Self-Paced Study

Self-Paced Study

Guidebook 2

Overview of Community Policing

Contents

1. Introduction...... 1

2. What You Will Learn...... 3

3. Four Dimensions of

Community Policing...... 4

4. Philosophical Elements...... 6

5. Strategic Elements...... 8

6. Tactical Elements...... 11

7. Organizational Elements...... 13

8. Questions...... 16

9. Summary...... 17

1. Introduction

Most people who talk or read about law enforcement these days have probably heard the terms community policing and community-oriented policing before. But just what is community policing? What, specifically, do people mean when they say it?

In a nutshell, COP is a different way of performing the job of law enforcement. It asks you to get to know your community better and to enlist citizens’ help in fighting crime. The goal of COP is the same as the goal of other ways of policing—to prevent crime and enforce the law. What’s different is the way it encourages people to think about crime and law enforcement and the methods it uses.

COP grew out of earlier ideas in policing, such as police-community relations, team policing, crime prevention, and the rediscovery of foot patrol. During the 1990s, it expanded to the point where it is now the dominant strategy in policing.

This guidebook gives you a general picture of community policing. The guidebooks that follow will discuss each particular element of COP in greater detail.

What is community policing?

COP is both a philosophy and a program. As a philosophy, it should influence everything an agency does. As a program, it uses specific, practical measures, such as prevention and enforcement strategies.

Although the concept of COP has been around for some time, it still doesn’t have a clear, universally accepted definition. In fact, COP ends up being something a little different in each place it’s used.

Why? Partly because community policing uses a wide range of efforts to accomplish its goals. It is flexible in order to work with communities’ differing resources, problems, and levels of commitment to COP.

What is community policing: a dimensional approach?

COP: A Dimentional Approach is a version of community policing that was specifically designed but not limited to Kentucky. It has several important characteristics:

It applies as much to small towns and rural areas as it does to larger towns and metropolitan areas.

It applies to all officers. It is not something that just a few specialized officers do.

It has 12 core elements. Those elements apply to all departments, but how they are put into practice will vary. Some of those elements are already being used in many agencies.

What are COP’s limitations?

Besides saying what community policing is, it’s also possible to say what it is not:

COP is not a panacea or cure-all. It is not the answer to all the problems facing modern policing or all the problems facing any single department. However, COP is an answer to some of those problems.

COP is not totally new. Some departments and officers say they have always practiced community policing. Even so, some aspects of community policing are new to some departments, and some elements take time to develop. Few agencies can claim they have fully adopted COP.

COP is not a cookbook. COP consists of certain principles and practices, but exactly how they are used varies from place to place because jurisdictions and law enforcement agencies have differing needs and circumstances.

COP is not “hug a thug.” It is not anti-law enforcement or anti-crime fighting, and it does not try to turn officers into social workers. In fact, COP is more serious about reducing crime and disorder than the incident-driven style of policing that many departments have been doing for decades.

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This training in COP is meant to be more than just interesting. It should prepare you to use COP’s techniques so you can be the most effective law enforcement officer possible.

2.What you will learn

After working through this guidebook, you should be able to answer the following questions:

What are the purposes of community policing?

Does community policing distract an agency from its law enforcement efforts?

What are the four dimensions of community policing?

What are the three elements of each of those dimensions?

The guidebook ends with a summary of key points.

3.Four dimensions of
community policing

The best way to describe community policing is to divide it into four major areas. Each area, which is known as a dimension of COP, contains three parts. Those specific parts are known as elements of COP.

This section describes the four dimensions of COP. Later sections describe the three elements of each dimension.

Philosophical dimension

In many ways, community policing is a new philosophy of policing—a major shift away from professional-era policing. The philosophical dimension includes the central ideas and beliefs underlying community policing. Among the main ones are listening to community members and learning what their concerns are. The three main elements of the philosophical dimension are citizen input, broad function, and personalized service.

Strategic dimension

The strategic dimension of community policing translates the philosophy into action. It includes strategies that link the broad ideas and beliefs underlying community policing with specific programs and practices for implementing it. These strategies help ensure that agency policies, priorities, and resource allocation are consistent with COP philosophy. The three main elements of the strategic dimension are reoriented operations, prevention emphasis, and geographic focus.

Tactical dimension

The tactical dimension of community policing is where the rubber meets the road. This dimension translates ideas, philosophies, and strategies into concrete programs, tactics, and behaviors. Unless community policing leads to some new or different behavior, it is nothing but talk. The three main elements of the tactical dimension are positive interaction, partnerships, and problem solving.

