The Pros and Cons of Community Policing 1

The Pros and Cons of Community Policing

Abstract
This paper explores the pros and cons of community policing with information gathered from multiple

academic journals as well as trusted news organizations. It provides insight to specific benefits of

community policing such as community building, deterioration of crime, and police reputation. As well

as the disadvantages of community policing such as cost, training, and power struggle. The paper ends

with an analysis of the disadvantages and advantages alongside with my own opinion.
The Pros and Cons of Community Policing 3

Community policing can be defined as the collaborative effort between the police and the

community to identify the problems of crime and disorder and develop solutions within the community

(Inciardi 185). The idea of community policing is that the police will become more responsive and

connected to the community they are helping in, the acknowledgement that policing is far more than just

law enforcement, and that both officers and the community have a major role in preventing crime. Like

any other method of policing, community policing has its pros and cons, those who support it and those

who don’t, and it has its successes and its failures.

In an ideal world officers are assigned neighborhoods and they will often live in or around the

neighborhoods themselves, so they know the quality of life that exist in the neighborhood. The officers

are assigned to patrol the area as the would normally and walk around the neighborhood and listen to

any complaints that the people living in that are might have. Having the officers in the community helps

build trust within a community which helps in making the area feel safer and having trust in the officers

makes it more likely that people within the community will report any incidents of crime and will come

to the officers with information of any crime committed. The overall goal of community policing is that

neighborhoods are going to be safer and that crime will decrease overall. Criminals tend to stay away

from neighborhoods where the community looks out for one another, officers would be helping create

this environment.

With community policing it would be optimal that there would be no crime in a community but

if and when crime did occur it would force the officers to analyze the crime and figure out why it

occurred and what can be done to stop any more crimes from occurring. There is a political scientist

named James Wilson who offers the theory of broken windows. According to a theory if you break a

window in a building and no one’s fixes then people assumes that no one cares about the building and

that leads to more and more window been broken until there isn’t any windows left to break and the

building is destroyed. Thus saying, that if a crime is committed in a community and nothing is done
The Pros and Cons of Community Policing 4

there is going to be more crimes being committed and the community safety will be destroyed, and

social disorder would flourish.

Right of the bat we can see what some of the pros for community policing would be and those

pros would be bringing communities together, deterring crime, police reputation (Greene). According to

Community Policing in America: Changing the Nature, Structure, and Function of the Police by Jack R.

Greene, community policing would be vital to bringing communities together. By working with police

to deter crime it builds a relationship of trust and build communities where criminals aren’t going to act

and commit crimes when they believe they are being watched or the they know the police are nearby.

Allowing officers to oversee a certain area or community allows them to get to know the citizens that

live there helps create this feeling of responsibility for the community and encourages officers to work

harder for their community. This would allow for a change in the reputation that police officers receive

within some communities. Having positive interaction with police officers can completely change a

community and the way they perceive law enforcement and their attitude towards crime and reporting it.

The urban police was built on the concept of the people’s police. According to Community

Oriented Policing and Police-Community Relations: From Definition to Implementation by Katherine

Freeman-Otte, community policing would revive the idea that the needs for police service must be

determined by the basis of ongoing communication with the people and the police. The police is only

necessary when the people and officers agree on it. It gives a season that the police aren’t out to get you,

but they are truly there to help the people. Community policing also encourages officers to deal with

complex issues beyond the traditional ways. When officers are integrated into communities and have

built trust, they are going to learn about problems within communities that are not just a simple solution.

They become aware of how one part of the community is integral to another and are forced to analyze

the situation to bring a solution to t without harming the community.

One of the big issues we are seeing in todays society is the problem of police brutality and the

abuse of power within law enforcement. Community policing could bring a change to this problem.

Being apart of the community and getting to know the people within the community forces the officers

to learn how to operate with humanity and compassion. They are being forced to resolve human

problems within their community of people they know instead of being outside of the community and

dehumanizing the crimes and people involved in the crimes. Community policing could completely

change the way that the police approach people and the way people approach the police. Having

established trust and respect for one another will completely change the way we confront crime

To every positive there must be a negative. Community policing gets its fair share of bad

reviews. People commonly argue that police cannot be expected to be involved in a community on top

of all their duties already. In Learning in Action: Training the Community Policing Officer by Allison

Taylor Chappell there are three negatives that can be highlighted with community policing: 1. Power

struggle, 2. Manufactured crime, and 3. Community doesn’t want community policing. With the power

struggle, not everyone has the right intentions when becoming a police officers and it only takes one

person on a power trip to ruin a community. There are bad apples to every tree and some officers abuse

their power within communities. We have seen that communities are targeted and the officers instead of

bringing a community are tearing it apart by not building trust within the community and just putting the

blame of the crime on certain individuals. Manufactured crime, in order for there to be community

policing there needs to be a certain level of crime within the community, and there are times where that

level of crime is not there and suddenly, we start naming every little problem within a community in

order to find an excuse to have a community policing program. There are crimes that are normally

overlooked or that can be handled without a constant police presence that suddenly become a valid

reason to bring police into the community. If you try hard enough, you will find crime anywhere is

essentially the idea the community has on this. The community sometimes doesn’t want there to be
The Pros and Cons of Community Policing 6

community policing in their community because they don’t believe they need it. The community feels

like the community policing programs are looking for a problem that doesn’t exist and people believe

that it is not necessary to have police present “just in case” theres a crime because that begins to

deteriorate the trust and peace in a community. Of course, a lot of this could foster from negative stigma

of law enforcement but it is very much a hurdle that community policing must overcome.

