours of educational credit, and Georgia licensed attorneys can receive three hours of continuing legal education credit.

Join CJAG Past Presidents and current officers for a cocktail hour Thursday evening following the conference presentations and before dinner. It’s a great, casual way to meet other attendees.

A block of rooms has been reserved at the Holiday Inn Express & Suites Dahlonega – University Area, 32 East Main Street, Dahlonega, Georgia 30533.  Telephone:  706-707-8000. 

Abstracts of presentations should be submitted no later than September 6, 2023.

The early bird discounted registration rate runs through September 13, 2023. Conference fees, inclusive of annual dues, are:

  • $25 for students
  • $90 for faculty and professionals registering by September 13; $110 thereafter

  • Click on one of these links to pay conference fees online:

Click here to download a form and pay conference fees via mail.

We hope to see you in Dahlonega Thursday, October 5 and Friday, October 6, 2023

2020 CJAG Conference

Dear CJAG Members,
The executive board met last week to discuss the 2020 conference. The health and safety of our members are important. Given the confluence of the current pandemic and anticipated reductions in 2020-2021 budgets across our college and university communities, we decided to cancel the in-person two-day conference and are developing a one-day online conference. We believe this virtual conference will provide more professional development opportunities for you and your students.
As of now the 2020 Criminal Justice Association of Georgia (CJAG) will be held virtually on October 9, 2020, please save the date. This year’s conference theme is “The Importance of Ethics in Justice,” The keynote speaker, is Chief Jason Armstrong, recently appointed Chief in Ferguson, MO. Chief Armstrong is a graduate of Columbus State University and also served as interim chief of police in Forest Park, GA.

The executive board believes in and encourages students’ participation in the annual conference. To promote student engagement and scholarship, the board has devoted a full session to student presentations this year. As you may recall, last year, the board established a student poster session competition and will again host the student poster competition. We are asking you to encourage presentations from your students and practitioners in the field. If we bring all these groups together, we should have an excellent forum for dialogue involving the academe, practitioners, and professionals in the field.

The call for abstracts is available on our website (www.cjag.us). The deadline for abstracts is September 4, 2020. Membership & Registration is $30 for faculty and professionals and $10 for students. Additional details will be forthcoming.

Sincerely,
Your Executive Board

What’s in it for Me? Where is the community in community policing?

March 15, 2018

What’s in it for me? 

This question seems selfish but it can be motivating question for a very altruistic aim. Believe or not, this is the question that I want community members to answer when deciding to participate in one of the central features of modern policing – Community Oriented Policing or COP.

I teach policing classes, and every time I ask students if they attend community policing meetings, no hands go up. I am not really surprised because I have attended community policing meetings myself and hardly anybody was there. Out of the one hundred thousand or so residents in the city where I attended community policing events, we’d only have a dozen people show up. At that time, I asked myself a question, “Where is the community in community policing?”

One of the major pitfalls in community policing is the lack of sustained involvement by community members. A renowned police scholar, Wesley Skogan, who studied COP in Chicago found that there was lack of participation by the community in COP programs. This finding became more troubling when he noted that communities that needed COP the most were the ones that were least involved with the COP programs. In the end, he said that community policing benefited more affluent communities. In the opposite, more disadvantaged communities don’t tend to reap the same rewards.

The community is the Key to COP

Neighbourhood Watch Area sign It has been found in research over and over again that a witness is the key to crime solution and suspect apprehension. Police cannot be everywhere all the time. The police need the eyes and ears of the community. Not only are ordinary citizens instrumental in solving crimes, the engagement of the community is also the key component to crime prevention. It is their civic action that can remove disorders in society when they paint over gang signs, provide support for the homeless, repair dilapidated homes, or simply admonish people to stop littering and loitering. This same strategy of engaging the community is even used in counter-terrorism efforts where everyone was encouraged to be on the lookout for suspicious behaviors, spawning the rise of the “If You See Something, Say Something” movement.

Using the community is an age-old principle similar to the hue and cry — a system where the person who witnesses a crime is obligated to alert everyone else. Physical cry for help has now begun to take a new form as it became digitalized with Amber Alert. This type of response is a testament to the importance of the community in the provision of safety, but why are the communities missing in community policing activities?

COP Should Be Mutually Beneficial

What’s in it for me?

I believe that answering the question in a selfish way could be a stronger motivator for someone to invest in this crime prevention and crime control effort. Community involvement in crime prevention and crime control is a huge investment of time and safety. Currently, the major benefits from COP are couched in such terms as improved quality of life, reduction of disorder in the community, less fear of crime among community members. I don’t know about you but these outcomes are too abstract. Communicating these goals this way to community members is not attractive. It does not invite a call to action.

Instead, the incentives that should creep into the individual’s psyche should be, “What’s in it for me?” Quality of life should be defined in econometric terms such as greater economic investments in the community, increased valuation in real estate property, and fewer financial and emotional losses as a result of reduced crimes. These benefits are more tangible, and tangible benefits are the language that is understood by key stakeholders of COP such as businesses, community leaders, and ordinary citizens.

