COMMUNITY POLICING: THE POLEMICAL POLARIZATION

Abstract

There is no gainsaying the fact that the police have a difficult work; besides, the role of the police has always been somewhat ambiguous. During the last few decades, the perception of the police mission by police leaders and the community leaders varied.  Despite some accomplishments of community policing, not all agree with community policing and that is why with respect to community policing the debate continues. Against this backdrop, research on the effectiveness of community-oriented policing has yielded mixed results. A sizeable proportion of experts are not overly enthusiastic over the idea of community policing. One of the challenging faced in community policing is to define what is meant by community. In diverse community policing projects, the concept of community is defined in terms of “administrative areas” traditionally used by police departments to allocate patrols, instead of in terms of “ecological areas” defined by common norms, shared values, and interpersonal bonds or relations. It has been argued that if the police are using administrative areas instead of ecological areas, they lose the ability to activate a community’s norms and cultural values. Meanwhile it is significant to note that some administrators are also uncomfortable with balcanising a community up into “parcels” and possibly having those areas competing against themselves for funding, attention and service. Also many feel that community policing can actually have a negative effect on certain people. A critical analysis of a victim callback programme established by the Houston Police Department found that the programme, which was originally designed to help victims, had a generally negative effect on some minority groups (Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans), whose members may have been suspicious of the departments’ intentions. However as reports of overall crime rate decreases hit the presses in the mid-and late-1990s, some police officials associated decrease to closer relationships with their communities through community policing.