Community policing comes from the service-oriented policing school. The focus of community policing is to have police in the community, an active presence with a storefront, so that people in the community can interact more directly with police. The traditional policing model is more a situation where there is a headquarters, and police fan out through the city or their districts from a handful of such headquarters. They are detached from specific neighborhoods and communities will find it generally more difficult to interact with police in a traditional policing model. There are three different components to community policing: community partnership, organizational transformation and problem solving (COPS, no date). The first, partnerships, reflects that community policing involves forming partnerships with different stakeholders within the community. This can be business groups, homeowner groups or other stakeholders. The community has a better sense of what is going on in its neighborhood, and that gives it the sort of insight that can be beneficial to police. There are many instances where the most successful community policing set-ups have been in areas where the officers do not live; they never understood these areas all that well before, but do after the institution of community policing. The partnerships allow the community to...

The traditional police organization is not effective set up to form collaborations with communities. Traditional police departments are heavily bureaucratic, and responses usually either take time, get passed up the chain of command or are subordinated to larger departmental priorities. With community policing, the police in the community are more empowered to make decisions and move more quickly towards meeting the needs of that community. There will also need to be an organizational culture change to encourage this empowerment -- the flow of communication directly between the department and the community also means that the community is expecting its concerns to be met quickly -- that expectation creates motivation for the needed organizational changes that will facilitate effective community policing.
The feedback that the community partners provide is critical because it allows the community department to better understand the needs of the community, with respect to the problems that the community feels need to be solved. The direct flow of communication also means that…