Keeping people safe & well

 

NCLB Implementation Guide
Community Policing

 

Critical assumptions

OPS has to deal with several important issues when planning for and implementing community policing, including making decisions about how to change police culture and values, organizing the department to facilitate community policing, and managing the implementation.

Changing Police Philosophy and Culture
Community policing needs a department-wide effort, requiring long-term and substantial changes in the existing practices and its relationships with the public and other institutions. It is desirable, although not mandatory, that such an undertaking support a NCLB process.

Nevertheless, the NCLB process does not require a top-to-bottom change in the culture of policing for community policing to be successful.

Developing community partnerships and problem solving can be implemented in the designated communities by a dedicated group of officers. This approach requires that all policing activity undertaken within the area be coordinated with these officers. For example, the NCLB effort is at risk if another police unit does not follow the priorities identified by the community and the concerned officers working with the community or begins a crackdown effort without consulting with the assigned community policing officers.

The officers working in the selected neighbourhoods are the centre through which all policing services to these areas are channeled. Equally important, community-policing officers engaged in the NCLB activities are able to call on other police units to support community engagement and problem-solving activities. These units include narcotics, gangs, crime analysis, intelligence, crime prevention, investigations, school resource officers, communications, and special weapons and DART team.

Changing Patrol Officer Behavior
The most visible police presence in the neighbourhood is the patrol officer. If community policing is to succeed at the neighbourhood level, the behavior of patrol officers must conform to the principles of community policing. Officers are sensitized to focus on neighbourhood problems and include the community in this effort. Officers understand how to identify problems and analyze them, and they need to have the skills to engage the community throughout the problem solving process.

Training must be provided to officers lacking the requisite problem solving and community engagements skills. The most important criterion for the officers is that they have an interest in being part of the effort. Officers who have been working in the designated areas are given first consideration for the program because they likely already know the people and the problems.

The best way to make patrol officers’ behavior more effective is to make it more community policing oriented. This introduces these officers to the neighbourhood and eventually makes them aware of the problems that can be solved through a collaborative working relationship with community members, businesses, government agencies and other stakeholders.

Officers working in the designated communities need to include community members as partners in crime correction and prevention in a meaningful way. In a patrol operation in which officers rotate frequently through different shifts and neighbourhood beats, officers rarely get to know anyone but the perpetrators and victims of crime. They also often develop a mindset that “bad” neighbourhoods are places to get into and out of as quickly as possible. Without getting to know the community members, some officers may identify all people in the neighbourhood as part of the problem. Thus, for community policing to succeed, patrol officers must be empowered by their agencies to solve problems and be given some degree of designated geographic assignment to the designated neighbourhoods. In this way, officers and community members develop trust and mutual respect.

In the past, two police officers were specifically assigned by East Division to four NCLB neighbourhoods. The success in building bridges and reestablishing trust between OPS staff and the community was phenomenal.

Experience shows that one major difference between traditional policing and community policing is the shift in organizational focus from accountability for a limited period (work shift) to full-time accountability for a geographic location. Traditionally, patrol officers and supervisors are held accountable for what occurs on their watch or shift. Because officers on a shift may be assigned to police the entire city or large districts within the city, they are not specifically accountable for neighbourhood problems that occur during each shift. Moreover, persistent problems often overlap the shift times that officers work. Similarly, neighbourhood officers never have the opportunity to develop a special relationship with specific communities and get engaged in constant and consistent interaction. Our experience in the four communities shows that the frequent interaction between the neighbourhood officers and the communities established a long-term relationship between the concerned communities and OPS. In the beginning residents were reluctant to meet the police officers. However, the work of two dedicated officers changed the community perception to the extent that all subsequent new officers were warmly welcomed afterwards.

When unresolved neighbourhood problems are passed on from shift to shift, it is difficult to hold anyone accountable. Under community policing in designated neighbourhoods, the neighbourhood officers have primary responsibility for a designated neighbourhood. The officers are reached and consulted and held accountable for any and all police-related problems that occur in the neighbourhood, regardless of the time they occur.

The concept of geographic assignment integrity (the same officers are assigned to the same neighbourhoods for a long period) and territorial responsibility (neighbourhood officers are responsible and accountable for what goes on in the neighbourhood) is crucial to the success of community policing.  

