| Community Policing |
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What is Community Policing? “Police others as you would have others police you.” Community Policing is a philosophy, a mind-set, and the reason why we do things in policing. It is the strategic vision that must precede strategic planning; otherwise, we have planning for planning sake. The community Policing philosophy is constant. It doesn’t change from police department or police officer, conversely, how it gets done changes constantly.
And there is another thought that is critical to an understanding of Community Policing. Over the past several decades we have “done to” people in terms of policing. Community policing would have us “do with” people. It embodies the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “Got often to home of thy friend for weeds choke the unused path.” Conventionally, the only paths we talk are those to the bed guy’s house. Weeds choke the path between the common people and us. “Only want the facts a’ am, we’ll do the rest.” And there is another side to it. Traditionally, police have decided, unflatorally, what is important. As a consequence, because we have a monopoly over our work, and because policing has a very nebulous job description (I defy anyone to quantify peel’s principles, and don’t look to the Police Acts for help), and mostly because we are human, to a large degree we have ended up doing the things we like to do, and that are quantifiable (an hour spent on radar is measurable, not so with a bunch of snotty-nosed kids bent on mischief), as opposed to what is best for the community, over time, a space has developed between what we think is important and what the public thinks is important. Let me use an everyday example to make this point. A bank is robbed and a wino is mugged. In our criminal code these crimes are equal they are both robberies. There is no special category for banks. Police reaction to them, however, is not. On the Richter scale of police priorities, the bank is an 8 the wino doesn’t register. Why? It all has to do with mind-set. It has to do with evolution of police thinking of what is important. That thinking has been predicated upon the actions of the criminal rather than the social damage of the criminal’s action upon the community. It has to do with such things as the amount of money involved; status of the crime in the criminal code and in some cases the status of the victim. Our conventional reaction is influenced more by its legal damage versus its community damage. If we were to wore of the community policing mind-set. We might ask these questions before we decide what our reactions would be. What is the community damage to the banking community specifically? Well, in terms of money, it is infinitesimal. It is simply part of doing business just as doctors are bloodied once in a while. All banks are insured and they can cover the cost of this insurance in the rates that they charge their customers. Also, people of the banking community go home every night to suburbia where they can feel secure from the type of people who rob banks. In short, they can get away from it. Bank robberies are not the crimes that fuel the perception people have that crime is rampant. In short, the social damage to the “Community” most affected by this crime is slight, and transitory. Looking at the wino’s mugging, the damage to his “community” is considerable and his financial loss is total. It may be his last $5.00 (wine’s not so cheap anymore). Worse still, the crime is perpetrated in the neighborhood where he is destined to live as are the people who may have witnessed the crime or learned of it from the other people who live in that neighborhood. Also, a person is opposed to an institution is the victim. Often these people know who committed the crime and may have been victimized before, but because of their fear of retribution, may not have reported these crimes. These are types of street-level predatory crimes that feed the perpetual fear of victimization these people must endure; the feeling of helplessness they have in their own neighborhood grows inexorably because they cannot get away from it. In this case, the social damage to the immediate “community” is significant, and lasting. From a pure survival point of view, whom do you think needs us the most? Community policing, in its purest form, requires that we use this community damage criteria as a central factor in predicating our response to crime. It does not mean an abdication of one for the other but rather that the bank robbery perhaps comes down to a 6 on the scale and the wino moves up to a 2. It does not change what we do so much as why we do it. It simply broadens our vision of what our work is and who our customers are. Wealth must never be a factor in police services rendered. This is precisely why we enjoy the freedom we do from elected branch of government. We must not be manipulated. In this case, I have used the crime of robbery as an example; the rational can be applied to any crime or piece of work we do. Whether the scene of the crime be the main branch of the Scotia Bank or the Pimiento House, it must not influence our decision-making as much as it did in the past. You see, there is no difference between a bank robbery and wino (310) mugging except in