Community-oriented policing

SIGNIFICANCE: Community policing practices have been adopted in one form or another by a vast majority of police departments throughout the United States.

Formal policing is less than two centuries old, and a community-oriented approach is being advanced as the new philosophy of policing for the twenty-first century. Although the variety of roles police have played during the history of the United States is not well documented, an understanding of what is known will aid in understanding the concept of community-oriented policing.

Historical Background

At the turn of the twentieth century, American police officers performed duties that amounted to social services. Such activities included assisting the unemployed to find jobs, operating soup kitchens, and making police stations available as night shelters for the indigent. During the first decade of the twentieth century, the New York City police commissioner initiated a number of policies that facilitated community-oriented policing. The commissioner believed that the rank-and-file police officers held positions of social importance of great public value. The community-oriented policies should not only be considered for their benefits to the police but also as beneficial to the public. The New York City Police Department held that every police officer was accountable for the social condition on the beat that he patrolled.

Many disciplines in the social sciences now hold that employment is a deterrent to crime. The 1990s saw a verification of this theory: The United States had both a low unemployment rate and a low crime rate. Likewise, in the early twentieth century, the New York City police commissioner considered unemployment to be a major cause of crime, and beat officers were expected to distribute employment information and assist the unemployed in locating employment. One of the overall responsibilities of beat officers was to improve the safety of their beats.

Initiatives by the New York City Police Department in its early, community-oriented approach to policing included creating so-called play streets. Play streets were designated for youngsters in neighborhoods that had no playgrounds, parks, or safe open places. For several hours during the day, the police would close streets in specific neighborhoods by placing barricades to vehicle traffic.

The police also referred teenage boys who were involved in delinquent acts to social services agencies, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Big Brothers. One more creative approach to community-oriented policing was the police department’s communication with ethnic newspapers of that era. Greek-, Italian-, and Yiddish-language papers were encouraged to publish city ordinances, so that immigrants could read about the laws in their native languages.

Eras of Policing

Historians recognize that policing in the nineteenth century was primarily decentralized and neighborhood-oriented. The major problems of this policing model were inefficiency, police corruption, incompetence, and undue political influence on police officers. That era has been called the “political era,” during which the police and politicians had close relationships. Meanwhile, as towns and cities were developing, policing was in its initial stages, under the control of local governments. In the cities, the politicians oversaw all police operations. Although the police were usually organized in centralized, semimilitary, and hierarchical structures, they generally did not function along those lines. Rather, they made up decentralized units, with each ward politician running the police department in his ward.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the Progressive movement emerged as a voice that sought to improve city government. The Progressive movement reflected upper-middle-class values that emphasized honesty in government officials, and it ushered in uniform, well-defined police procedures and policies. This period of policing has been called the “reform era.” It saw attempts to free the police from control by politicians. Civil service reforms in police departments led to decreased influence by politicians, who lost their power in the hiring and firing of police officers. The reforms in policing emphasized the law-enforcement functions of policing over their social service functions. Although some law-enforcement scholars have suggested different policing eras and models, the terms “political era” and “reform era” have become generally accepted as the names of the eras preceding the modern era of community-oriented policing.

Problem-Oriented Policing

The road to modern change may have been laid down in 1979, when Herman Goldstein published an article on problem-oriented policing that would greatly influence modern-day practices. Goldstein claimed that the reform approach to policing was not working. Police responded to citizens’ calls to handle specific incidents then returned to their patrol cars. According to Goldstein, beat officers were responding to events that kept occurring over and over again. Goldstein recommended that the police address the cycles themselves by developing a problem-oriented approach to solve the underlying issues that lead to problems. The emphasis of problem-oriented policing, he said, should be on the police working proactively to resolve situations that generate the reactive calls for help from beat officers.

In community-oriented policing, as in problem-oriented policing, the police take an active role in problem solving, but the goal of community-oriented policing is for officers to develop partnerships with members of the communities they serve. Problem-oriented policing has been incorporated into community-oriented policing as an important tool. Police departments that have adopted the community policing philosophy refer to problem-oriented policing (POP) projects, in which beat officers are expected to be involved.

The literature of various police departments reveals that the philosophy of community-oriented policing has a variety of meanings. Some police administrators believe that community-oriented policing has always taken place in small towns, where police officers typically know everyone on a first-name basis. Some administrators equate problem-oriented policing with community-oriented policing. Still others equate community-oriented policing with specialized units that work in high-crime areas. Also, there are police administrators who tout community-oriented policing because they consider it the latest fad and have instituted it for public relations purposes. Community policing has become so fashionable that a vast majority of police departments are claiming they are doing it.

