Community Policing Essay

501 Words3 Pages
This dimension includes the central beliefs and ideas that are part of community policing, with the most important being broad function, citizen input, and personalized service. Broad function is the idea that police do more than just catching lawbreakers and enforcing the law, the also resolve conflicts, prevent accidents, assist victims, reduce fear, do social work, solve problems, and reduce crime through enforcement and apprehension. Citizen input is the belief that in a free society citizens should have input to the decisions and policies of the police and have open access to police organizations. Basically meaning that communities should be have influence in the way they are policed, concerns and views should be able to be discussed directly…show more content…
Flexible operations allows officers the freedom to promote the ideals of community policing while still engaging in practices used to achieve the goals that are traditional to policing. Geographic focus involves emphasizing the importance of geographic location to assignment and responsibility by shifting patrol accountability to place instead of the time of day. This element wants to make officers responsible for a small area 24 hours of the day instead of having that responsibility on larger areas for shifts of 8 to 10 hours, and also pushes officers to know their community better by giving them a permanent assignment to that smaller area. Prevention emphasis involves an orientation that is more proactive and preventative by encouraging officers to use their time better by devoting their free patrol time to specific crime prevention efforts, directed enforcement activities, problem solving, citizen interaction, community engagement, or other similar activities. This strategic element allows officers to focus deeper and discover the underlying conditions and problems, instead of just focusing on reported crimes and individual-incident calls for
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