Strategies to Boost Community Policing

¶ … Community Oriented Policing Today's society is characterized by a drastic increase in gangs, crime, and drugs. Studies focusing on crime detective and rapid response are now criticizing the effectiveness of traditional policing practices. The perception that the core police function involves arresting law violators and combating crime has been slowly fading. These studies have convinced the American police unit to re-examine traditional policing practices considered as unsuccessful. This has led to the birth of community policing, which is currently making a significant contribution to the United States policing strategy.

Components of community policing Community-oriented policing (COP) consists of two essential components. They include problem-solving and community partnership. Community partnerships are created through developing positive relations with the community (The United States & Community Policing Consortium, 1994). This requires the police to involve community members in the pursuit of better crime prevention and integrate their resources with existing community resources to deal with the most pressing security concerns.

Problem-solving is defined as the procedure by which the police identifies the particular concerns of the community and initiates the most appropriate remedies to abate the identified issues. The concept of community policing does not imply that the police department is no more in authority or subordinated (The United States & Community Policing Consortium, 1994). Nonetheless, tapping into the community's resources and expertise relieves police officers of some burdens.

All those working and living in the community, among them churches, social agencies, government officials, and schools have a stake in its development. This means they share responsibility for devising practical solutions to issues that detract from the security and safety of the community. Community Partnership The component of community partnership aims at forming and sustaining mutual trust. Police officers have acknowledged the need to cooperate with the community. In combating serious crime, authorities are encouraging community members to present relevant information (The United States & Community Policing Consortium, 1994).

Moreover, police have been speaking to local neighborhood groups, participate in civic and business events, work with educational programs for school kids and collaborate with social agencies. Further, special units have adopted strategies, among them provision of various crisis intervention services. The fundamental feature of community policing is that the police have become an indispensable element of the community culture. As such, the community members help in establishing the future priorities and allocating resources. For the police to mobilize community support effectively, they must apply different strategies in different communities.

Often, obtaining cooperation and establishing trust are the easier in affluent and middle-class communities than in poor communities. This is because, in poor neighborhoods, there is a long history of police mistrust. In some areas, building bonds entail supporting basic social institutions like schools, churches and families, which seem to have been weakened by pervasive disorder or crime. It is necessary to create viable neighborhoods if the police desire to sustain long-term alliances that foster cooperative efforts.

With community policing, the police officers serve as both facilitators and catalysts in the development of these communities. Problem solving The second component of community policing philosophy aims at solving persistent community problems. This component concentrates on particular crime issues and attaining crime reduction outcomes. Here, police officers identify, analyze and respond to the underlying conditions that generate crime incidents. It is grounded on the theory that underlying conditions are the source of problems (The United States & Community Policing Consortium, 1994).

Therefore, police authorities gather information and use it in their responses to incidents, in unity with details acquired from other sources, to create a clear picture of the issue at hand. Problem solving assumes that disorder and crime can be reduced in small geographic locations through cautiously studying the attributes of problems in an area. Then, the police apply appropriate resources based on the theory that people make decisions based on the opportunities presented by the direct social and physical features of an area.

Given that the police department manipulates these factors, individuals will be less inclined to act offensively (The United States & Community Policing Consortium, 1994). The central tenet of problem-solving policing is securing a true assessment of a problem. Given that a response to an issue fails, then, the police returns to the analysis, hence might generate a new remedy that could have significant influence than the previous remedy.

The primary approaches to problem-solving are the application of scanning, analysis, response and scanning (SARA) to launch the problem-solving procedure (The United States & Community Policing Consortium, 1994). In scanning, police officers identify recurring problems that affect not only the police but also.