Community Policing:

In the past it was shown that shortcoming of the professional model of policing was lack of police-community relations. In the 1950s, concerns arose about police being isolated and distant from the public. The initial responses to this problem were public relations initiatives and then police-community relations programs. As these responses gradually became more genuine and substantive, they evolved toward what is now called community policing.

A significant component of police-community relations in many jurisdictions is intertwined with race relations as racial profiling became such a difficult and controversial professional, legal, and political issue. As police have sought to shed an image of an occupying army to help narrow the divide separating them from vulnerable populations.

It was found that foot patrol made the public feel safer and improved the public’s attitudes toward the police. Although widespread adoption of foot patrol was not viable for most police agencies, many jurisdictions implemented bicycle patrol, police substations, and other techniques aimed at making police officers more accessible. It also became more common to instruct police officers to get out of their patrol cars as often as possible, in order to interact with the public on a more frequent basis.

The “broken windows” thesis postulates that when police pay attention to minor crime and incivilities, neighborhood residents notice and are reassured about the safety of their neighborhoods and the dependability of their police.

In the 1990s community policing might have hit a plateau had community policing stopped at the “Officer Friendly” stage and had limited impact, however, problem solving got incorporated into community policing at just the right time, providing something substantive for Officer Friendly to do beyond just enforcing the law with a smile.

Beginning in the 1960s, U.S. police departments started hiring more college-educated officers, women, and minorities creating a diverse work force. At the same time internal human relations approaches to officer management was becoming more popular giving higher priority to improved human relations within the police organization melded with putting more emphasis on improved relations between the police and the community. This “organizational transformation” is often cited today as an essential ingredient of community policing.

From civil rights groups, civil liberties groups, academics, community policing became a key feature of the progressive agenda for police reform. Those who were dissatisfied with police and wanted them to change often focused on reducing police abuses of authority and improving the quality of police-citizen encounters. With its emphasis on improving police-community relations, community policing fit this agenda nicely.

For most of the twentieth century, it was smart politics to emphasize tough-on-crime measures and stand firmly in favor of law and order. Somehow, in the 1990s, Bill Clinton managed to campaign on community policing with a pledge to hire 100,000 police. It is a toosup over who decided that community policing should be the new policing strategy in their cities and towns, mayors or police chiefs.

By the year 2000, over 50 percent of U.S. police departments serving populations of 100,000+ had formal, written community policing plans, and over 90 percent of U.S. police officers worked for departments that had at least an informal community policing plan, if not a written one

Community policing is now widely recommended as the best model for curbing police abuses and restoring police-public relations.

Community policing is popular with the public and seems to make people feel safer.

This requires firm commitment to the value and necessity of citizen input to police policies and priorities. Citizens are supposed to have a say in how they are governed. Law enforcement agencies are most likely to obtain the citizen support and cooperation they need when they display interest in input from citizens. A few of the techniques utilized to enhance citizen input include advisory boards, community surveys, community meetings, and radio/television call-in shows.

The job of police officers is seen as working with residents to enhance neighborhood safety. Policing is inherently a multi-faceted government function and arbitrarily narrowing it to just call-handling and law enforcement reduces its effectiveness in accomplishing the multiple objectives that the public expects police to achieve. Some examples of the broad function of policing include traffic safety education, drug abuse prevention, search and rescue, and protecting “the lives of those who are most vulnerable—juveniles, the elderly, minorities, the poor, the disabled, the homeless”.

Community policing emphasizes personal service to the public, this is designed to overcome one of the most common complaints that the public has about government employees, including police officers—that they do not seem to care, and that they treat citizens as numbers, not real people. But whenever possible, officers should deal with citizens in a friendly, open, and personal manner designed to turn them into satisfied customers. This can best be accomplished by eliminating bureaucratic barriers, so that citizens can deal directly with “their” officer. A few of the methods that have been adopted in order to implement personalized service are customer relations training, officer business cards, and victim/complainant re-contact procedures. Modern technologies including cell phones, e-mail, and social media have opened up new methods by which police agencies can deliver services to people and by which community residents can contact “their” police officer directly.

Community policing recommends re-oriented operations, with less reliance on the patrol car and more emphasis on face-to-face interactions, foot patrol, bicycle patrol, directed patrol, differential responses to calls for service, and case screening for more targeted investigations rather than responding to crime only after it occurs. Current initiatives associated with hot spots policing, intelligence-led policing, smart policing, and predictive policing also fit into this category. Community policing encourages agencies to proactively develop solutions to the immediate underlying conditions.

