Difficulty Managing Community Oriented Policing

Difficulty Managing Community Oriented Policing

Difficulty Managing Community Oriented Policing

by Daniel Whittacre

Of recent years, law enforcement agencies have stumbled on old policing practices that seemed to have been all but abandoned.   In an effort to solve the growing urban criminal issues plaguing inner cities and suburbia alike, police have rejuvenated the art of Community Oriented Policing.   This drastic divergence from the typical process of law enforcement creates difficulties to the agency managers.   Whether the title is commissioner, chief or sheriff, the difficulties of solving crime with programs are the same.   Clarence Darrow once wrote this about the remedies of crime:
Students of crime and punishment have never differed seriously in their conclusions.   All investigations have arrived at the result that crime is due to causes; that man is either not morally responsible, or responsible only to a slight degree.   All have doubted the efficacy of punishment, and practically no one has accepted the common ideas that prevail as to crime, its nature, its treatment, and the proper and efficient way of protecting society from the criminal.   (1934, p. 229)
Community Oriented Policing is another method of ‘protecting society from the criminal’.   It is left to the administrator to fully develop this tool.
Community Oriented Policing is not new.   Since the formation of law enforcement agencies in the United States, there has been a relationship with the community.   While this relationship hasn’t always been the best, it has been there in one form or another.   First let’s examine the historical basis for Community Oriented Policing.   This allows for a clear explanation of how our modern agency’s forerunners departed from this key element and fundamental tool.   Second we’ll focus on the resurgence of this tool in modern times.   Third let’s look at the process of implementing this program into today’s departments/agencies. And finally we’ll examine why it is that administrators...