The Nature of Communities

Basically, community-oriented policing involves police working with people in the communities they serve as equal partners to solve local problems. The term community may refer to a specific geographical area, such as a neighborhood, precinct area, or a patrol beat. Different areas of the city or community typically have different problems, the solutions to which should be determined by the police officers assigned to these areas in partnership with the local residents. A major premise of community-oriented policing advocates that strategies to solve problems are developed in concert with the citizens, whether the community refers to neighborhood or beat.

What is the value of community-oriented policing? Will it produce safer communities? Will citizens be more willing to cooperate with and support the police? Will the police be willing to share decision-making when it comes to controlling and preventing crime within the community? No definitive answers can be provided. Because of a lack of scientific evidence that community-oriented policing has been successful, supporters are stressing other benefits to the community that are easier to demonstrate, based on surveys of residents taken both before and after implementation of community-oriented policing strategies in their neighborhoods. These successes involve citizens’ attitudes, specifically regarding their fear of crime, their evaluation of the police, and their satisfaction with their neighborhoods.

In addition, the distribution of police newsletters informing residents about crime prevention and police programs; community projects, such as cleanup campaigns, property identification, and “safe” houses for children are considered to be successful attributes of community policing. Other benefits that community-oriented policing offers include public scrutiny—the public has a close view of police practices—and accountability—community-oriented policing provides the public with greater control over the police and law enforcement. Obviously, because community policing is implemented by individual police departments throughout the United States, it should be expected that some communities will be further advanced than others in community-oriented policing.

The community-oriented policing philosophy is not completely new, but it represents a major break with the reform or crime control model of policing that dominated the United States for most of the twentieth century. Many of the strategies of community-oriented policing are based on concepts that have been used by police departments in the past. Community-oriented policing has adapted from police-community relations ideas that have been proposed since the 1960s. The team-policing concept adopted in the 1970s could be considered a forerunner to the philosophy of community-oriented policing. The strategy of directed patrol, or patrolling guided by analysis of crime patterns and directed toward the solution of specific neighborhood problems was used in the 1970s and is being used in community policing today.

In large part, community-oriented policing has been advocated because of the failures of previous crime control methods to prevent, solve, or reduce crimes substantially. The concept of community policing has a variety of definitions and meanings, but generally it includes a problem-solving, results-oriented, public-oriented approach which emphasizes collaboration and partnership with the members of the community. The police-community collaboration focuses on solving problems of crime, fear of crime, public disorder, and neighborhood decay. Although its effectiveness in preventing crime has not clearly been proven, community-oriented policing can have a positive effect on citizen attitudes, decreasing the fear of crime and increasing satisfaction with neighborhoods of residence. Community-oriented policing can also have a positive effect on the police, who gain a more positive image of the public, enjoy increased grassroots support, and see improved police morale. The Department of Justice's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) has invested more than $14 billion in community policing, reflecting the importance placed on the policy by the US government.

Possible Problems

Potential problems with community-oriented policing might include actions by police to uphold local norms of order and respectability that go beyond the legal bounds, such as harassment of the homeless. Also, police strategies may selectively favor the affluent and powerful in the community at the expense of the less privileged. Officers could use their close ties with the community members for political ends or for corrupt personal gain; the police could also become too intrusive into the private lives of residents.

In addition, implementation of community-oriented policing may face several obstacles. Many aspects of the reform or traditional policing organization and culture should be expected to resist change. Even in departments that have had community policing for several years, there are officers who resist the community-oriented philosophy and want a return to traditional policing. Also, community support and involvement can be difficult to obtain. Reasons behind lack of support could range from lack of residents’ time to commit to community-oriented programs to residents’ mistrust of the police, fear of neighborhood criminals, or lack of infrastructure in high-crime neighborhoods. Community support has to be obtained by the police and should never be assumed by them.

Bibliography

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Bennet, W., and Karen Hess. Management and Supervision in Law Enforcement. 5th ed. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2007. Print.

De Guzman, Melchor, Aiedeo Mintie Das, and Dilip K. Das. The Evolution of Policing: Worldwide Innovations and Insights. Boca Raton: CRC, 2014. Print.

Miller, L., and Karen Hess. Police in the Community: Strategies for the Twenty-first Century. 3rd ed. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2002. Print.

Muchow, Ashley N. "Community-Oriented Policing and Violent Crime: Evidence from the Los Angeles Community Safety Partnership." Police Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 4, 2023. DOI: 10.1177/10986111231162353. Accessed 24 June 2024.

Palmiotto, Michael J. Community Policing: A Policing Strategy for the Twenty-first Century. 2nd ed. Boston: Jones, 2005. Print.

Palmiotto, Michael J. “The Influence of ‘Community’ in Community Policing.” Visions for Change: Crime and Justice in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Roslyn Muraskin and Albert Robert. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice, 2004. Print.

Palmiotto, Michael J., M. Birzer, and N. Unninthan. “A Suggested Curriculum for Police Recruit Training in Community Policing.” Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies and Management 23.1 (2000). Print.