Community Policing

Mike Brogden, Preeti Nijhar

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843920069
• eBook ISBN: 9781134009107
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kriminologie

Community policing has been a buzzword in Anglo-American policing for the last two decades, somewhat vague in its definition but generally considered to be a good thing. In the UK the notion of community policing conveys a consensual policing style, offering an alternative to past public order and crimefighting styles. In the US community policing represents the dominant ideology of policing as reflected in a myriad of urban schemes and funding practices, the new orthodoxy in North American policing policy-making, strategies and tactic. But it has also become a massive export to non-western societies where it has been adopted in many countries, in the face of scant evidence of its appropriateness in very different contexts and surroundings.

• critical analysis of concept of community policing worldwide
• assesses evidence for its effectiveness, especially in the USA and UK
• highlights often inappropriate export of community policing models to failed and transitional societies.

Chapter 1

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Globalizing community-oriented policing (COP)

… two emerging philosophies – community-oriented policing and problem-solving policing … such notions as police-community reciprocity, decentralisation of command, re-orientation of patrol, and generalised rather than specialised policing are commending themselves to police executives around the globe. At first thought, this is rather surprising. Why should police executives with such different cultures, different economies, and different traditions as Oslo, Tokyo, London, New York, and Santa Anna, be advocating similar reforms?

(Skolnick and Bayley 1986 p. 17)

Introduction

Community policing has been the buzzword in Anglo-American policing for the last two decades. But it comes in all shapes and sizes. From the specifics of problem-solving by the local beat officer to the grand philosophy of a policing that is community sensitive, accountable, and transparent, it has not and will not be subject to clear definition. Public commentators – perhaps now more in the rhetoric of the mass media than in some of the nuances and refinements of official police discourse – generally treat community policing as a euphemism for a particular concept of police-civil society relations. Whatever the intent of local structures – from Police Community Forums to ad hoc campaigns like Crime Stoppers, from beat patrols to the optimism of Neighbourhood Watch Schemes (NWS) and to the specifics of Sector Policing, it appears to be most generally defined by its negative.

It is not military-style policing with a central bureaucracy obedient to directive legislation which minimises discretion. It is not policing that is autonomous of public consent and accountability. It is not policing that is committed primarily to reactive crime-fighting strategies. It is not policing that is measured by output in terms of professional efficiency. Rather it is policing which is determined by strategies, tactics and outcomes based on community consent. In this text, whatever the nuances of local usage, we shall use it as a generic term that implies a style and strategy of policing that appears to reflect local community needs.

As we shall discuss in the following pages, COP has become an important vehicle for police transformation in failed societies – that is societies such as those of the former Soviet bloc where the political systems have collapsed and new state structures are experiencing major birth pangs. Community policing is also important because it is a key component of an export drive from the West in the development of new policing structures in transitional societies – that is countries which might once have been described as ‘Third World’ or (optimistically) as ‘developing’, which are being forced by economic and social exigencies (such as rising recorded crime rates) to construct new safety and security agencies.

In Britain, community policing has become adopted in the popular parlance of the public, of the media and of politicians. In that discourse, it is imbibed with a mythical appeal in several senses. It appears to be a reincarnation of the old ‘bobby-on-the beat’ – the foot patrol police officer who in the distant past appeared to use pragmatic commonsense in dealing with issues of local crime and disorder. Most British police forces no longer use the term of community policing in their policy development – specific strategies of problem-solving policing and of intelligence-ledpolicing have replaced the community policing discourse. Further, most policing experts would argue that problem-solving now represents a quite distinct form of policing from that of COP (Bullock and Tilley 2003)¹. But in public presentations, problem-solving is normally included under the rubric of community policing, resonating in a consensual policing style to which the public can relate directly. However, in practice, in Britain and in parts of Western Europe, community policing philosophies have often been displaced with local community safety contracts and secondly, with forms of tiered policing², such as local warden schemes (although some might regard them as necessarily included within the community policing mission).

In the United States, community policing (or as we shall refer to throughout this text, community oriented policing [COP]) represents the dominant ideology of policing as reflected in a myriad of urban schemes, in funding practices, and in research publications. COP represents the new orthodoxy in North American policing policy-making, strategies and tactics. But it is in failed and transitional societies that COP is the new cargo cult, as the Western missionaries promote a policing elixir that will resolve a range of social ills. Where such societies are characterized by rising recorded crime rates, by delegitimation of older criminal justice agencies and, where economic investment is handicapped by foreign investors’ fears of social instability, police reform is perceived as the essential bedrock of social and economic progress. In that theatre of social change, COP is cast to play a key role.

Exporting policing

Despite the enormous sums spent on this COP export process, we have little evidence of its impact or indeed of the effect of international exchange and trade in police values, ideologies, policies and technologies (Marenin 1998). Apart from a few pathbreaking studies, there is little evidence of the motives of the often misnamed donor countries, of the nature of the commodity, of the conditions of delivery, of the processes of installation in the ‘host’ society, of the reactions of the recipients and of their agents, and of the consequences of installation. There is, however, one invaluable study of the export of COP to Kenya (Ruteere and Pommerolle 2003). There are also several briefer accounts appearing that problematize local acceptance of Western policing in Eastern Europe.

