Kappeler: Community Policing, 6th Edition


Case Studies with Questions and Answers

Chapter 13: Community Policing at the Crossroads

You are a retired police chief and you have recently accepted a position with the local police academy as an instructor. The director of the police academy talks to you about the curriculum and the possible classes that you might be asked to teach. He states that he is interested in having you teach on community policing. He has had other instructors teach a similar course in the past. However, the police recruits have not been very receptive of the community policing idea. He wants you to create a course that helps these recruits to understand that community policing is the future of policing in the United States. You are excited about the course and you begin to prepare the course materials.

Questions

  1. What is the philosophy of community policing?
  2. Correct Answer

    The idea of community policing is a radical departure from traditional notions of policing. Community policing is a paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1966) that challenges long-standing conceptualizations of the police and fundamental assumptions about doing police work. As a philosophy, community policing is grounded in a defined set of values that serve as an ethical and moral foundation, values that sought to change both the nature of the tasks police perform and the number of people responsible for determining the desired means and ends associated with policing. The assumptions upon which community policing rest represents a dramatic departure from the past that threatens the values and beliefs embraced by the traditional political system and institutionalized forms of policing.
    Ideally, community policing values people and their concerns relegating the police institution and its law enforcement agenda to a secondary consideration. By paying attention to human and social problems and by tailoring police service to those problems, communities might be transformed into safer places with an improved quality of life for all people. Solving human problems and making communities safer places in which to live are accomplished by giving average people control over the police agenda. This means a radical redistribution of the power that has traditionally marked the divide between government, police, and people. From this perspective, people are no longer passive actors in the policing process; they are active participants in determining both what constitutes a community problem and how best to address it.
    By transforming the values of the police institution, community policing seeks to inject an ethos of service into a culture that has historically focused solely on crime rather than social problems. The traditional police institution's obsession with law-enforcement-based tactics is supplanted with an ethos of service and a problem-solving orientation. By retooling policing, the social isolation and inequities inherent in the traditional system are broken down and police form a new partnership with the people they are sworn to serve. By allowing line officers and average people, not just police executives and political elites, the power to set immediate priorities and launch new initiatives, police become responsive to community needs.


  3. What are the basic values of community policing?
  4. Correct Answer

    • All people deserve a say in how they are policed, regardless of who they are or what position they hold in society. People have a right to decide both the means and objectives of the police;
    • People—and not the police—have the ultimate power to control crime, enhance their own safety, and help improve the overall quality of life in the community. Community policing must empower groups that previously had little or no power and control;
    • People are not only vital to policing, they are the reason for policing. People are not problems; they are the solution to problems. To do their job, the police must have access to average people. Average people are no longer the passive recipients of police service, but important partners in the policing process;
    • People in the community become important arbiters in determining the relative success or failure of local initiatives, and they have a major role to play in supervising and assessing police performance;
    • Police officers must be educated to see themselves as community leaders and builders, not just as crime-fighters. Within realistic limits, they must move beyond responding to calls as isolated incidents, to identifying and altering the underlying dynamics that create social problems—not just their symptoms;
    • Police executives must actively demonstrate their commitment to this new philosophy by delegating power and control to line officers and the community; and
    • Police executives must shift to emphasizing trust while maintaining accountability, allowing all officers within the department the freedom and autonomy to move beyond responding to calls as isolated incidents, to managing social problems.

  5. What are the organizational and structural issues associated with community policing?
  6. Correct Answer

    • Community policing requires changes in the way that resources are spent;
    • Community policing requires a reordering of police work to allow time for problem solving;
    • Community policing requires the decentralization of organizational power in a manner that allows line officers greater freedom to address human and social problems;
    • Community policing requires a flattening the organizational structure of police departments;
    • Community policing requires educating the public on the new nature of police work especially as it relates to changes in police responses to calls for service; and
    • Community policing requires a new system of accountability that allows people direct input into the process of evaluating police efforts.

Copyright © 2012, Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.