Organizational dimension

There is an important organizational dimension to community policing. To support COP, law enforcement agencies may have to make changes in organization, administration, management, and supervision. The elements of the organizational dimension are crucial to the implementation of COP. The three main elements of this dimension are structure, management, and information.

4.Philosophical elements

These elements of community policing direct the law enforcement agency’s attention to the community and the ideas held by community members.

Citizen input

Community policing relies on citizen input into police policies and priorities. That input benefits both the public and you. When you seek out information and ideas from citizens, they get a say in how their government serves them, and you are more likely to obtain the cooperation you need.

In a small town, you might get enough feedback from citizens just by walking around, talking to them, and asking the right questions. In other places, you might need to make a special effort to find out what they are thinking. These are a few techniques used to gather citizen input:

agency, unit, beat, and other advisory boards

community surveys

electronic mail or World Wide Web home pages

radio or television call-in shows

town meetings

Broad function

COP treats policing as a broad function, not a narrow law enforcement or crime-fighting role. Your job is to work with residents to improve neighborhood safety. That includes resolving conflicts, helping victims, preventing accidents, solving problems, and fighting fear, as well as reducing crime through apprehension and enforcement. Limiting police work to just call-handling and law enforcement reduces your effectiveness.

These are a few examples of what the broad function of policing includes:

traffic safety through education, engineering, and selective enforcement

reducing drug abuse through public education, control of chemicals, school activities, and enforcement efforts

reducing fear through public education, high-interaction patrol, problem solving, and combating nuisance crimes

assisting victims by making referrals to services

zoning input by participating in zoning and building permit decisions

Personalized service

Community policing emphasizes personalized service to the public. The idea is to overcome one of the public’s most common complaints about government employees, including police officers—that they do not seem to care, and that they treat citizens as numbers, not real people. Of course, not every police-citizen encounter can be friendly. But whenever possible, you should deal with citizens in a friendly manner to turn them into satisfied customers. The best way to do that is to eliminate as many bureaucratic barriers as possible, so citizens can deal directly with “their” officer.

These are a few techniques agencies use to personalize their service:

officer business cards, pagers, and voice mail

victim recontact procedures

slogans and symbols

5.Strategic elements

These are the three elements that translate the philosophy of community policing into action.

Reoriented operations

Reoriented operations means less reliance on patrol cars and more on face-to-face encounters. One objective is to replace ineffective practices (such as random patrol and rapid response to low-priority calls) with more effective practices. Another objective is to perform necessary traditional functions (such as handling emergency calls and conducting follow-up investigations) more efficiently to save time for more community-oriented activities. The goal is to redeploy to where the people are.

These are a few types of reoriented operations:

Foot patrol supplements motorized patrol.

Other modes of patrol, such as bicycle, horse, or boat, bring you to hard-to-reach areas.

Walk and ride has you park your car and patrol shopping centers, business districts, and residential areas on foot.

Directed patrol places you at problem locations or gives you special assignments when you are not busy handling calls.

Differential response means using different methods (such as delayed response, telephone reporting, or walk-in reporting) for different types of calls.

Case screening assigns different investigative responses (such as no follow-up, follow-up by patrol, or follow-up by detectives) to different types of cases.

Prevention emphasis

Community policing emphasizesprevention. Although citizens appreciate rapid response, they would always prefer not to be victimized in the first place. Most departments have a crime prevention officer or unit. COP goes farther by emphasizing that prevention is a big part of every officer’s job.

These are a few approaches to crime prevention:

Situational crime prevention tailors specific preventive measures to each situation.

Crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) modifies the physical characteristics that make a place friendly to crime.

Community crime prevention means working with local residents to prevent crime.

Youth-oriented prevention means participating in recreation, mentoring, and other programs to reduce youth crime.

Business crime prevention means recommending personnel practices, business procedures, and other measures to prevent crimes against businesses.

Geographic focus

Community policing encourages a geographic focus to familiarize you and local residents with each other and give you a sense of belonging to each other. Police departments have long assigned patrol officers to beats, but those officers have usually been accountable to their shift, not the area they patrolled. Other personnel, such as investigators, have usually been accountable for handling specific types of crimes, not for any geographic area. However, COP’s very name implies an emphasis on places.

