Community Policing Is a Philosophy

Community policing is a philosophy of neighborhood improvement through integration of police officers into the community more broadly than in their narrow, traditional roles as crime fighters. It is a concept of modern policing that is not new, having already been implemented in one form or another, in the last twenty years, by thousands of different police agencies throughout the United States.

In principle, community policing balances the traditional responsibilities of patrol officers to patrol their sectors in the conventional manner with non-traditional responsibilities designed both to assimilate themselves into the local community as well as to increase quality of life by reducing crime indirectly through encouraging neighborhood-police cooperation. Article Summary: In the April 2006 issue of the FBI Law Enforcement Journal published by the U.S.

Department of Justice, former West Linn, Oregon Chief of Police John Ellison outlines the benefits and corresponding challenges of making the transition from traditional policing to community-oriented policing, in Community Policing: Implementation Issues. As suggested by its title, the primary focus of the article is on analyzing the issues and obstacles pertaining to making the change from one policing philosophy to another in an effective manner. In a previous November 2005 issue of the FBI Law Enforcement Journal, Dr. James Nolan, Dr.

Norman Conti, and Professor Jack McDevitt, authored the article Situational Policing, in which they analyze the relative prospect for successful implementation of community policing strategy in different types of local communities. Nolan, a former police officer, identifies three different stages of social development known to characterize social groups and neighborhood communities, acknowledging their different policing needs, in order to suggest the right community policing approach for each type of community.

Article Comparison: Both Ellison and Nolan (et al.) accept the underlying premise of the general validity of the so-called Broken Windows Theory, according to which physically well maintained communities experience less crime overall than less well physically maintained communities.

Likewise, both Ellison and Nolan accept the value of community policing as a mechanism for resisting and preventing crime in general, improving relations between police agencies and the communities they serve, and expanding the traditional role of patrol officers and their agencies to include municipal- types of service in addition to their tactical responsibilities. Both Ellison and Nolan acknowledge that community policing is an appropriate policing strategy in certain types of communities, particularly in homogeneous, middle- class, low crime areas, and much less appropriate in less homogeneous, high crime areas.

Ellison distinguishes middle and upper-class neighborhood communities and suggests that middle-class neighborhoods are the most receptive to collaborative association with police agencies, while upper class neighborhoods tend to rally together in the immediate aftermath of specific criminal activity that affects the community, but are less likely to maintain a sustained community-police collaboration after the specific crime concern is resolved. Nolan refers indirectly to the same issue in characterizing different neighborhood community-police agency relationships as exhibiting elements of interdependence, dependence, and conflict.

In Ellison's terminology, Nolan's interdependence corresponds to his characterization of homogeneous low-crime, middle class communities. Similarly, in Ellison's terminology, Nolan's dependence corresponds to his characterization of upper-class neighborhoods; finally Nolan's state of conflict corresponds to high-crime lower-class communities that are least receptive to community policing approaches according to both articles.

Conclusion: Both articles describe some of the difficulties often encountered in implementing community policing strategy, although differing in their more specific focus: whereas Ellison details the organizational and operational impediments to an effective transition of police agencies, Nolan focuses on the particulars pertaining to recognizing the inherent differences in community neighborhoods themselves, rather than on defining agency structure and patrol officer compliance. Whereas Nolan focuses exclusively on methods of identifying different types of neighborhoods and tailoring the application of community policing.