Community policing tries to implement a prevention emphasis, based on the common sense idea that although citizens appreciate and value rapid response, reactive investigations, and apprehension of wrongdoers, they would always prefer that their victimizations be prevented in the first place. Most modern police departments devote some resources to crime prevention, this can look like a special unit taskforce. Community policing attempts to go farther by emphasizing that prevention is a big part of every officer’s job. crime prevention through environmental design, youth-oriented prevention, and a variety of programs involving schools, communities, landlords, and businesses.

Community policing adopts a geographic focus to establish stronger bonds between officers and neighborhoods in order to increase mutual recognition, identification, responsibility, and accountability in furtherance of strengthening social organization and collective efficacy in neighborhoods. Some of the methods by which community policing attempts to emphasize geography are permanent beat assignments, lead officers, beat teams, mini-stations, and area commanders.

Policing inevitably involves some negative contacts between officers and citizens (arrests, tickets, stops for suspicion, orders to desist, inability to make things much better for victims, et cetera). Community policing recognizes this fact and recommends that officers offset it as much as they can by engaging in positive interactions whenever possible. Positive interactions have several benefits, of course: they generally build familiarity, trust and confidence on both sides; they remind officers that most citizens respect and support them; they make the officer more knowledgeable about people and conditions in the beat; they provide specific information for criminal investigations and problem solving; and they break up the monotony of motorized patrol. Some methods for engaging in positive interaction include attending community meetings, taking policing into schools, malls, and other settings where the public congregates, and simply shifting the emphasis of patrol from watching and waiting more toward interacting.

Community policing stresses the importance of active partnerships between police, other agencies, and citizens, in which all parties really work together to identify and solve problems. Citizens can take a greater role in public safety than has been typical over the past few decades, and other public and private agencies can leverage their own resources and authority toward the solution of public safety problems. Obviously, there are some legal and safety limitations on how extensive a role citizens can play in “co-producing” public safety. Just as obviously, it is a mistake for the police to try to assume the entire burden for controlling crime and disorder. Partnerships can take many forms including block watch groups, citizen police academies, police-school initiatives, landlord associations, code enforcement liaison, and even citizen patrols.

Community policing urges the adoption of a problem-solving orientation toward policing. Officers should search for the underlying conditions that give rise to single and multiple incidents. When such conditions are identified, officers should try to affect them as a means of controlling and preventing future incidents. Basically, police officers should strive to have more substantive and meaningful impact. Typical ingredients of problem solving include the SARA process, the crime triangle, a commitment to carefully analyzing specific crime and disorder problems, and a bias toward sharing the responsibility for problem solving with the community and with other public and private institutions.

Community policing looks at various ways of restructuring police agencies in order to facilitate and support philosophical, strategic, and tactical elements. Any organization’s structure should correspond with its mission and its technology (to transform inputs into outputs and outcomes). Some aspects of traditional police organization structure seem more suited to routine bureaucratic work whereas community policing requires discretion and creativity. The types of restructuring associated with community policing include decentralization, flattening of the hierarchy, de-specialization, teams, and civilianization.

Community policing is often associated with styles of leadership, management, and supervision that give more emphasis to organizational culture and values and less emphasis to written rules and formal discipline. The general argument is that when employees are guided by a set of officially sanctioned values they will usually make good decisions and take appropriate actions. Although many formal rules will still be necessary, managers might need to resort to them much less often in order to maintain control over subordinates. Management practices consistent with this emphasis on organizational culture and values include mission and value statements, strategic planning, mentoring and coaching, and positive discipline. More emphasis is put on empowering officers and taking full advantage of their talents and creativity, rather than on trying to tightly control them in order to avoid misbehavior.

Doing community policing and managing it effectively requires certain types of information that have not traditionally been available in all police departments. In the never-ending quality versus quantity debate, for example, community policing tends to emphasize quality. This emphasis on quality shows up in many areas: avoidance of traditional bean-counting (e.g., arrests, tickets) to measure success, more concern for how well calls are handled versus merely how quickly they are handled, et cetera. Also, the geographic focus of community policing increases the need for detailed information based on neighborhoods as the unit of analysis.