Of course, policing export to non-Western societies is not a new practice as the long legacy of colonial policing instructs us³ and in the post World War II attempts to transplant US policing to the defeated Axis powers. British colonial practices, in particular, are well documented. But it is a century since one Robert Baden Powell arrived back in Cape Town from Dublin Castle with plans for the new South African Constabulary in his knapsack (Brogden 2005). Exporting policing today is a little different from the then British East African police with Irish Constabulary (IC) senior officers, Punjabi inspectors, Somali constables, and with new recruits learning their duties from the IC Instruction Book! (Brogden 1987). It is also distinct from 30 years ago when United States police aid and advice flowed through the Office of Public Safety (OPS) as an instrument of foreign policy to prevent the encroachment of socialist ideas and rule in contested Latin American societies (Marenin 1996).

In the last decade, policing strategies and materials have become a major part of the export drive from the West to failed and transitional societies. In a replay of colonial days when the police institution was often the first to be implanted to safeguard imperial trade, new policing is being driven by donor interest and also – and this is new – customer demand.

The motives of the exporters are mixed. They include versions of the ‘thin blue line thesis’ as apparent in the law and development movement of the 1970s⁴ . The police institution is seen as the key to stability, in a period of rapid social change, while new legitimacies are created for other state institutions. In the words of key proponents of community policing internationally, police reforms became the axis of an effort to dismantle authoritarian structures and to move from ‘regime policing’ to ‘democratic policing’. The establishment of democratic policing is regarded as the foundation of the security and stability necessary for the consolidation of democracy and for a fertile environment for economic development (Ziegler and Neild 2002). More recently, Call (2003) has distinguished between Human Rights, peacekeeping, law enforcement, economic development and democratization motives⁵.

COP represents an historically-legitimated model for export, given the conservative ideologies of Anglo-American policing structure, which locate the origins of such community policing in a Peelite tradition. This perspective represents the police institution as a bulwark against the ‘forces of darkness’. Community policing is the salvation. Call and Barnett (1999) in their analysis of the United Nations Civilian Police (CIVPOL) suggest a new perception by the international community, that of a relationship between domestic security and international security (especially since 9/11). Internal schisms may have international effects. In the words of the American Justice Department:

Why are the police so important in the development of democratic societies? The police are different from any other government entity. Of all government functions, the policing function is arguably the most visible, the most immediate, the most intimately involved with the well-being of individuals and the health of the communities.

(Travis 1998, p. 2)

Donor countries may offer community policing as part of a larger package of police ‘reform’ in order to guarantee a degree of stability. If one can establish ‘efficient’ policing structures, so the argument goes, other cognate state institutions are given the space and time to develop new legitimate structures. The police ‘hold the line’. The thin blue line thesis – and its modern versions – holds that when society is undergoing major social change, policing is the one institution that can maintain stability until other elements of the state apparatus are able to establish legitimacy.

There are other well-meaning motives, with COP perceived as the elixir to solve Human Rights issues. Police export is also a profitable business in which private multinational corporations as well as individual entrepreneurs straddle the world in a quest for a market share of law enforcement commodities.

Several types of agency are involved in the process. Individuals contribute. So do policing agencies, NGOs, national governments and private corporations.

The motivation for the involvement of individual police forces can vary from the practicalities of having to cooperate with the recipients of assistance in the future on common crime problems, to individual police officers perceiving such help as an opportunity to provide philanthropic assistance to ‘fellow’ police officers.

(Beck 2002, p. 23)

Rank-and-file police officers from the West apparently spend vacations in transitional societies delivering community policing training with missionary zeal. For example, Captain John Deangelis (of the USA Egg Harbour Police) has been entrepreneurially selling domestic violence and community policing courses in Lithuania and Estonia. Old apparatchniks and retirees are reincarnated in a new guise as community policing missionaries. Thus the consultancy of George Fivaz and Associates (Pty) aimed to contribute to COP development at an international conference in Bangkok sponsored by the United States government. Fivaz, the former head of the South African Police CID and Mandela’s choice for transitional Commissioner, was described as an international expert on community policing, with fellow board members consisting of pensioned members of the apartheid SAP establishment⁶.

Bi-lateral police exchanges – sometimes state-sponsored sometimes not – convey the message. Foreign policy programmes with wider concerns support COP schemes, often promoted through training schemes by Western academies. For example, Fijian and Jamaican police officers attend COP courses at the British Bramshill Police College. Russian police officers undertake tuition at police academies in the United States. The St Petersburg Academy draws on the Metropolitan Police’s expertise on community policing. The Dutch police exchange community policing experience on a routine basis with officers from Hungary, from Poland and from the Czech Republic. Amongst many other ventures, staff from Washington State Spokane Community Policing Institute cross the North Pacific to develop COP on Russia’s Sakhalin Island. The British police aim to develop community policing in Bulgaria’s city of Plovdiv⁷. The Toronto Police have been encouraging COP in Lithuania. Norwegians, Dutch and Canadians teach community policing in Prague. The United States’ International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP) has promoted COP as part of a larger police reform programme in countries as divers...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Globalizing community-oriented policing (COP)
• Part 1 Community Policing — Models and Critiques
• Chapter 2 Community-oriented policing: the Anglo-American model
• Chapter 3 Anglo-American community oriented policing: ten myths
• Chapter 4 Community policing on the Pacific Rim
• Chapter 5 Aspects of community policing in the European Union
• Part 2 Community policing in transitional and failed societies
• Chapter 6 South Africa: the failure of community policing
• Chapter 7 Community policing in other transitional societies
• Chapter 8 Community policing in failed societies
• Chapter 9 A new beginning? Community policing in Northern Ireland
• Chapter 10 Transforming policing
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject index