Law Enforcement Best Practices: 2019 COPS Office Guide - Community Policing
Overview of the 2019 COPS Office Publication
Document Identification: The source material is the COPS Office (U.S. Department of Justice) publication titled Law Enforcement Best Practices: Lessons Learned from the Field.
Nature of the Guide: This is a practitioner-developed resource designed specifically for law enforcement executives, leaders, and general personnel.
Core Purpose: To address critical and deeply intertwined areas of modern policing under the umbrella of community policing philosophy. These areas include:
(1) Community policing.
(2) De-escalation.
(3) Crisis intervention.
(4) First-line supervisors.
(5) Early intervention systems.
(6) Internal affairs.
(7) Recruitment, hiring, promotion, and retention.
(8) Data systems.
Primary Audiences:
New executives and leaders who need to understand current challenges.
Seasoned executives in communities where these issues are at the forefront.
Personnel tasked with developing or refining the agency’s approach to these topics.
Key Interconnected Themes:
De-escalation is considered a vital component of crisis intervention.
Early intervention systems and high-quality training are direct aids to personnel retention.
Effective data systems underpin problem-solving, prevention, transparency, and credibility.
Building trust through these systems improves recruiting and retention.
The document operates on the principle that functioning systems increase overall community policing effectiveness.
Chapter Structure: Each section follows a consistent format: Importance/Key challenges, a brief academic literature summary, existing DOJ/other resources, to specific best or promising practices, special considerations for small agencies, implementation checklists, and a summary.
Terminology: The terms “best practice” and “promising practice” are used interchangeably. They refer to methods practitioners have implemented and advocated for based on results in their jurisdictions. While some are research-backed, others have not yet been rigorously studied but show potential to maintain community trust, resolve issues, and build relationships.
Implementation Tools: The checklists provided are actionable at both strategic and tactical levels. They are intended as progress-tracking tools and conversation starters rather than exhaustive mandates.
Chapter 1: Community Policing Fundamentals
Foundational Precept: The primary belief is that effective control of crime, disorder, and fear necessitates community participation and assistance.
The Role of the Community: Communities provide vital information on crimes, offenders, and systemic problems. They form the interpersonal networks required for social cohesion and informal social control.
Historical Barriers: Collaborative relationships often require overcoming decades of isolation, disenfranchisement, suspicion, and civil unrest. Agencies must navigate past accusations of racial bias, excessive force, and a perceived lack of accountability.
Management Pressures: Executives face pressure to address non-traditional policing issues while managing changing budgets, recruitment challenges, and fractured services.
Core Mission: The mission extends beyond simple crime reduction toward tangible relationships based on mutual trust, respect, common interests, procedural justice, and shared responsibilities.
Three Components of Community Policing Response
1. Problem Solving (SARA Model):
Scanning: Identifying recurring problems in the community.
Analysis: Conducting an in-depth study of the identified problems.
Response: Developing innovative approaches that go beyond traditional law enforcement tactics.
Assessment: Measuring the effectiveness of the response.
Focus: Problems should be geographically defined to maximize efficacy by focusing on “hot spots” or service call concentrations.
2. Community Partnerships:
Range: These span from formal interagency agreements to informal collaborations.
Communication: The aim is free-flowing, bidirectional communication with stakeholders including social service providers, faith leaders, business owners, schools, and local government.
Felt Presence: Achieved through foot patrols, talking to residents, youth events, and ties with the faith community.
Procedural Justice: Decisions must be made transparently, allowing public voice, and treating individuals with respect and fairness to build legitimacy.
3. Organizational Transformation:
Reorientation: Shifting leadership and resources away from rigid, paramilitary bureaucracies toward community-based activities.
Strategies: Decentralization (e.g., using substations), civilianization of certain roles, and the reorganization of units.
Integration: Success is achieved by engaging all employees (—sworn and non-sworn) at every level, rather than limiting community policing to a specialized unit.
Environmental Considerations and Academic Literature
Internal Environments: Rigid, rules-oriented structures and officers' perceptions of their roles (“protect and serve” ideals vs. job realities) can hinder transformation. Agencies are shiftng from punitive discipline to education-based accountability and early warning systems.
External Environments: Past strategies, such as hot-spot policing performed without community input, have historically widened the divide and perpetuated mistrust.
Key Academic Findings:
Face-to-face interactions are the most successful programs for increasing the resident-police interface.
Procedural justice leads to a greater willingness for the public to participate in prevention.
Tactics must be tailored to specific neighborhood characteristics; for example, foot patrols are most effective in atypically high-violence beats.
A common failure is the lack of full organizational restructuring; without it, frontline personnel lack the time for creative problem-solving.
Problem-solving often defaults to traditional tactics like saturation patrol and arrests due to superficial assessment phases.
Ten Best or Promising Practices from the Field
1. Comprehensive Strategic Planning: Develop a written plan that imparts core values and outlines the shift to a community policing philosophy. It should include specific roles, activities, milestones, and metrics, and be integrated into all operations (recruitment, evaluation, etc.).
2. Training All Personnel: Training must focus on overcoming distrust and reinforcing values. This includes preparing for hostility and ensuring that even specialized units (like detectives) address root causes and victim support.
3. Atmosphere of Openness and Transparency: Agencies should share data, policies, and outcomes regularly, not just upon request. This involves telling the agency’s story and creating opportunities for community input on strategy changes.
4. Adoption of Procedural Justice: This principle applies both internally (seeking employee opinions, treating them with equity) and externally. It is a long-term investment that requires all agency components to support it.
5. Personnel Safety and Wellness: Community policing requires high levels of empathy and compassion, which increases stress. Systematic intervention for trauma and preventative services are essential to maintain an officer’s capacity for meaningful relationships.
6. True Community Partnerships: Develop advisory groups that include a broad cross-section of stakeholders. Crucially, these should include “contrarian voices” and traditionally unsupportive members for robust feedback.
7. Positive Engagement in Every Contact: Treat every call-for-service, phone call, or digital interaction as an opportunity for procedural justice. This builds legitimacy and models engagement behavior.
8. Measuring and Developing Social Cohesion: In low-cohesion areas, reactive suppression can damage relationships. Agencies should collaborate with researchers to measure residents' trust and act as brokers to fix environmental issues (e.g., lighting, blight) through other government partners.
9. Reevaluation of Success Metrics: Traditional data may not capture success in community policing. Qualitative perceptions and beliefs of the public are key. Executives must determine how to gauge efficacy with varied partners while protecting privacy.
10. Performance Evaluation Integration: Assess internal progress by asking if administration values all voices and if the disciplinary system has been reformed toward progressive, constructive feedback. Use tools like “Measuring What Matters” and incorporate these into COMPSTAT.
Case Study: NYPD Neighborhood Policing Plan ()
Core Components:
Officer ownership of specific geographic areas.
Individual officer-resident relationship building.
Elimination of overspecialization and departmental silos.
Greater job satisfaction through systematic problem-solving.
Patrol structure organized into three tiers for career paths.
Outcomes: By , the NYPD saw the lowest violent crime numbers in decades while maintaining a strategy built on collaboration.
Special Considerations for Small Agencies
Natural Alignment: Community policing is often the inherent nature of small-town agencies due to the routine engagement of residents and personnel living within the community.
Accountability: Town governance in smaller jurisdictions is frequently public and high-attendance, creating natural opportunities for dialogue and accountability.
Geographic Challenges: Large geographic jurisdictions for small agencies can still present logistical hurdles for community engagement.