The police should also be asking what’s in it for them. Community involvement should become beneficial for the police too. What’s in it for the police? They will become more efficient and effective with their job of preventing and solving crimes. For the police, community involvement will result in less time, resources, and personnel required to carry out law enforcement. More importantly, it has the potential of smoothing out strained police-community relations.

The Police are Hardly the Answer to Crime

Fishtown district in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.Police scholar Gary Cordner critiqued our tendency to rely on the police. He said that we placed too much emphasis on the police as crime control and crime prevention agents. A cursory survey of the theories on crime hardly identifies the police as the cause of crime, nor are they the solution to crime.  Criminologists have primarily blamed crime’s occurrences on social and individual shortcomings. The major catalyst for change in this situation is community members. Citizens who care to provide goods and services, mutual aid, and social control.

Policing as Self-Help

The delivery of police services has been reshaped in the last 30 years. Two renowned police scholars, David Bayley and Clifford Shearing, make the claim that the business of defining safety needs and the provision of this safety is no longer the monopoly of government. The government has, in fact, allowed the community to actively share in these two tasks. Not only are communities allowed to define the level or state of safety in their community, the community members are allowed to partake in the provisions of these safety measures through programs such as night watches or citizen patrols. In other words, the government is reverting back to the old practice of policing as a self-help endeavor. No, we are not reverting to vigilante policing. Current self-help measures where the citizens are patrolling the streets, increasing vigilance against crime, or engaging in community actions to address physical and social disorders are regulated and supervised by the police and the community themselves. Our justice system still outlaws vigilantism. Safety should be everyone’s responsibility and it should start with the individual.

New Directions

Community involvement needs to be reinvigorated. Recasting COP goals into econometric terms can potentially enhance community policing. Another major change should be to put the community at the center of this effort. Let’s start with changing the acronym COP. Subconsciously, the acronym, COP negates the centrality of the community. Instead, the acronym provides a self-serving promotion of the police (a.k.a. cops). I think these two factors are hindrances to greater community involvement with crime prevention and crime control.

We need to bring back the community in community policing. Let the community define their own safety needs and be actively involved in the provisions of this safety. Let’s make community members realize that they will benefit from community policing. Let’s make the police benefit from community policing. Sometimes, selfish motives result in altruistic results and the common good. Don’t you agree?

Melchor C. de Guzman, Ph.D. is a full professor of criminal justice and criminology whose main research involves policing, citizen participation in policing, and citizen control of the police.

2018 and 2019 Conferences Announced

A very well attended and successful 2017 CJAG conference is now in the books. We hosted our first ever Peace Officers Standards and Training Council accredited training Thursday morning. Thursday’s educational session concluded with an outstanding keynote address from Brian Owens of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole, and was followed by three separate social events. On Friday we continued with excellent presentations and the South Georgia premiere of the documentary “Released” and a panel discussion chaired by “Pete” Peterman, the United States Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia. Thanks to all the good folks at Valdosta State University for hosting the conference. Kudos to Neal McIntyre for his service as program chair.

We will be back at Valdosta State University on Thursday, October 11 and Friday, October 12, 2018 for our next conference.

In 2019, we will be at Coastal College of Georgia in Brunswick on Thursday, October 10 and Friday, October 11.

Mark your calendars for both events!

2017 Conference Program Now Online

Our 2017 Conference program (Thursday, October 12 and Friday, October 13, 2017 at Valdosta State University) is now online here at the CJAG website.  See the program at https://cjag.uswp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-Conference-Program-Final.docx.

The conference agenda is quite full, beginning with parallel programs on Thursday.  For law enforcement officers we have two two-hour P.O.S.T. accredited sessions https://cjag.usproduct/cjag-post-training/, while for CJAG members there will be a Board meeting, Board of Regents update and the full CJAG membership meeting.  Following lunch, we begin our panel presentations.  Late on Thursday, Brian Owens of the State Board of Pardons and Paroles will be our keynote speaker.

Be certain to attend the social events on Thursday, both on campus and at our preferred hotel, the Drury Inn and Suites-Valdosta.  We will begin the social portion of the conference on campus, thanks to the kindess of our University hosts.  Then, there will be a “kick back” hour at the hotel, followed by a casual party at the hotel hosted by CJAG President, Michael Shapiro.

Friday morning we return to Valdosta State University’s campus for more conference presentations.  At lunchtime, Pearson will be hosting a “lunch and learn” about their REVEL product.  We will wrap up the conference with afternoon presentations and the South Georgia premiere of the documentary “Released“.  Our colleagues from the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia will assist us with a panel presentation as the documentary ends, featuring some of the people from the movie.

This clearly is a conference you do not want to miss.  Hope to see you next Thursday and Friday at Valdosta State University.