Policing Eras: Discuss How Community Policing Is Defined in Your Community

1. Policing Eras: Discuss how community policing is defined in your community. This section should be at least 200 words.

Community policing in my area is rooted in transparency. Transparency is an essential part of any successful law enforcement agency, if success is measured by public trust and approval. Aside from our undercover operation citizens have the ability to find out what’s going on in their area through our various forms of social media, phone, internet or email. Even our undercover operation results are posted online after completion. Keeping the community informed has greatly expanded our department’s community policing mission. The downside to this is, because of social media, the public expects an immediate response to any and all queries about the department. Any time there is an issue several media outlet rush to get out a story first. There is little to no research or fact checking and it may even be false information. Any department has a responsibility to thoroughly investigate a matter before issuing a release. To combat the social media storm our agency has a public information officer who is probably one of the busiest people in the department. The public information officer becomes a point of contact for all media and also for the public via social media posts.

 2.) Citizen-Police Interactions:

As stated previously, transparency is a cornerstone for law enforcement and community to have a trusting relationship. Community policing does involve much more that transparency though. Community policing must actually come from the officer in their actions and treatment of citizens. An officer can be trained on how to properly interact with the public but if that officer does not have a general feeling of “the duty to serve” they will never be successful in a community policing environment. Personalities differ throughout any profession, but in law enforcement the wrong personality can be fatal in life along with a trust of citizens in their department.  

I haven’t seen a problem with excessive force in the local department. That stems back to most of our new hires have life experience. They are a little older and have done other jobs besides law enforcement. In my opinion this makes for a better officer in the long run. Through an excessive amount of background checks and other procedures the department attempts to comb through recruits with an authority complex. Though some do slip through the cracks for the most part law enforcement is a profession that weeds out the bad through officer influence.

3.) International Policing:

The main difference between community policing in the states versus international policing is civil rights. Certain rights were given to citizens of the United States that cannot be infringed upon without due cause. At least two wars were fought over these very rights. Those wars were the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. In international policing the police are often times enforcers of federal law. These enforcement practices are often void of the civil rights we hold so dear in the United States. This cause the public of those countries to view police as heartless robots who are often as corrupt as the government they serve. Citizens are not receptive to any law enforcement contact and are often not cooperative with police.