Executive Summary
This report:
- Examines the history of the concept of Community Policing ( CP)
- Studies some of the definitions of the concept that have been offered by leading policing scholars
- Looks at how the concept is implemented in other jurisdictions beyond Scotland
- Highlights CP's local roots in the development of policing styles to complement Scottish communities
- Reviews the international evidence on 'what works' in CP
- Makes some recommendations for a useful programme of research to develop our understanding of CP in the Scottish context.
Definition
While there are many competing definitions of CP in the literature, we can find some common ground which leads to the following components being considered core:
- Decentralisation of responsibility within the police organisation (officers on the ground have to be able to respond to public demands and make things happen locally)
- Partnership with other agencies that can take action when public demands are not for things that the police can directly help with
- Community engagement (communities need to have a real voice that can be fed into police priorities and practices where appropriate)
- Proactive and problem-solving ( CP does mark a shift away from reactive fire-brigade policing - this does connect it with POP and ILP, both of which can facilitate proactive policing, but they have to be directed by community engagements, not existing, unreflective police definitions of problems)
- Philosophy ( CP heralds a changed understanding of 'real' police work - one that gives priority to police work where officers are akin to 'peace officers' embedded in the networks of their communities rather than as reactive 'law officers' - the latter is not, however, ignored and remains an important dimension of policing)
Evidence
The evidence review is structured according to the following five 'promises' of CP. They are listed here, with a summary of the weight of evidence supporting them:
Increased public satisfaction with the police: Studies vary in their findings as to the level of increase in public satisfaction driven by CP, from modest improvements to significant gains. There is data from some studies to support the contention that it is visible police presence rather than the quality of resident-police interaction that drives satisfaction with the police and confidence in officer effectiveness. If CP can engage more effectively than other policing strategies with sub-criminal problems of disorder, it should be able to reap the benefits of increased public satisfaction with the police consequent upon lower levels of disorder-related fear.
Decreased fear of crime: Reductions in fear of crime, and increases in feelings of safety, range in the evaluation data from the impressive to the patchy. The robust Chicago evaluation provides strong evidence for the fear-reducing capacities of CP. As well as reducing fear of crime through directly lowering crime and disorder rates, and attending to quality of life issues, CP might reduce fear of crime simply through its 'reassuring' presence. While knowledge of the police's local CP efforts has been found to be associated with lower fear of crime, often the majority of residents do not know enough about the implementation of CP in their neighbourhood to benefit from this reassurance.
Reductions in levels of crime and anti-social behaviour (or 'disorder'): CP has been seen to reduce both crime and disorder, although there is stronger evidence for its effectiveness in reducing disorder than crime. The positive results in relation to the reduction of disorder have been suggested to be related to two strands of the CP approach in particular: foot patrol and problem solving.
Increased community engagement (increasing public 'ownership' of local crime problems and willingness to play a role in problem solving): Implementing a variety of strategies to encourage citizen participation in the processes of CP has been seen to be more effective than relying only on one method of engagement, for example public meetings. Although programmes have been found to have achieved positive results in relation to public confidence in the police, feelings of safety, problem solving, and police visibility, they have tended to have little effect on calls for service or 'social capacity', i.e. willingness of neighbours to intervene, or increased voluntary activity.
Changing police officers' levels of engagement with and satisfaction with the job: There is a wide range of possible beneficial effects of CP on police attitudes. In the right implementation context, confidence in and support for CP practices can be high among community officers. CP has been found to be generally supported by community officers, but sometimes less supported by the rest of the force who retain a preference for motorised patrols and response-oriented methods. This evidence has been used to support the recommendation that all officers be rotated through CP assignments, to expose them to working knowledge of the method and its benefits. This fits with calls for CP to be implemented by way of 'whole organisation' change rather than specialist units, as well as other less clear-cut findings which have suggested that while all officers support CP, those with experience of CP support it more.
Unintended or adverse consequences of CP
Some of the possible failures of CP are:
- The apparent popularity of high visibility policing with members of the public may sometimes set itself against the capacity of more visible policing to stigmatise an area as being a high-crime neighbourhood and therefore dangerous or otherwise unappealing.
- There is a risk that CP can become a vehicle for the practical implementation of local punitive attitudes against marginalised or minority groups. CP can become problematic if it moves away from a genuine problem-solving ethos towards pseudo-problem-solving through simply appeasing public appetites for enforcement that may function as unduly exclusionary.
- The supposition that freeing up officers' time to allow them to patrol communities will somehow automatically translate into more 'on the ground' community-level problem solving seems to be optimistic, without explicit co-ordination of community officers' time around core CP methods and a detailed understanding of what these methods can deliver.