Implementation of Community Policing

Pre-Implementation Stage

Successful implementation of organization-wide community policing begins far before the change is put into motion. The planning stage is crucial and time consuming, consisting of goal setting and the creation of a management foundation. While community policing in practice is often discussed as a bottom-up concept, implementation within a department is top-down, starting with an executive decision and the commitment to complete the process from inception to completion. Preimplementation begins by training all sworn and non-sworn personnel in the organization on community policing and problem solving, focusing on the underlying philosophies as well as strategies and practices. Furthermore, it requires identifying stakeholders within the organization and community that [Page 208]are most likely to support the idea as well as those that are most likely to resist. In this phase, police executives define what community policing means in their organization and community. This is done through internal (other administrators within the department, officers, and staff) and external (administrators in other agencies, community stakeholders, policymakers whose decisions impact police operations, and previous literature) communication. This early communication informally begins the implementation phase and primes the organization for the change that will soon take place.

If the original scope decision is for an organizationwide version of community policing, further preimplementation phases are required before the executives proceed. This is where theoretical and conceptual knowledge become paramount through reviewing previous literature and research, as does understanding the behavior of organizations going through change. In this phase, the executives must embrace the notion of innovation and beware of mimetic isomorphism (institutions in the same organizational field becoming similar through mimicking what other have done) without greater attention to their unique organizational history and community environment. Furthermore, research has found that community policing through the utilization of federal grants often becomes a form of coercive isomorphism—influencing departments that accept the grants to become the same in terms of structure or process. Thus, executives must be keenly aware of the pitfalls of isomorphism when planning the implementation of community policing and focus on innovative management methods to avoid the failures described and detailed in the community policing literature.

...