Coming Home Again - The Comforting Success of Community Policing
We will not say that community policing has died. Some would
argue that it is dead, naturally discarded in the flow of police
deployment models that seem to show up in 20-year cycles. Others
would say that community policing died because it was unresponsive
to current needs. Local policing suddenly went international in
2001. Money that once supported hiring officers and a variety
of community engagement initiatives suddenly evaporated, eventually
reappearing to fund a different set of tangibles, like equipment.
There also was a push for intelligence and data-driven policing
that some say bumped community policing over the edge. Slashed
police budgets and the mistaken belief that community policing
was too labor intensive prompted a search for efficiencies, like
concentrating more on the analysis of hotspots and directing rapid
responses to those hotspots.
Somewhere, while racing efficiently between hotspots, we watched
as some agencies lost their commitment to community and collaboration.
Not so? A January 2007 news article proclaimed a "new crime
fighting strategy" that would put officers out into the neighborhoods
to meet and interact with residents and business owners. Another
recent article talked about the "new direction of focusing
on community policing."
However, many did not lose the faith. Community policing is alive
and well in places like Louisville, Kentucky, thriving under a
new chief in Richmond, California, and winning over communities
in San Francisco, to name a few, where strong partnerships between
neighborhoods and police officers are credited for dropping crime
rates. Cities large and small are witnessing crime-fighting successes
under community policing initiatives and those that forgot are
again taking notice. Certainly, the communities have not forgotten.
The media is replete with the pleas of citizens for a return to
collaboration and problem-solving.
Ironically, community policing always had the capabilities to
be responsive to international threats and to today's complex
needs. The lessons of 9/11 showed that the best way to identify
emerging threats is through robust community engagement because
the community is where the critical information can be found.
The FBI's effort to develop N-DEx is recognition at the highest
levels that effective counter-terrorism cannot be conducted without
access to the information in local, state and tribal records systems.
Community policing was always data-driven. Step two of S.A.R.A.
is the process of analysis. Hotspots were always in the community
policing lexicon - but with the community's help, they were identified
and addressed earlier than later. The term "intelligence-led"
sounded sexy and cutting-edge but, in practice, the process somehow
ignored the community. And now, there is a debate as to whether
intelligence-led is actually being practiced by any agency. No,
community policing is not dead - some have simply lost their way
home.
 |
|
Back to LETN E-News
|