the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), and our heads, and that is as clear and as simple as I can explain the basic philosophy of Community Policing. How do you do Community Policing? To answer this question, we have to get our heads around the notion of problem-Oriented Policing. Problem-Oriented Policing “Walks the Talk” of community policing. It’s how you got it done. Its engine is imagination and its motto is, “there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” Traditionally, the only way we’ve tried to prevent crime is by catching the person in the act. We believed if we caught enough people in the act, we’d eventually lock up all the criminals or at least scare off the un-caught ones. And if directly enforcing the law didn’t solve the problem, then, by definition, the problem was not a police problem; surely it must belong to someone else. We’re not social workers (are we?). Problem-oriented policing accepts the reality that everyday police work goes far beyond crime in the pure sense and that the range of tools we have at our disposal goes far beyond law enforcement. It accepts the medical profession, which learned to use the symptoms of an illness at the early stages to alert it to an impending disease. It has also learned to reach out much further than sickness and disease and it promotes habits that prevent those things. That is why today as much time and money goes into preventive medicine as into active treatment medicine, coming back to problem-oriented policing, it too is grounded on a simple philosophy; it recognizes that we must get beyond controlling the bad our challenge to organizing the good to help us control the bad. Let us accept the fact that there never will not be a crime-free society. A certain amount of crime, even in healthy communities, is as natural as a certain amount of rain or garbage. Indeed, it could be argued that if democracy is working right. A certain amount of crime will be committed by people who disagree with the status quo. Just as doctors working alone can never give us sick-free society so long as we drink too much. Smoke too much, and the national past time is sitting on our fanny in front of the TV. Filling our faces, neither can police working alone give us a crime-free society so long as individuals live irresponsible, selfish lives. This type of lasman’s philosophy is fundamental to the understanding of what problem-oriented Policing is all about. Unlike Community Policing, though, which is constant, problem-oriented Policing is in a constant state of flux- whereas community policing is a philosophy and mind-set—tangible. Change is constant, dependent upon the problem being faced. It’s the medicine applied to the community sickness identified by the Community Policing philosophy. And, like the doctor, we need to know what the sickness is before we can provide the right medicine.
Examples of it are already happening in our own organization around us. Project O.W.E. (Outstanding Warrant Execution), whereby using imagination, technology and the media, every year we get thousands of people to come to us and clear up outstanding warrants—that’s problem-oriented Policing. Mobile trailer police office plunked right in the middle of the drug basis gives the message “wherever you go we’re coming with you” is an example problem-oriented policing. The anti-crime operations in recent years to target Drug Sales in a City areas and the many special operations to target youth gangs and those dealing with drugs and firearms are graphic illustrations that conventional law enforcement, no matter how much of it we do, does not always get the job done. Literally hundreds of charges had been leveled against those perpetrations, however, they continued to operate. The objective became “Shut them down”. These problems are not new, but the solutions are. These are only isolated incidents with community policing mind-set they should be the norm. We will only get more of them by recognizing our greatest asset lies in the human minds we have in our sworn and civilian personnel, Conventional Policing has programmed and procedure those minds to death and may have ended up simply functioning. Many of us chain our brain at the gate coming to work and pick them up when we leave. Community Policing takes the shackles off these minds and provides inspiration and a work environment within which they can flower, It seems we go out of our way to select the brightest people we can find and then teach them to follow orders. God worked so hard to make us all different and policing has worked so hard to make all the same we need to follow up on Gods work. For greater in depth literature on the subject of Problem Oriented Policing- Read anything by Herman Goldstfin. You can get your hands on, especially “Policing a free Society” (1977). |
That really says it all. What follows will not add to or take away from that golden statement of life as well as policing, but will simply serve to explain and illustrate it.
We cannot know what the most community-damaging problems are without working through the community, which is our patient. Problem-oriented Policing casts the officer as a “pilot fish” using the Community damaging criteria to spot problems. Sometimes the officer will have to get help within policing, the community, or both, to find a solution.
