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Hello.
Welcome to Week 1 of CJ501.
In this lecture, we will discuss community policing.
Community policing has three main components.
They are community involvement, problem solving,
and decentralization.
Let us compare traditional policing
with community policing.
Traditional policing impartially enforces the law.
Theoretically, every violator of the law can be arrested and
discretion is not required.
The police are often referred to as the thin blue line.
This concept suggests the police are the only ones who
stand between good and evil.
A traditional police officer does not typically patrol his
or her own neighborhood.
This increases the chances of impartiality, but reduces
ownership of the patrol area.
Community policing is an attempt to strengthen the thin
blue line with the support of the community.
This is reduced when the community falls under the
siege mentality, as when the police are seen as a
militaristic force and the only dealings are in the form
of enforcement actions.
The stop snitching or snitches get stitches mentality is
common in areas with the siege mentality and has even entered
mainstream America.
Other factors that can contribute to this are highly
publicized incidents of use of force, perception of or actual
racial discrimination.
Efforts to increase the strength of the police through
community support vary from legitimate efforts to simple
compliance with federal requirements for grants.
Some departments have assigned personnel to community
policing units.
A problem with this method is the assigned personnel are a
small percentage of the department while the majority
continues without supporting community policing efforts.
Interactions outside enforcement are required.
This can be in the form of participating in community
events, such as charitable fund raisers, organizing
Neighborhood Watch programs, and having a forum for
community members to express their concerns about crime and
the police.
Without the support of the community, the police lose a
significant asset which can be in the form of getting
witnesses to come forward, capturing suspects, or
delivering crime prevention information.
If the police are given the sole responsibility for crime
prevention, we are doomed to a stagnant level of
effectiveness.
Some argue the police are incapable of participating in
problem solving because the only solution they possess is
enforcement.
As a practitioner, I have witnessed cynical attitudes
toward community policing from officers with the us versus
them mentality.
Interaction with the public outside
enforcement is avoided.
Community-style policing is often encouraged through foot
patrol and decentralization.
The patrol car serves as a significant barrier to
communication.
Giving commanders and officers more power to make decisions
based on the individual characteristics of their
patrol area falls under decentralization.
Community ownership can be established by assigning an
officer to their own neighborhood.
Or, keeping an officer in the same area can help an officer
get more involved with the community and learn the source
of problems versus only responding to problems.
How do we evaluate community policing?
This can be accomplished by evaluating the fear of crime,
perception of crime, perception of the police, and
the crime statistics before and after the implementation
of a community policing program.
The next policing innovation we are going to discuss is
broken windows policing.
Broken windows policing is based on the idea that if
small things are allowed, such as loitering, panhandling, and
graffiti, more serious crimes will follow because the belief
is no one cares.
Many attribute the significant reduction of crime in New York
City to broken windows or zero-tolerance policing.
There are some challenges to this theory.
Many of the low-level crimes may be enforced only on the
poor and vulnerable populations without the
political influence to resist.
Some suggest crime was already coming down throughout the
nation and New York's crime reduction was attributable to
other social factors.
The broken windows theory can change the appearance of an
environment by pushing undesirables and open-air
criminal activity out.
Some methods of zero-tolerance policing are arresting or
ticketing loiterers who may be simply standing around when
the police are present but operating an open-air drug
market when they are not.
How do we evaluate the broken windows theory?
This can be accomplished by evaluating the fear of crime,
perception of the police, and the crime statistics before
and after the implementation of a broken windows or
zero-tolerance policing program.