COMMUNITY POLICE

Community Police



Community Police

Introduction

Community policing “reforms” have sought to provide the police with greater public acceptance and political grounding. These reforms were created over time and came together in the 1990s under the umbrella of “community policing” (which is also called community-oriented policing). At that time, it had become clear that other 20th-century police efforts—the “wars” waged by the police on crime, drugs, and youth participation in violence—were not working as intended. Herman Goldstein, arguably the architect of modern community and problem-oriented policing, suggested that the police often emphasized means over ends—that is, arrest over community safety, or the number of calls for service responded to as opposed to the underlying problems that produced the need for those responses. This means-ends inversion resulted in the police and the public talking past one another, with the police concentrating on effort and the public on effect. (Greene and Mastrofski, 2009, 154)

Moreover, Goldstein emphasized that the police acting alone rarely had sustainable results. That is to say, the police rarely touched the “root” problems of crime and social disorder, responding instead to “branch problems,” visible crime, and social disorder in public settings. Without attachments to other institutions of social control (e.g., the community, civic groups, other government agencies, and the like), the police were often relegated to the role of “picking up the pieces” after  events had already occurred. Reactive policing was shaped more by the public's willingness to call the police than by police-derived interventions. And, when the police sought to become more “proactive” in their crime prevention and suppression activities, they invariably confronted a level of public resistance to what was perceived as “police overzealousness.” (Greene & Mastrofski, 2000, 5)

Goldstein's ideas shaped a generation of reform that emphasized a broader communal role for the police, and particularly the use of partnerships and problem solving. The idea of community policing emerged from Goldstein's critique—it represented a sharp detour from conventional police crime-attack approaches, and it set the stage for decades of experimentation on police practices. (Kelling, 2009, 11)

Community policing may be the most important development in policing in the past quarter century. Across the country, police chiefs report that they are moving toward this new model of policing, which supplements traditional crime fighting with prob-lem-solving and prevention-oriented approaches that emphasize the role of the public in helping set police priorities. What police departments are doing when they do community policing varies a great deal. Agencies point to a long list of projects as evidence that they are involved. These range from bike and foot patrols to drug awareness programs in schools, home security inspections, storefront offices, and citizen advisory committees. In some places, community policing is in the hands of special neighborhood officers, whereas in other places, it involves the transformation of the entire police department. In some cities, residents participate in aggressive neighborhood watch patrols as part of their city's program, although in many more places, public involvement is limited to being asked to call 9-1-1 quickly when they see something ...