Chapter 11: Community Policing and Problem Solving

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.