Policing is About Change

Community policing is becoming an increasingly common approach in policing today. Community policing alters the fundamentals of policing. It holds that the police should work closely with residents, that they should emphasize crime prevention, as opposed to law enforcement, and that they should decentralize the decision-making authority to rank-and-file officers.

Community policing programs takes many different forms. Some emphasize quality-of-life issues, while others focus on serious crimes. Others primarily address drug-related crime.

One of the most well known community policing programs is the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS). Implemented at a limited level in 1993, a year later the CAPS program had spread throughout the entire Chicago-area as well as neighboring suburbs.

The CAPS strategy lays out a rational plan for community policing. It is based on the premise that officers should be permanently assigned to neighborhoods to enhance their knowledge about the community in which they work and to allow the officers and the neighborhood residents to get to know each other on a personal level. Under CAPS, the police department requires officers to meet with neighborhood residents to get to know one another on a personal level.

The bottom line is, community policing exemplifies the fact that the current form of policing is not the only one that is possible. The idea that police do not and cannot change is a myth. Community policing is simply one of many emerging schools of thought in criminal justice today.