¶ … tenet of Christian societies is a need to create healthy and safe local communities. Christians frequently emphasize freedom and justice within the Judeo-Christian perspective. That means creation and promotion of fair criminal justice policies. These criminal justice policies must do away actions based on stereotypes and try to eliminate racial profiling as of apprehending potential criminals. With the support of religious entities and congregations, implementation of community-oriented policing methods through collaboration with intelligence-gathering entities may lead to effective and easier community policing. Things like fusion centers and intelligence-led policing (ILP) may make such a novel aim possible.
Fusion centers act as an information sharing center. Fusion centers were created under the U.S. Department of Justice through two government agencies: Office of Justice Programs and U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Most of them were formed from 2003-2007 (Rukus, Warner, & Zhang, 2017). The purpose of fusion centers is to promote at the federal level, information sharing from across various levels, including state and local-level government. While statistics have not been updated since 2009, there exist approximately 72 fusion centers in the United States. One other purpose for fusion centers is potential use with Emergency Operations Center in case of a disaster.
While the idea of a fusion center seems like a potentially powerful tool for law enforcement in terms of promotion of collaborative efforts through information sharing, what has already been executed has resulted in production of useless, inappropriate, or irrelevant intelligence reporting, with some fusion centers reporting no intelligence at all. Even worse, a report done on the fusion centers stated some violated privacy and/or civil liberties. If fusion centers are to help law enforcement better handle interactions with minorities, they must use fusion centers...
Consequently, biases (like any preconceptions) held by the police almost certainly cause racially discriminatory decisions about whom to investigate (stop, question, search) and how to interpret their behavior, and therefore partially account for disparities in criminal justice outcomes (Spencer, Charbonneau, & Glaser, 2016, p. 51).
Police officers are on the front line of interactions with civilians and often experience stereotypical
behavior while on
duty or allow perceived stereotypes to influence their judgments and actions. A way to reduce the likelihood of police behaving in such a manner is through faith communities. During the 1960's and into the 1970's racial profiling saw a rise in use as is seen now. Faith communities helped bring reform through community awareness. What positive effects came from such efforts may be reversed in the years to come. The main reason behind it could be intelligence-led policing.
Intelligence-led policing (ILP), is a policing construct that focuses on
management of
risk and assessment. Intelligence officers often serve not as
operation guiding intelligence but as guides to operations. First witnessed in the 1990's in both American and the
Great Britain, ILP urged cops to behave similar to spies to gather information to generate a greater number of apprehensions and combat recidivist offenders. Most of the ILP seen today has changed to include a 'revisionist'
expansion, allowing integration of neighborhood policing as well as reassurance.
Community policing, a part of ILP has shown at least in some research, to provide no positive effects concerning
perception of
safety that includes a positive effect on community participation within the metro core. The article explains that suburbs and rural areas see a different implementation of community policing with emphasis on youth services. "For suburbs and rural areas, community policing is only related to youth services. Collective efficacy is positively associated with safety…
