What is a Community?

• Community: A geographical area that has multiple aspects such as racial diversity, socioeconomic composition, organizational participation, etc.

  • Socioeconomic Composition: People or families are separated into 3 levels; lower class, middle class, and upper class. It is usually based on one's income, education, or occupation.

  • Residential Stability: The percentage of people who still resided in the same house as they did a year ago

  • Racial/Ethnic Heterogeneity: A distributional characteristic that is unaffected by the identities of the groups within a community and solely depends on the number and proportion of each.

  • Local friendship relational networks: These are groups or friends who are connected through friendship or some sort of relationship within a community.

  • Organizational Participation: This is a group that works based on participation from the public rather than hiring contracted workers.

  • Supervisory Capacity: These are the responsibilities that allow someone to hire, transfer, promote, demote, or terminate employees.

• 8 Attributes of a community:

  • Particular geographic area or location

  • Recognized legal entity

  • Social interactions within have a division of labor and interdependence

  • Citizens share a culture or perspective

  • Values are spread

  • Social interactions within creating a shape for itself

  • There is inclusion and exclusion present

  • Citizens have a shared sentiment, sense of belonging, and interdependence

Theoretical Underpinnings of Community Policing

• Community Ownership: The degree to which a community feels responsible for maintaining a good quality of life in the community.

• Broken Windows Theory: The understanding that even minor infractions or quality-of-life transgressions can encourage or breed more major crimes in a neighborhood by luring more criminals and driving away more law-abiding citizens

• Contagion Proposition: As the quality of life decreases in geographical location more fear and crime is generated over time.

• Public Health Model: Attempts to find risk factors in order to avoid or lessen a certain illness or social issue in a community.

Community Partnership and Problem Solving

• Community Policing: A collaboration between the police and the community that identifies and solves community problems.

• Partnership: When a police department and community work together to make the community better. The community becomes the officer’s “eyes and ears”

• Elements of a partnership:

  • Working together on a goal

  • Identifying common goals

  • Constant communication and sharing of information

  • Having deadlines and views of the problem similar to one another

  • Everyone equally works together to find a solution

• Empowerment: When everyone in a group feels like they have a similar input and are on the same level as everyone else in the group.

• Police departments can work with multiple organizations such as:

  • Merchant associations

  • Neighborhood and civic groups

  • Youth-serving agencies

  • Tenant associations

  • Block associations

  • Community development corporation

• Problem Solving: Identifying and finding the causes of problems and researching rather than directly responding to a problem.

• Reactive: Acting after a problem occurs to prevent it

• Proactive: Acting before a problem occurs to prevent it

• Problems: 2 or more problems that the community and police can work together and solve.

• Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED): Recognizing that crime can be stopped by manipulating location dynamics such as target vulnerability.

Community-Oriented and Problem-Oriented Policing

• Community-Oriented Policing: Organizational strategies as well as using partnerships and problem-solving techniques are included in this.

• Problem-Oriented Policing: Proactive policing strategies that focus on the causes of a problem and how to prevent it in the future.

The SARA Model

• SARA: Used by community policing agencies to identify and solve repeat crime and community problems.

  • Scanning: Identifying problems that are common in the community that is concerning.

  • Analysis: Recognizing and comprehending the circumstances and events that lead up to and around the issue

  • Response or Strategy: Brainstorming new ideas and implementing the solutions

  • Assessment: We collect data to identify if there was a change when the solution was implemented.

• Crime Triangle: Displays the three elements necessary in order to take place a victim, offender, and location.

• Serious Habitual Offender Criminal Apprehension Program (SHOCAP): A study that allowed us to identify the 3 facts that help the crime triangle begin.

• 3 known facts the crime triangle begins from:

  • 10% of offenders account for 55% of all crimes

  • 10% of victims account for 42% of all victimization

  • 10% of all locations account for 60% of all call loads to the police

Focusing on Problem Locations

• Repeat Victimization: When someone has been victimized multiple times.

• Crime Analysis: The analysis of people involved in crimes, particularly repeat offenders, repeat victims, and criminal organizations

• Prevalence: The overall incidence of a problem in a geographical location.

• Target Area: An area where problems occur the most and so the officers and community work together more to solve the problems there.

• Hot Spots: Specific area that has the most crime within the community.

Management Implications of Community Policing

The Strategic Dimension

• Structural Changes: The transformation in the structure of society.

• Decentralization: Delegation of government responsibilities, authority, and resources to lower levels of government.

• Despecialization: Making an organization less specialized and making line officers take on more of these responsibilities as generalists.

• Team Policing: Assigning police officers to a small geographical area.

• Participatory Management Model: Encourages farmers to employ an adaptive management approach in order to interact with the complex systems in which they live and work in a sustainable manner.

The Programmatic Dimension

• Programmatic Dimension: Implementing a series of programs to gradually incorporate community policing into department operations.

Barriers to Implementing Community Policing:

• Community Mobilization: Used by law enforcement to involve people from all sectors of the community.

The Relationship Between Causes of Crime and Strategy :

• Needs Assessment: To develop a proactive police approach, problems and their sources must be identified in local communities.

Implications of Criminology Theory for Law Enforcement Practice:

• Risk Factors: Things are found to increase crime.

• Individual Factors

  • Pregnancy and obesity complications

  • Low resting heart rate

  • Internalizing disorders:

  • Hyperactivity, concentration problems, restlessness, and risk-taking

  • Aggressiveness

  • Early initiation of violent behavior

  • Involvement in other forms of antisocial behavior

  • Beliefs and attitudes favorable to deviant or antisocial behavior

• Family Factors

  • Parental criminality

  • Child maltreatment

  • Poor family management practices

  • Low levels of parental involvement

  • Parental attitudes favorable to substance use and violence

  • Parent-child separation

• School Factors

  • Academic failures

  • Low bonding to school

  • Dropping out of school

  • Moving schools frequently

• Peer-related Factors

  • Delinquent siblings

  • Delinquent peers

  • Gang member

• Community and Neighborhood Factors

  • Poverty

  • Community disorganization

  • Availability of drugs and firearms

  • Neighborhood adults involved in crime

  • Exposure to violence and racial prejudice

• Resiliency Theory: The more risk factors that are present the greater the criminal activity or behavior will be.

• Comprehensive Plans: Outlines a vision for the community's future and the steps necessary to turn that vision become reality.

• Suppression Strategies: These strategies are used to keep cases as low as possible.

• Prevention Strategies: Put into place so that it does not happen in the future.

• Routine activities theory: For a crime to occur there has to be a motivated offender, a suitable target, and an absence of capable guardianship. All three of these must intersect at the same time and place.