All these concepts are tried and tested at the national level in other countries such as the United States and UK.[1] Experience in the US shows that police have gained trust and contributed to behavior change by playing softball games with gangs. The Police Athletic League (Boys and Girls Club) and basket ball games with youth are successful experiments here in Ottawa. Furthermore, to demonstrate the department’s commitment to the neighbourhood and to ensure that officers have assignment integrity with geographic responsibility, many police agencies in the US have opened mini-stations or storefronts in the selected areas. We had a CPC in the area for a long period of time, but the difference that two specifically assigned officers made to one of the communities was transformational in nature.

Organizational Changes to Enable
Community Policing
If the community policing officers are held accountable for the designated area, they also require adequate resources to do the job. It is up to police agencies to decide whether to deliver patrol services to the designated areas by using regular beat officers or create a special squad. Regardless of the approach selected, the officers assigned to the neighbourhoods must be full-service patrol officers in addition to their community engagement activities. Whenever possible the officers handle citizen calls for service. It is important to handle the neighbourhood calls for service for at least the following reasons:

1. Officers gain a detailed understanding about residents’ problems and have a chance to talk with them about possible solutions;
2. Officers gain an in-depth knowledge of who is doing what in the neighbourhood, which often leads to cultivating valuable sources of information;
3. Community members come to rely on their community policing officers to handle their calls and problems, which may affect communication with beat officers coming in just to handle the complaint;
4. Officers engaged in the community policing effort are viewed as still doing “real police work”; community policing is not seen as just another program that will die when the outside assistance is gone.

The management of calls for service on a 24/7 basis is a challenge to police services but to be successful in a community policing environment the following should be considered: Police management deal with two important organizational alignment issues in providing community policing to NCLB process neighbourhoods. First, calls for service need to be managed to allow officers time to engage community members and minimize occasions when officers not familiar with the neighbourhood are sent to handle a call. Second, the extent to which services are decentralized to the neighbourhood level also needs to be determined.

However, there is no need to remain preoccupied with calls for service if it leaves little time for engaging community members in identifying, analyzing, and implementing solutions to resolve problems. The community policing officers need to be given time away from service calls to become involved in other community policing activities, meeting residents and developing trust relationships. Police management ought to examine the call workload and determine how calls can be prioritized, handled more efficiently and handled by alternative means.

Implementation of what is called differential police response (DPR) also remains an option for this process. The following are examples of how DPR can work in the designated neighbourhoods. Lessons can be drawn from the following experiences from similar initiatives:

1. Computer-aided dispatch (CAD) systems have been programmed in the US where dispatchers are trained to hold non-emergency calls for neighbourhood community policing officers for a predetermined time until they are available to respond. In this case, complainants are advised of the delay and the purpose behind it.
2. Certain non-emergency calls are handled by having trained civilians take reports over the telephone. Departments frequently handle calls such as minor property theft, auto theft and minor vandalism by telephone report. In this case, the information obtained from the telephone reports are given to community policing officers as soon as possible to keep them abreast of ongoing problems in the neighbourhood, and neighbourhood community members are fully informed of the type of calls handled by phone and the reasons for the policy.
3. Some police agencies, such as in Orlando, Minneapolis, Vernon Hills , in the US have employed civilian community service officers (CSOs) [2] to assist patrol officers in the field with no emergency calls for service. CSOs become part of the neighbourhood community policing team and relieve officers of time-consuming minor calls so that they can devote more time to community policing activities.
4. In some agencies, cellular telephones have been provided to neighbourhood community policing officers so they can call complainants when they receive no emergency call dispatches and make convenient appointments with consenting callers.

The other organizational alignment issue that police management may like to address is the degree to which decentralization of services occurs.

Policing NCLB communities requires the help of specialized units such as narcotics, gangs and guns, violence and follow-up investigations. Which services are part of the neighbourhood community policing team and which are provided by specialists from outside the team need to be determined. Decisions on decentralization of police services to the neighbourhood level ought to involve both the police and the community.

Role of Management and Supervisors
The role of management and supervisors is always critical during any type of organizational change, but it is particularly important in the transition to effective community policing. Management’s most important role is to provide an environment in which community policing can be successfully implemented. One of the best ways to accomplish this is made possible through the development of a plan that identifies what is done and who is responsible for each task.

Leadership and vision at the top levels of the police department are critical; the top command would need to demonstrate to the entire department that it supports the community policing philosophy. This is especially important as the agency struggles with critical decisions such as the extent to which decentralization occurs in the transition to community policing. Studies show that there is usually some resistance  in attempting to implement community policing. [3]

Management also needs to lead the effort in developing the necessary officer selection criteria, training and performance evaluation to support and reinforce community policing. Management provides the resources needed by the community policing officers to do an effective job. In addition, management’s help is needed to coordinate with other city and county agencies in bringing some needed services to the selected neighbourhoods. Field supervisors play a critical role in bringing community policing to designated communities.

