Essay Sample on Community Policing Practice

Introduction

Community policing involves allocating police officers to specific areas in the community where they can get familiar with the local people and improve their services delivery. The same patrol officers work in the same area for a long period and they get to know more about the people they serve, to an extent that they can serve diligently without bias. They work in partnership with the citizens to solve the challenges that affect society. It mainly concentrates on prevention or proactive solutions to the common problems that require police intervention as opposed to the reactive procedures applied in the other policing activities. It raises the sense of security in the community and it reduces the rate of crime. Community policing in Chicago helps to solve many of the security problems in the area.

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Holding Community Meetings to Deal with Drugs and Graffiti

One of the community policing strategies used in Chicago is holding community meetings to discuss and find solutions to the challenge of graffiti and drug abuse. According to Jenkins (2016), the broken-windows policing, which encourages that neighbors should report any suspicious operations in their area, has helped many neighborhoods t deal with the menace of petty crimes and drug abuse. By holding community meetings, the police can collect information from the community on the abandoned buildings and the idle and suspicious people in their areas who sell drugs. The community helps the police to understand the operations of the drug dealers and to propose the ways in which the challenges can be solved. The meetings are used to clarify the operations if the police, the way they collect data and how they can use it to improve security. Basketball games are also used to keep the youths busy which helps to reduce their engagement into drugs. The community meetings also help to change the views and perceptions of the police in the communities. According to Stein & Griffith (2017), the progress of the community policing can be improved through the understandings between the community and the police and the needs of each of the groups. The success of community policing is determined by its ability to control and reduce the common evils in the community like drug dealings and graffiti. Chicago has a well-developed community policing that involves strategies set by the society and the police.

Benefits of the Practice

The use of community policing in Chicago has attracted several benefits and one of them is that it has brought the communities together. The practice helps people to come together to make decisions related to their communities. The roles make the communities more cohesive and tolerant with each other. The other benefit is that it leads to new and better ways to reduce crime. For example, the policing done at the bus stops has improved the security in the areas (Ariel & Partridge, 2017). The other benefit is the increased deterrence of crime due to the visibility of the police presence and the fear that someone is seeing the offenders. This means that whenever the criminals commit a crime, they fear they could be seen by the community and the police in the surrounding area. The other one is the increased knowledge in the way the police works and this helps the community to get a positive perception about the police. The community feels that since they are close to the police and they can understand the way the police functions, then it is possible to co-operate and bring positive changes to the community. The community meetings also increase the interest that people have to join the community policing (Choi & Lee, 2016). The attraction and perception help both the police and the community in achieving their targets.

Challenges Facing Community Policing in Chicago

The practice is affected by several challenges associated with the way the community and the police approach the challenges in the community. Violent crime is one of the major challenges in Chicago and it is the source of one of the challenges that face community policing (Schnell, Braga & Piza, 2017). The community policing strategies face violent opposition from some of the organized criminal groups and this makes it hard for the community to implement some of their strategies. For instance, the police may need to change the strategies they use to access the abandoned houses and stop graffiti. However, the violent resistance may leave some of them injured or dead as the criminal groups fight them back. The other challenge is the changing tactics used by criminals. The increased technology and the internet has made crime more complex than it was before. Chicago community policing is faced with new challenges each day and they have to update their operations frequently. The need to evolve does not match the available resources, which leads to the other challenge; inadequate resources. Human resources and financial resources are not enough to make the required changes. The money allocated by the government is not enough to make all the necessary policing activities. In conclusion, community policing works in Chicago and has the potential to improve in the future.

References

Ariel, B., & Partridge, H. (2017). Predictable policing: Measuring the crime control benefits of hotspots policing at bus stops. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 33(4), 809-833.

Choi, K., & Lee, J. L. (2016). Citizen participation in community safety: a comparative study of community policing in South Korea and the UK. Policing and society, 26(2), 165-184.

Jenkins, M. J. (2016). Police support for community problem-solving and broken windows policing. American journal of criminal justice, 41(2), 220-235.

Schnell, C., Braga, A. A., & Piza, E. L. (2017). The influence of community areas, neighborhood clusters, and street segments on the spatial variability of violent crime in Chicago. Journal of quantitative criminology, 33(3), 469-496.

Stein, R. E., & Griffith, C. (2017). Resident and police perceptions of the neighborhood: Implications for community policing. Criminal justice policy review, 28(2), 139-154.