With those two elements, community policing adds a critical, proactive element to the traditional reactive role of the police. The obvious key elements that strengthen the ideal of community policing is the involvement from the communities with the police.
Community policing offered citizens more ways to participate in activities that not only reduce crime, but also promote a safe, healthy environment to do business and to live. Through community policing, community members were able to learn the role of the officers that serve them, which made them more aware of that was expected of them, the citizens. Residents were not accustomed to seeing a police officer walking in their neighborhood and talking with people with no other motive than to address their problems and concerns. They were further surprised that community policing involved officers addressing problems that were not traditionally handled by the older reactive model of policing (Allender 2004).
Nevertheless, there were also many weaknesses in community policing, and the one that seem obscure and seem not to be notice is the “means over ends” syndrome. The affect of the “means over ends” syndrome was creating a beautiful public image for the police by improving policing in America through restoring the internal managements. Community policing original goal was to create a good public image, and some of the police agencies often exposed themselves to the “means over ends” syndrome in the process of doing so. For those agencies that were able to succeeded in creating a good public-police relation, forgets to re-concentrated themselves with the end result of their goals, which was the actual impact that their streamlined organization have on the problem the police are called upon to handle. Also some of the agencies seem reluctant to move beyond the “means over ends” syndrome plateau and move toward creating a more orderly end product (Goldstein 1979).
The “means over ends” syndrome was one of the negative sides of community policing, and probably best sum up into this quote by an unknown author, “Community policing is a patient in critical condition whose survival looks bleak.” In another word, this unknown author tries to say that community policing is a patient that affected by this “means over ends” syndrome and other symptom and its survival seems dreary.
As history has shown, in order for the police to maintain a good social order, they have to use certain policing style for certain types of social disorder. For instances, slavery police to kept the slavery from escaping, industrial police to suppress riots and strikes, municipal police and etc. With community policing, it doesn’t have the same role and effectiveness. Community policing is just image-management, which use image management as a tool for prevention of crime. Community policing not really reducing crimes but what its really do is reducing the fear of crimes, by putting more police officers in the communities. Instead of fighting crimes on their own, community police call the communities for help (Barlow 1999). What this means is that the police are putting their white flag up and show that they self-defeated.
The primary objective of community policing is using the media to portrayed the positive image of polices. What this lead to is that community policing is affected by another syndrome known as the “public-image” symptom, which used community-“policing wages on the image of crime rather on the crime itself” (Barlow 1999, p. 647). The side effect of the syndrome shows that community policing is not really effective. For instance, foot patrol is one of the strong strategies of community policing. But evidence shows that “ foot patrol has no effect on crime; it merely fool the citizen into thinking that they are safer” (Barlow 1999, p.666 cited in Kelling 1982). What foot patrol really does is developing a great image for the media and public to notices.
On another hand, another unknown author argues, “Community policing has changed the way police do business,” and it has. The reasons this unknown author might argues this way is because since police has adopted the idea of community policing, it has dramatic changed in many forms. These changes include transform officers from specialists to generalists, team policing, but in one particular change that shined is the reactive to proactive approach. With proactive approach, this allows police officer to prevent crimes instead of remedial crimes. As mention earlier, community policing focused more on the communities and create programs for the community’s members to participate and understands the importance of their cooperation and involvements.
In addition, “community policing require polices to step out of their real role of being law enforcer and pushes them into the broader role of generalist social servants” (Carter 1999, p. 209). For instance, for those citizens who call the police for a non-criminal and non-violent act, (such as domestic disturbance, noise complaint…) should get the responses from the police? Should the citizens who pay taxes for their security have the right to define the broad types of activities they want from their police to do? If the police don’t responses then who will? This is where community policing play the generalist social servant roles, it now much easier for the police officer to handle since they already know the community’s members and community’s problems.
The bottom line is that community policing is the application of modern management thought to the business of policing. Whether a business or public service, the management goal is to direct the organization with the greatest efficiency and effectiveness. This includes, responding to customer needs and demands, solving the problem, not responding to symptom, and involving customer in setting priorities (Carter 1999, p. 212).
References
1). Allender D., Community Policing Exploring the Philosophy, Mar 2004, Vol. 73, Issue 3. (Academic Search Premier).
2). Barlow E., Barlow M. 1999, Policing: An international Journal of Police Strategies & Management, Vol. 22 No. 4, 1999, pp. 646-674. MCB University Press, 1363-9511x.
3). Bureau of justice assistance Publication: Understanding community policing " Aug
1994 Chapter 3 Pg 13,15
.
4). Goldstein H., Improving Policing: A Problem-Oriented Approach, Crime and Delinquency, pp. 254-274. Copyright 1979 Sage Publication.
5). Sewell J., Controversial Issues in Policing. Community Policing: A more Efficacious Police Response of Simply Inflated Promises, D. Carter 1999, pp. 206-221.
