COMMUNITY POLICING

Community Policing



Community Policing

Introduction

Community policing represents the driving force behind the current efforts to reform law enforcement, providing both the rationale and the mechanisms for changing significant the nature and goals of policing in America. The success of the revolution rests largely on the effectiveness of the community policing model, which includes basic tenets regarding the importance of citizen participation, problem solving, fear reduction, order maintenance, and quality-of-life issues.

The challenge is to determine what community policing is (and is not) and to differentiate it from traditional policing. Is community policing, in practice, truly ground-breaking or simply “old wine in new bottles”? Such clarification will help us examine the merits and limitations of these programs. Criminal justice scholars and police administrators have yet to articulate the full theory behind community policing or to enumerate all its components and operations.

 

Discussion

In the early- to mid-1980s, the focus of community policing was on the community. Progressive police departments used a variety of strategies to reduce the physical and psychological distance between the police and the citizens they served. Experimental programs were typically designed to increase foot patrols, create local ministrations, encourage more and better police contacts with citizens, and create or support community organizations interested in crime prevention. Evaluations of these initiatives showed that crime rates were reduced only inconsistently but that residents' perceptions of crime and their evaluations of local police were repeatedly improved significantly (Rosen Baum, 1994).

Community policing officers can pursue numerous paths toward achieving self-regulated and self-defended neighborhoods. It includes working jointly and equally with citizens, to define local problems, educating the community about the causes of crime and disorder, helping develop action plans that are responsive to these issues, and working with citizens. It also includes identifying and mobilizing resources—both inside and outside the community— and solving and preventing the target problems. The possibilities for citizen involvement are variegated, but the outcomes of these activities are still uncertain.

 

Two international applications of community policing

Problem Solving

One unique characteristic of the community policing model is its focus on problem solving, which became a widely clear strategy after 1987. This orientation has clear implications for community participation. Nearly every definition of community policing includes the notion that the police and community must work continuously to identify and solve neighborhood problems (Skogan, 1997). As Rosen Baum (1994), has observed.  In an ideal world, problem-solving requirements a high level of community commitment to recognize problems, to develop an thoughtful of the particular circumstances that give rise to them, to craft enduring preventive remedies, and the effectiveness of the remedies.

 

Partnerships

At the heart, of the community policing model is the empirically supported the idea that the police are more effective in solving neighborhood problems when they use the resources available in the community than when they try to complete the task alone. With the emergence of community policing, emphasis is now given to the “co-production” of public safety (Rosen Baum, 1988). In this structure, safety is viewed as a product that is created by the joint efforts of ...