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Policing Models There is a remarkable historical, geographical, and organizational diversity in the activities of persons who are, or have been, counted as police. Within any one country the work of police today is very different from what it was 200 years ago. There are also major differences between countries policing New York City is bound to have little in common with policing the Solomon Islands. The diversity is so great that the onlooker may wonder if the different kinds of activity and organization have sufficient in common to be classified together. The principle of police accountability is helpful in explaining the diversity.
From one point of view, it is desirable that a police force be as efficient as possible. This consideration favors the establishment of national police forces, which can take advantage of the economies of scale in training, promotion, organization, and so on. But it often has been felt that the existence of a national force places too much power in the hands of those who direct it; that there is a danger that the government will use its control of the police to keep itself in office; and that the police will not be accountable to the public. Therefore, some countries favor a local basis for police organization. Police activity must be adapted to the society that is being policed. Law enforcement is divided into three major eras throughout history.
These eras are the political era, the reform era and the community era. The political era that took place between 1840 - 1930 was characterized by five points, which was the authority was coming from politicians and the law, a broad social service function, decentralized organization, an intimate relationship with the community, and the extensive use of foot patrol. The downside to the political era was that the police got its authority from the politics and the law, the close tie with politics posed as a problem. After the Act of 1856 mandated police in the provinces, police departments spread throughout England. Provincial police were funded by both local and central governments. After the Home Office certified the quality of a provincial police department, the central government paid half of the cost of local policing, and local taxes paid the rest.
The dominant methods of provincial policing were foot patrols and criminal investigations. Attempts in the late 19 th century to develop a coherent vision of an intercity police system were largely unsuccessful; the police theory that did develop, however, was formulated mainly in local political halls. As ethnic residents gradually gained political control of city wards and neighborhoods, the link between the police and neighborhood politics became closer. In some instances the relationship became so close that the police were actually seen as adjuncts of the local political machines. The linking of police and politics bred political and financial corruption and injustice.
Police became involved in partisan political activity to ensure election of particular candidates; they received gratuities for not enforcing unpopular vice laws; and they excluded strangers from social and political life. By the end of the XIX century, middle- and upper-class citizens attempted to centralize political power to end the ward-level political control of ethnic minorities. Reformers attempted to centralize services on a citywide basis, create a civil service to end political patronage, and transfer control of police to cities-at-large, or, if all else failed, transfer control of the police to the state government. In the 1950 s and 60 s, both civilian and police groups assumed that the primary activity of police officers was to deal with crime and to do so with little discretion. Research on police functions conducted during this period, however, showed that when police activities, calls, and dispatches were analyzed, anticrime activities constituted less than 20 percent of patrol activities. The remaining patrol functions included resolving conflicts, providing emergency services, maintaining order, and providing other public services.
Moreover, it was discovered that police officers regularly used discretion in handling events, criminal or otherwise, and that the use of discretion was an essential ingredient of police functions. One of the earliest and most sophisticated research efforts concerning the effectiveness of police patrol was the Bright Foot Patrol Experiment in Britain in 1970. Although this experiment indicated that crime declined in areas covered by officers on foot patrol, efforts to further decrease crime by using additional foot patrols in the same neighborhoods did not have a measurable impact. In the 1970 s and 80 s strong community anticrime efforts also were developed in many countries, including the United States, Canada, and Britain.
In a sense, these groups represented a return to the ancient tradition of social obligation, with each citizen obliged to come to the aid of others. Although police were instrumental in developing such groups, in cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, which had traditions of strong neighborhoods, many groups developed on their own. Research suggests they are relatively effective in reducing crime and fear in neighborhoods. Police experience and research suggests that police action, in itself, is limited in its ability to prevent and investigate crime. Police can be successful only to the extent that they work closely with citizens. Indeed, the most promising development in American policing during the 1980 s was community policing.
Incorporating many of the ideas of team policing with research on foot patrols, community policing is an attempt to reintegrate the police officer into the community. Community policing has since proved so effective that most major U. S. cities, including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and others, have either implemented the procedure or experimented with it. Community policing is defined as any method of policing that includes a police officer assigned to the same area, meeting and working with the residents and business people who live and work in the beat area. The citizens and police work together to identify the problems of the area and to collaborate in workable resolutions of the problems.
Moving neighborhoods and communities toward solving their own problems, and encouraging citizens to help and look out for each other. To be successful, community policing requires the total commitment of the police, citizens and subgroups like business, media, political leaders and social service agencies and other institutions of the community. It is proactive, decentralized and personalized; it is full-service and works toward the goal of removing predators from the streets and solving long-term problems by dealing with the causes, not just reacting to the symptoms. Community policing is based on the joint effort of citizens and police toward solving neighborhood problems which in turn satisfies the expressed needs of citizens and enhance the residents quality of life. The role of the community police officer is equivalent to the role of the critical social scientist, the facilitator and catalyst of problem solving activities. Through self-education and educating the residents, the officer plays both the expert and educator role without forcing the expert opinion upon the residents.
