Keeping people safe & well

 

NCLB Implementation Guide
Community Policing

 

Overview
This Component describes community policing in relation to NCLB sites. It presents useful steps to implement community policing and describes key implementation issues.

Vision
Community policing is the style of policing that a law enforcement agency adopts to guide its delivery of services in the designated high crime neighbourhoods or the neighbourhoods which have identified crime prevention as their top priority. In a community policing environment, whether the intended result is corrective or preventative, it is the communities role and responsibility to work with police to identify the policing issues that need to be resolved, identify potential solutions and resources to be committed towards the resolution of the identified issues, whenever possible to be involved in the implementation of the identified solutions and, ultimately, assess and evaluate whether the policing issues have been resolved as a result of the actions taken. 

The initial step in the NCLB process is to take corrective actions to remove the criminal elements before undertaking preventive action, empowerment and neighbourhood restoration. The bridge between the preventive and correctional actions is community policing.

Community policing officers, officers who have to consistently remain engaged with the community, provide the continuity to maintain community safety and peacefulness by communicating and forming partnerships, stimulating community mobilization, and encouraging prevention programs and neighbourhood restoration efforts.

Community policing is generally defined by its two key components — community engagement and problem solving. Community engagement is an ongoing process between the police and members of the public. The public includes residents, businesses, government agencies, schools, hospitals, community-based organizations and visitors to the neighbourhood.

Community engagement takes place in several ways. It occurs in community’s formal meetings with the police and in routine contacts on street corners. Any contact between police personnel and community members is an opportunity for community engagement. The idea is to formalize these public relationships by forming collaborative partnerships with key stakeholders. These stakeholders are critical for several reasons. Many provide services to the designated neighbourhoods. Each of the stakeholders can offer police both insight into the problems and potential solutions. Because of their shared responsibility for the neighbourhood and understanding of the issues, stakeholders are important resources for implementing programs designed to address the problems.

Preventing crime and enforcing the law are the traditional functions of police departments. Community policing expands the role of the police beyond enforcing the law and arresting criminals to identifying and responding to problems in the neighbourhood. The manner in which the police undertake problem solving and how they and the community relate to each other determine the standard of success of community policing.

For community policing to be successful as an approach and practice, the police understands the conditions in a neighbourhood that give rise to the problems associated with crimes and criminal behavior. Developing and implementing solutions tailored to reducing these problems, and determining the impact of the solutions by obtaining feedback from the community, is what sets community policing apart from more traditional law enforcement practices. Therefore, the processes of community engagement (partnership development) and problem solving are central and inseparable components to the concept and practices of community policing.

Partnering with the community without solving its problems provides no meaningful service to the public. Problem solving without developing collaborative partnerships risks overlooking the most pressing community concerns and tackling problems that are of little interest to the community, sometimes with tactics that community members may find objectionable.

Furthermore, because community members know what goes on in their neighbourhood and have access to resources important to addressing problems, their engagement in problem solving is vital to gaining valuable information and mobilizing community responses to the problems. Through meaningful community partnerships, police sources of information and learning about the community improve. The most important element of the improved process of engagement is communication between the police and residents.

 

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© 2005-15 South - East Ottawa Community Health Centre
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