Community Policing

Community Policing Defined

COP has been popularly defined by Robert Trojanowicz and Bonnie Bucqueroux as a new philosophy of policing based on police-citizen partnerships that work together in creative ways to solve community problems such as crime, fear of crime, disorder, and neighborhood decay. Fundamental to this philosophy is the ideal that citizens as active members of the community can be empowered to enhance the quality and safety of their neighborhoods rather than relying solely on police services. This broadened view of police recognizes that cooperation between police and the public will allow police greater access to information provided by the community, in turn fostering better police responses to community needs. While the actual definition of COP is highly debated, inherent to most COP models is the goal of establishing collaborative community-police partnerships, which address crime and disorder at the neighborhood level in a proactive, community-sensitive approach.

Still, COP exists in various forms in different environments, with models changing to meet the specific needs of the community involved. For some departments, this means a focus on activities that are designed to bring police officers closer to the communities they serve through increased foot and bicycle patrols, police decentralization through the use of substations, and the long-term assignment of officers to specific beats. In other departments, COP suggests more order maintenance and service delivery initiatives such as crime prevention programs and efforts that seek to revitalize disorganized neighborhoods.

History of COP

While early police practices illustrate many aspects of contemporary COP models, the call for police professionalism coupled with rapid innovations in technology led to increased distance between police and citizens. As police isolation, weakened community ties, and increased social and political protest offered evidence of the ineffectiveness of professional policing, criminologists and police administrators began to recognize the need for better community-police relations.

[Page 140]As with other reforms throughout history, the evolution of COP occurred within the historical context of American community-police relations. While many acknowledge the inherent difficulty of policing in a representative democracy, the historical role of American police has been to maintain the status quo by protecting politically powerful citizens. Thus, for communities with little or no access to political power, the road leading to COP was marred by injustice, over- and underenforce-ment, and fear.

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