The community policing officer assists the residents by meeting with them individually and in groups in hopes that communication will lead to some consensus of accepted action will be agreed upon and implemented by the residents. The major considerations in community policing are: citizen input into defining problems to be solved, citizen involvement in planning and implementing problem solving activities, and citizens determining if their felt needs have been met. Community policing is critical social science in action and is based on the assumptions of normative sponsorship theory. The theory of community policing is based on normative sponsorship and critical social theory. Normative sponsorship theory declares most people are of good will and willing to cooperate with others to satisfy their needs. It proposes that a community effort will only be sponsored if it is normative (within the limits of established standards) to all persons and interest groups involved.
One of the major considerations when attempting to initiate community development is to understand how two or more interest groups can have sufficient convergence of interest or consensus on common goals to bring about the implementation. Each group involved and interested in program implementation must be able to justify and, hence, legitimize the common group goal within its own patterns of values, norms, and goals. The more congruent the values, beliefs, and goals of all participating groups, the easier it will be for them to agree on common goals. The participating groups, however, do not necessarily have to justify their involvement or acceptance of a group goal for the same reason.
In community policing, critical social science is practiced and it assists police and citizens to gain an understanding of the quasi-causes of their problematic situation, which aid citizens to solve their own problems. Community Policing is the most widely used term for a loosely defined set of police philosophies, strategies, and tactics known either as problem-oriented policing, neighborhood-oriented policing, or community- oriented policing. Like the police-community relations movement, community policing stems from a view of the police as a multifunctional social service agency working to reduce the despair of poverty. Like team policing, community policing is rooted in the belief that the traditional officer on the beat will bring the police and the public closer together. At the same time, it maintains the professional model's support for education and research.
Instead of merely responding to emergency calls and arresting criminals, community-policing officers devote considerable time to performing social work, working independently and creatively on solutions to the problems on their beats. It follows that they make extensive personal contacts, both inside and outside their agencies. Community policing apparently has received widespread support at the conceptual level from politicians, academicians, administrators, and the media. It also has strong intuitive appeal with the general public. Yet, community policing has encountered significant stumbling blocks at the operational level nearly everywhere it has been tried. Does community policing reach societies desired outcome and expectations?
This is one of many questions we may have about the fairly new and controversial subject of community policing. The philosophy rests on the belief that people deserve input into the police process, in exchange for their participation and support. It also rests on the belief that solutions to todays community problems demand freeing both people and the police to explore creative, new ways to address neighborhood concerns beyond a narrow focus on individual crime incidents. While traditional methods of policing fail to provide desired levels of crime control and public safety, police departments across the Nation search for new and innovative ways to provide law enforcement services to their communities. In recent years, community-oriented policing has emerged as the method of choice for many law enforcement agencies. As part of the conversion from traditional policing methods to community-orientated policing, agencies have become more reliant on a new breed of police officers better suited for performing proactive, citizen-oriented policing functions in their communities.
Traditional policing focuses on reducing crime by arresting the bad guys. Not only does this risk demonizing everyone who lives in high crime areas, it requires relying on rapid response which makes it almost impossible for the police to avoid being strangers to the community. This concept also suffers from reducing the role of the law-abiding citizens in the community primarily to that of a passive by-stander. Community policing takes a different approach to crime, drugs, and disorder, one that can augment and enhance problem-oriented policing such as rapid response and undercover operations. One of the most obvious differences is that community policing involves average citizens directly in the police process. Traditional policing patronizes the community by setting up the police as the experts who have all the answers.
In contrast, community policing empowers average citizens by enlisting them as partners with the police in efforts to make their communities better and safer places to live and work. Many people may say that community policing is a program, but it really is not. A program has a beginning and an end as community policing should not. Community policing produces improved relations between people and their police as a welcome by-product of delivering high-quality decentralized and personalized police service to the community at the grass roots level. To summarize, community orientated policing is a matter of giving people what they deserve.
The innocent deserve the highest level of protection we can provide, they have the right to feel secure and that feeling may be as important as actually being secure. The guilty on the other hand must feel that the criminal activity and acts will be discovered and prosecuted and that they will become the object of unremitting attention. The community policing approach plays a crucial role internally by providing information about and awareness of the community and its problems, and by enlisting broad-based community support for the departments overall objectives. Most obviously, according to Goldstein, problem-oriented policing primarily emphasizes the substantive societal problems the police are held principally responsible for addressing; community policing primarily emphasizes having the police engage the community in the policing process.
Under problem-oriented policing, how the police and the community engage one another will and should depend on the specific problem they are trying to address, rather than being defined in a broad and abstract sense. Community policing implies that responses to problems will involve some sort of collaborative or cooperative working relationship between the police and the community. Problem-oriented policing allows for this possibility, but does not imply that such arrangements are always necessary or appropriate for addressing every problem (Goldstein 1992) Carefully analyzing problems before developing new...
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Research essay sample on Oriented Policing Community Policing