Here are some ways departments try to focus on geography:

Permanent beat assignments keep an officer in the same area for a long period.

Lead officers identify problems and coordinate the efforts of all the other officers covering a particular beat.

Beat teams consist of all the officers who work on a particular beat, regardless of shift.

Cop-of-the-block means assigning each officer a particular, smaller area to focus on within his or her beat.

Area commanders are managers (often lieutenants) responsible for several beats, instead of being shift or squad commanders.

Mini-stations are facilities set up in outlying areas or in neighborhoods that need better access to services.

Area specialists are detectives and other specialists assigned to geographic areas.

6.Tactical elements

These are the elements that translate the ideas and strategies of community policing into concrete programs.

Positive interaction

Police work inevitably involves some negative contacts with citizens—whether arrests, tickets, or an inability to make things better for victims. COP recognizes that fact and recommends that you offset it whenever possible. Positive interactions have several benefits: they build familiarity and trust on both sides; they remind you that most citizens respect and support you; they make you more knowledgeable about the people and conditions in your beat; they provide information for criminal investigations and problem solving; and they break up the monotony of motorized patrol.

Here are some methods for increasing positive interactions:

Take time to talk to people in the course of handling calls instead of rushing to clear calls and return to your car.

Attend meetings in the community as often as you can.

Patrol not just by watching what goes on but by stopping and interacting with people in public spaces and schools.

Partnerships

Community policing stresses the importance of active partnerships between police departments, other agencies, and citizens. Citizens and public and private agencies can take a greater role in public safety, using their own resources to solve problems. There are some limits on citizens’ role in public safety, but no officer can shoulder the entire burden of controlling crime and disorder.

These are some types of partnerships between law enforcement agencies and communities:

Citizen patrols guard their own neighborhoods in cooperation with police.

Citizen police academies teach citizens about the department and may prepare them for roles as volunteers.

Volunteers work for law enforcement departments in a variety of sworn and non-sworn roles.

Officers work with school personnel such as truancy officers, principals, and teachers to resolve school-based problems; with landlords and tenants to prevent problems in rental properties; and with code enforcement personnel to use building and safety codes as tools to reduce crime.

Problem solving

Community policing encourages problem solving instead of simply reacting to incidents. Of course, emergency calls must be handled right away, and you cannot avoid spending time on individual incidents. But whenever possible, you should search for the underlying conditions that cause incidents. Once you discover them, try to address them to prevent future incidents. Basically, you should try to have a more meaningful impact than you can in 15-minute responses to individual calls for service.

These are some promising approaches to problem solving:

using a specific process called SARA (Scanning, Analysis, Response, and Assessment) to solve all kinds of crime and community problems

working with the “guardians” of problems—people who have an incentive or opportunity to help correct a problem (such as landlords, school principals, or business owners)

participating in beat meetings with residents to identify problems and brainstorm for solutions

focusing on hot spots—locations with many calls for service and problems—to lower the call volume there

forming multi-agency teams of police and other government agencies (such as public works, sanitation, parks and recreation, and code enforcement) to pool resources once problems are identified

7.Organizational elements

These are the elements that support the use of community policing in an agency.

Structure

Community policing looks at ways of restructuring police agencies to support the philosophical, strategic, and tactical elements described earlier. An organization’s structure should correspond with its mission. An agency committed to COP needs a structure that allows officers to use their judgment and creativity.

Listed below are some types of restructuring associated with community policing. In the smallest departments, most of these won’t apply. But even a one- or two-person department may need to change the way it is organized so it can increase citizen involvement, solve problems, focus on hot spots, or make the most of other COP elements.

Decentralization delegates authority and responsibility widely so that commanders, supervisors, and officers can act more independently and be more responsive.

Flattening reduces the layers of control to improve communication and cut waste, rigidity, and bureaucracy.

De-specialization reduces the number of specialized units and personnel in order to devote more resources to the direct delivery of police services (including COP) to the public.

Teams give agency employees a way to work together to perform tasks, solve problems, or improve quality.

Civilianization involves using civilians to perform jobs that don’t require sworn powers. Sometimes this means reclassifying or redesigning positions so non-sworn personnel can perform them. This saves money and makes better use of sworn personnel.

Management

Community policing emphasizes an agency’s culture and values more than its written rules and formal discipline. When employees are guided by a set of agency values that they helped determine, they usually make good decisions. Formal rules are still needed, but managers don’t need to apply them as often.