Recommended Best Practices
Recommendation 1.8: Give officers ample time to engage with community members and solve community problems.
When implementing a community policing program, department leaders should consider logistics such as time and place. Officers need time to meaningfully engage with communities and should be assigned to the same general areas or neighborhoods so they can familiarize themselves with communities and build trust with community members. To support strong police-community relationships, departments should:
Assign officers to specific geographic areas or “beats.” Assigning officers to specific neighborhoods enables them to develop an understanding of the areas they police, which can lead to better decision-making and more effective law enforcement. Officers who patrol defined geographic areas get to know residents and become familiar with neighborhoods. This helps reduce the effects of negative implicit bias; officers who are from or who know certain neighborhoods well are better able to differentiate between suspicious and everyday conduct.[i]
When officers have nuanced understandings of the culture and norms of neighborhoods, sub-communities, and micro-communities, and of the people who live there, they are less likely to rely on assumptions or biases when assessing and responding to suspicious behavior.[ii]For this reason, leaders should assign officers to specific beats, and they should carefully consider decisions to re-assign officers so as to avoid disrupting established relationships with community members.[iii]
Another community policing strategy is to create incentives for officers to live in the communities they serve and consider community ties during recruitment and hiring processes.[iv]The IACP observes that “[h]aving some number of officers who live, shop, play, and/or have children in schools in the community they serve lends itself to creating strong community-police bonds.”[v]Whether officers live in the communities they serve or patrol the same neighborhoods over time, community policing is most effective when “officers and community members share a sense of ownership of ‘their neighborhood.’”[vi]
Give officers ample time to engage in community policing and problem-solving. To work well, community policing approaches should be implemented departmentwide and should be central to all officers’ duties. As noted above, many departments delegate community policing and engagement work to a handful of officers and assign the rest to traditional enforcement activities. Instead, leaders should give all officers opportunities to focus on community engagement.
One challenge of community policing relates to time management. Most officers spend their shifts responding to (often backlogged) service calls, which leaves little time for community engagement. Leaders can work with community members to identify the types of calls that need police attention and develop community-based responses for those that don’t. For example, a resident who complains about a neighbor who consistently plays loud music could be referred to a community mediation team. Leaders can also promote relationship-building by assigning officers to community police activities, as does the NYPD. Leaders there relieve officers from answering service calls for periods of time so they can spend time getting to know and working with the community.[vii]
[i] Tracie L. Keese, Three Ways to Reduce Implicit Bias in Policing, Greater Good Magazine (July 2, 2105), https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/three_ways_to_reduce_implicit_bias_in_policing.
[ii] Lorie Fridell, et al., Police Exec. Research Forum, Cmty. Oriented Policing Servs., Racially Biased Policing: A Principled Response 95–96 (2001), http://www.policeforum.org/assets/docs/Free_Online_Documents/Racially-Biased_Policing/racially%20biased%20policing%20-%20a%20principled%20response%202001.pdf.
[iii] Gayle Fisher-Stewart, Ph.D. Community Policing Explained: A Guide for Local Governments, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice 2, 3, 7, https://cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/vets-to-cops/cp_explained.pdf.
[iv] Int’l Ass’n of Chiefs of Police, IACP National Policy Summit on Community-Police Relations: Advancing a Culture of Cohesion and Community Trust26-27 (2015), https://www.theiacp.org/sites/default/files/2018-09/CommunityPoliceRelationsSummitReport_web.pdf;see also President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing 15 (2015), https://cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/taskforce/taskforce_finalreport.pdf(recommending implementation of “resident officer programs” to house officers in public housing neighborhoods with agreement of the law enforcement agency and housing authority); San Diego Police Dep’t, Use of Force Task Force Recommendations 66 (2001), https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/police/pdf/taskreport.pdf.
[v] Int’l Ass’n of Chiefs of Police, IACP Nat’l Policy Summit on Community-Police Relations: Advancing a Culture of Cohesion and Community Trust27 (2015), https://www.theiacp.org/sites/default/files/2018-09/CommunityPoliceRelationsSummitReport_web.pdf.
[vi] Wasserman & Zachary Ginsburg, Inst. for Intergovernmental Research, Building Relationships of Trust: Moving to Implementation 26 (2014), https://ric-zai-inc.com/Publications/cops-w0729-pub.pdf;accord U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Civil Rights Div. & U.S. Attorney’s Office N.D. Ill., Investigation of the Chicago Police Department 136–39 (2017), https://www.justice.gov/opa/file/925846/download; U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Civil Rights Div., Investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department 156–57 (2016), https://www.justice.gov/crt/file/883296/download; Int’l Ass’n of Chiefs of Police, IACP Nat’l Policy Summit on Community-Police Relations: Advancing a Culture of Cohesion and Community Trust25-27 (2015), https://www.theiacp.org/sites/default/files/2018-09/CommunityPoliceRelationsSummitReport_web.pdf.
[vii] N.Y.C Police Dep’t, Neighborhood Policing, NYC.gov,https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/bureaus/patrol/neighborhood-coordination-officers.page.