Another concern with community policing is the cost. According o the New York Times

violence prevention programs can cost over $19.9 million dollars at any given year. This is one o the

biggest concerns politically for why community policing should or should not be implemented. Do cities

or states have the viable money and resources needed to support community policing programs. Other

problems include the communities want to fix things that are not a problem and that are out of the

officer’s legal power such as loiterers or vagrants. The communities begin to want a picture-perfect

community.

Also, community policing requires a huge change in the way we train police officers. They are

currently being trained with a broad discretion to identify problems and effective reposes to these

problems. But with community policing they would need more training on how to identify smaller

crimes within a community and how to approach these crimes without harming the community around

them. The officer in the community will not be able to stop all the problem himself, in order to be

successful, he will need support from other aspects of law enforcement such as investigative units and

that opens up another concern. There is also the concern that because the police will be so involved with

the community that they will retreat from the prosecution of organized crime and white-collar crimes

which are often the reason there is so much crime within communities.

In Community Policing and Crime: The Process and Impact of Problem-Solving in Oakland by

Jeremy M. Wilson and Amy G. Cox state that there is not statistical evidence that community policing is

action associated with the reductions of crimes. Thus, there is no actual evidence that community
The Pros and Cons of Community Policing 7

policing actually solves the crime problems. Wilson and Cox give four theories on why that might be so.

The first they offer is that the programs simply do not work. They claim that it is impossible to create

the necessary relationship with the police and the community and it just does not work. Second, there is

the hopeful theory that there are positive outcomes that the evaluation doesn’t cover. They offer that

maybe the changes are slow and minimal thus they are not reported or seen too quickly and that might

be the reason we do not see any change. Third, the program is associated with an increase propensity to

report crime thus offsetting the crime reeducations. Having officers in a community can increase the

amounts of crimes that are reported thus in return when we look at the change in crime there should be a

relatively high percentage of crimes solved to crimes reported but because there are more and more

crimes being reported we do not see the change. Lastly, they say that implementation challenges

preclude the programs ability to be effective in other words the officers are given too much work to be

efficient in solving the crime problems. They are given too much coverage, the community isnt

responding positively or working with the officer, or there are just too many problems to address at one

time.

If implemented correctly community policing could be a successful program that allows for

communities and the police t be able to work together besides the difficulties in their previous

relationship. It should be expected that there will be some push back to community policing like there

would be to any new program but with time and implementation communities and police officers will

develop a better relationship and will begin to trust the police, if implemented correctly. It is completely

realistic to expect police officers to be involved in community policing aside from other responsibilities

because with the development of the program it would allow for the officer’s prior responsibilities to

merge with their new responsibilities with the community, they are a part of. It all has to do with the

planning and implementation of the plan.

References

Chappell, A. T. (2005). Learning in Action: Training the Community Policing Officer. University of

Florida. Retrieved from

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.461.3558&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Freeman-Otte, K. (2012, May 16). Community Priented Policing and Police-Community Relations: From

Definition to Implementation (R. Espejo, Ed.). Retrieved from

http://go.galegroup.com.ezp.slu.edu/ps/retrieve.do?tabID=Viewpoints&resultListType=RESULT_LIST

&searchResultsType=SingleTab&searchType=TopicSearchForm¤tPosition=7&docId=GALE|EJ301090

3221&docType=Viewpoint

essay&sort=Relevance&contentSegment=&prodId=OVIC&contentSet=GALE|EJ3010903221&topicId

=KFLZND945627075&searchId=&userGroupName=sain44199&inPS=true#

Friend, Z., & Martinez, R. (2010, April 3). Preserving Community-Oriented Policing in a Recession.

Retrieved from

http://go.galegroup.com.ezp.slu.edu/ps/retrieve.do?tabID=Viewpoints&resultListType=RESULT_LIST

&searchResultsType=SingleTab&searchType=TopicSearchForm¤tPosition=10&docId=GALE|EJ30109

03216&docType=Viewpoint

essay&sort=Relevance&contentSegment=&prodId=OVIC&contentSet=GALE|EJ3010903216&topicId

=KFLZND945627075&searchId=&userGroupName=sain44199&inPS=true

Greene, J. R. (n.d.). Community Policing in America: Changing the Nature, Structure, and Function of the

Police. Policies, Processes, and Decisions of the Criminal Justice System,3.

Morgenthau, R. M. (1990, December 30). Does Community Policing Work?; Beware of Its Limits.

Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/30/opinion/does-community-policing-work-beware-

of-its-limits.html
 The Pros and Cons of Community Policing 9

Wilson, J. M., & Cox, A. G. (2014). Community Policing and Crime: The Process and Impact of Problem-

Solving in Oakland.