Mike brown
Dilip K Das
10/5/12
According to the book community policing doesn’t have one definition but has many definitions. One example they give was the philosophical definition, community policing represents a fundamental change in the basic role of the police officer, including changes in his or her skills, motivations and opportunity to engage in problem solving activates and to develop new partner ships with key elements of the community. To me the first definition they introduce is one of best definitions given, but I think that a better way to describe them is by themes or elements of policing. There are four main elements of community policing, community involvement, problem solving, a community base, and redefined goals. What it means by community involvement is that the people that live in the community must speak up and communicate with the police. Meaning if you live the community and you see something that shouldn’t be happening that you report it and not just act like it never happen. Also police have to do their part by solving the problems that they see in the community but I guess they cannot figure what the problems are because the community won’t talk to the police. Another example to help the community and police problem solve is to have town or community meetings to discuss problems that need to be corrected, there should be an open dialog between the police and the community the people shouldn’t be scared to call the police and the police should treat the people with respect and solve the problem they were called for. We should not feel like the police don’t care and be like there not here to help us but give us more problems. The police should be more helpful we should want to call the police in certain situations
The book also states that the federal government implemented community Oriented cops in 1994. The goal of this office was to fund local agencies in hiring 100,000 new community police officers, but they had a problem with this because the police training remained the same so the new community cops were just like the regular cops. Which meant the emphasis didn’t change it was still about making arrest and taking reports opposed to preventing crimes and problem solving. The community police they hired were supposed to work with the community such as alternative sources of intervention and working with non-law enforcement agencies. Also the criteria for hiring police did not change either so basically which means that they just hiring people to fill the positions. Without these changes to the training and criteria there are no community police there just thugs with guns. The book also talks about community policing programs and reports there over 800 law enforcement agencies that have or are involved in some form of community policing. They provide four examples from the text, theft from automobiles which help prevent the crime of theft opposed to dealing with it after the fact. One of the methods they used was called the potential of fenders, so they would set up maps and find patterns based on where the thefts are occurring and bring resources to patrol and catch them in the act and preventing future automobile theft. Kind of what they do on the show bait cars where they leave a car in an area where lots of car thefts have took place and have police watch the car