Community Policing

Community Policing

Introduction

The last two decades of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a new era of policing, the phenomenon of “community policing,” otherwise known as “community-oriented policing” or even “community-oriented public safety.” (Clear, 2008) To some scholars, community policing is a revolutionary departure from traditional police practices; to others, it is a return to the origins of modern policing originally conceptualized in England in the early 1800s. Is community policing new wine, or is it old wine in new bottles?

Brief History of Modern Policing

Community policing is a relatively recent development in the history of modern policing in the United States. At the time of its inception in the 1980s, spirited discussion centered upon whether it represented a real change or merely a rhetorical one. Did it represent a new way of doing law enforcement or was it simply a new term for carrying out the business of policing in the most effective, tried-and-true ways(Braiden, 2010)? By the mid- to late 1990s, the concept had gained enough institutional acceptance that the debate shifted again: Was the change that agencies were experiencing revolutionary or evolutionary? Something was happening in policing, but where would it lead? And were recent drops in violent crime directly attributable to developments in community policing?

The Rise of Professionalism

As policing sharpened its focus on crime control and efficiency, it gained stature and reliability but forfeited responsiveness and effectiveness. American policing had moved away from its ability to provide comprehensive social services such as caring for society's misfits and economically marginalized, as it had done at the turn of the century when it operated soup kitchens and housed vagrants(Bayley, 2009). Instead of informally maintaining order on the streets by its close familiarity with local residents and business owners, it promoted itself as a law enforcement authority that was dedicated to fighting crime. Police departments had transformed themselves into the agency to call when a crime already had occurred or when the legitimate use of force was needed to control combatants. A uniformed presence meant that crime could be reacted to and efficiently recorded, but it seldom translated into the type of responsiveness where crime might be prevented in the first place. In short, policing had evolved into what some scholars have referred to as “911 policing,” a reactive model where the police are the crime experts and community involvement is limited to a citizen role as victim, witness, or perpetrator.

Defining Community

To understand the extent to which modern policing has evolved from its English origins to the form it takes in the Community Era, it helps to define at least two key concepts. What is community and what is meant by the term community policing? (Goldstein, 2009)

Peel envisioned that the public would equate police officers with citizens in uniform. From Peel's perspective, the public represented a community of ordinary citizens who were bound together in a societal existence at a specific time in a specific place. But does a group of people living together in a city really constitute ...