Some of the functions of first-line supervisors include:

1. Meeting regularly with community members to get feedback on policing plans and activities that affect their neighbourhood;
2. Helping community-policing officers negotiate co-production of public safety with community members;
3. Promoting and prioritizing problem-solving activities;
4. Monitoring and rewarding proactive community policing, especially neighbourhood problem identification and analysis;
5. Facilitating interaction among officers, community members, and government agencies which can help resolve problems.

During community policing implementation, police managers serve as the planners and directors, whereas field supervisors serve as the neighbourhood coaches and monitors.

Information Management
Another significant organizational issue in community policing is managing information to support implementation. A vast amount of information about the NCLB process needs to be collected, stored, retrieved and analyzed. This information also needs to be readily available to the community policing officers.

Studies show that there are three important elements for all crimes:  offender(s), victim(s) and place. Community policing information needs to describe all three. Crime analysis is able to identify the most active offenders, people with repeated victimizations and those at the highest risk of becoming victims, and places with a disproportionately high level of crime, drug dealing or gang activity. This information is used to identify problems and target police and community activities, design appropriate solutions to problems, and assess the effectiveness of interventions.

As stated earlier, important sources of information used by community policing officers are calls for service, field incident reports, and officer intelligence reports. In addition, information which is not kept in the police department can be valuable. These data come from parole and probation agencies, social service agencies, housing departments, property management firms, schools and hospitals.

Neighbourhood community members are another important source of information. They can express their public safety concerns at neighbourhood meetings, during door-to-door surveys, on the street to foot patrol officers, and in other encounters. Community policing officers use these opportunities to document resident problems. They can also collect information from community members through anonymous drug or crime tip lines or the Internet. An example from the US shows that one police agency distributed postcards that community members returned with information about crime and other neighbourhood problems.

Another example of what is being done in community policing: Officers maintain a problem-solving log that documents neighbourhood problems and police officer activities directed at solving them. [4] Such a log is also needed for supervisors to track and monitor the progress of officers in dealing with neighbourhood problems. It is also possible to automate this log in agencies with data processing capabilities.

 

Notes

[1] See: Award-Winning Community Policing Strategies. The report highlights some of the winners of the International Association of Chiefs of Police Community Policing Award. Included are brief descriptions of innovative approaches, successfully developed and implemented at the local level to reduce crime and disorder. URL: http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/RIC/ResourceDetail.aspx?RID=451 One example of successful community policing is: Compstat and Community Policing: Taking Advantage of Compatibilities and Dealing with Conflicts,’ a project undertaken with funding from the Office of Community-Oriented Policing, U.S. Department of Justice. (COPS Cooperative Agreement No. 2005-CK-WX-K003)

Also see: Community Policing: The Past, Present, and Future, Lorie Fridell and Mary Ann Wycoff, Police Executive Research Forum, US. URL:

WORKING FOR SAFER NEIGHBOURHOODS: A manual for action, The Crime Concern Trust Limited, Crime Concern, Beaver House, 147-150 Victoria Road, Swindon SN1 3UY, www.crimeconcern.org.uk, www.safer-community.net

[2] See the CSOs job description here as a ready reference: URL: http://www.cityoforlando.net/police/support_services/cso.htm

[3] See: The Challenges of Implementing Community Policing in the United States
Stephen D. Mastrofski*, James J. Willis** and Tammy Rinehart Kochel*. Policing.2007; 1: 223-234

[4] Performance Criteria Under a Problem Oriented Policing Model: A Report Prepared for the Ada County Sheriffs Office, John P. Crank, UD Department of Justice, June 03, 2002.

Also see: Innovative Neighbourhood-Oriented Policing: Descriptions of Programs in Eight Cities. Volume 1 of a Report Submitted to the National Institute of Justice, US, by Susan Sadd and Randolph M. Grime, Series: NIJ Report, Published: June 1995, 99 pages.
URL: http://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/inopvol1.txt

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Centre de Sante Communautaire du Sud Est D'Ottawa

Contact: Abid Jan Tel./ Tél: (613) 737-5115 Ext. 2403  Fax/Télé: (613) 739-8199

NCLB matters because neighbourhoods matter