Beal aids law enforcement
Researcher uses English degree to work with policing agencies

By JENNIFER LEWANDOWSKI
Reporter Staff

Pamela Beal earned her doctorate in English from UB, but what she's doing with it might be surprising.

The newly named coordinator of the Regional Community Policing Center on the South Campus has a penchant for collaboration with law-enforcement agencies where the betterment of the community is concerned. And how her scholarly research on philosophy and psychoanalysis ties into her line of work isn't such a stretch after all, she says.

While working on her doctorate in the early 1990s, Beal was hired as a research assistant with University Police, where she coordinated the Personal Safety Committee and community-policing projects.

It was during that time that she was asked to review a chapter in a book on police leadership authored by Raymond Hunt, a professor of organizations and human resources in the School of Management. Beal, whose doctoral work included the study of the philosophies of change and effect, began talking with Hunt about policing issues.

In the meantime, Beal says, Buffalo Police Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske had expressed interest in working with the university on organizational changes in the police department, particularly through community policing.

It was to that end that Hunt and Beal received funding from the National Institute of Justice to run a Locally Initiated Research Partnership (LIRP) with Buffalo Police.

"The idea was based on action research-that practitioners help design the research, (which) evolves over time according to their needs and then gets (data) back to them in a timely manner," Beal says.

The four-year project, which ended this past June, was about effecting change among the police ranks, she says-in part, through conversation.

"Language doesn't just reflect reality, it creates reality," says Beal, who spent six months in the field interviewing officers about "what they thought the direction or vision of the department should be.

"These conversations produced change," she says. "(They) gave the police an opportunity to give shape to their own ideas of what needed to happen in the department and, in general, their ideas were quite progressive. Most said they were concerned about neighborhood-disorder issues and welcomed the community's involvement in helping to co-produce public safety."

Beal's move from English into management, and finally law enforcement, may seem to be a "disjointed trajectory," she acknowledged. But, she argues, there's a "fundamental connection between my training in philosophy and poetry, and my work with police and the community."

Beal has a lot to do with change brought about by LIRP projects.

Turnover in the police department had sparked a call for review of hiring practices, Beal says.

"They wanted us to research the possibility of raising the educational requirements" from a high-school diploma to a two-year degree, she says. "People were very skeptical; they didn't think it would happen.

"But, in part, because of the work the university did in looking at census data, surveying other departments and talking to (police) supervisors, the federal court approved" the new policy in October 1998, she says.

Beal also had a hand in creating a model to evaluate the effectiveness of placing mobile computer terminals in police vehicles.

The Buffalo Police Department had received $1 million to purchase the terminals, Beal explains, and the federal government was looking for an evaluation of the time savings provided by the technology.

"The police had no money, time or expertise for doing such an evaluation," she says. So she and Raghav Rao, associate professor of management information systems, assisted police in creating an evaluation-and-redeployment formula that the federal government now uses as a model nationwide, she says.

Beal also has been involved in solving neighborhood-disorder issues that have the potential to "destabilize neighborhoods or that can escalate into worse kinds of crime."

She has worked extensively with police and residents on strategies to improve the community-one of which included the creation of a book of summonses for violations of such city ordinances as excessive noise and abandoned cars.

"This gave the police a tool to do something (about the violations)," says Beal, noting that in a jammed-up court system, such offenders usually face little or no consequences.

Working together with those affected by a particular problem on a solution is the basic purpose of research, Beal says." That's how research should be-more customer oriented.