Community Policing: Often Advocated, Rarely Practiced PDF

3 Community Policing: Often Advocated, Rarely Practiced Timothy Parsons Ask a citizen out on the street about community policing and they are likely to show some recognition of the term. It may strik...

3 Community Policing: Often Advocated, Rarely Practiced Timothy Parsons Ask a citizen out on the street about community policing and they are likely to show some recognition of the term. It may strike them as oddly familiar, a term they have heard before, an established phrase that arises periodically in public discourse. Enquire of them further about the actual meaning of the term community policing and they may well begin to struggle. In that, they will not be alone, as many experienced police offi- cers would probably also struggle to define what community policing is. This should not surprise anyone as there is no universally accepted definition of community policing or what the term actually means. Of course, there are many scholars and policymakers who have offered their own interpretations but there is variation in how the term is understood and what it describes. T. Parsons (B) School of Justice Studies, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 33 J. J. Nolan et al. (eds.), Policing in an Age of Reform, Palgrave’s Critical Policing Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56765-1_3 34 T. Parsons For some it is simply a policing approach that includes some form of consultation or partnership between the public and the police. For others it provides a wide-ranging and sophisticated vehicle for major police reform. From Australia to Armenia police services have committed them- selves to introducing community policing programmes and practices and permanently embedding them within the organisational outputs of their respective services. There is clear evidence that the language and termi- nology of community policing has for many years now become enshrined in the international policing lexicon. Casey (2010, p. 11) points to what in effect is an often loosely defined concept, influencing wider discus- sions of policing approaches and becoming a form of “ideological cult with more slogans than substance and more followers than leaders”. The pervasive influence of the community policing debate can even be detected in countries with tyrannical and despotic governments such as China and Zimbabwe, which also claim to have community policing at the core of a state-wide policing philosophy. A series of similar but slightly different definitions of community policing can cause still further confusion in the minds of practitioner and citizen alike. Variously described as community-based, community- oriented or even neighbourhood policing, a lack of clarity in defining such terms can lead to a wide variety of strategic approaches and varying degrees of success in operational implementation. The OSCE (2008, p. 5) has defined community policing thus: “A philosophy and organisational strategy that promotes a partnership-based, collaborative effort between the police and the community to more effectively and efficiently identify, prevent and solve problems of crime, the fear of crime, physical and social disorder, and neighbourhood decay in order to improve the quality of life for everyone”. Whilst Fielding (2005, p. 460) describes community policing as: “an iconic style of policing in which the police are close to the public, know their concerns from regular everyday contacts, and act on them in accord with the community’s wishes”. Although these definitions are helpful in describing the philosoph- ical approach to community policing as well as a vision for what it might deliver, it is useful to consider a more detailed analysis of the  3 Community Policing: Often Advocated, Rarely Practiced 35 core components of a successful community policing programme. A wide-ranging study of approaches to community policing conducted by Mackenzie and Henry (2009) for the Government of Scotland anal- ysed some 420 articles, books and research reports on the subject drawn from three major databases. The researchers distilled down the data looking both for similarities and differences across recently implemented community policing strategies in a number of different jurisdictions. From this they identified five key features common to successful commu- nity policing initiatives (1) Decentralisation—officers on the ground need to be able to respond to public concerns and make things happen at a local level. Centralised command structures slow down decision making with key decisions being made by senior officers remote from the context and location of any emerging problem. (2) Partnership— with other agencies, so police can act as an intermediary or facilitator when the public demand action on issues outside the immediate remit of law enforcement. (This may include local government, schools, youth workers, voluntary sector organisations or local businesses.) (3) Commu- nity Engagement—communities need to have a real voice that can be fed into police priorities and practices where appropriate. (4) Proactive and Problem-Solving—community policing marks a shift away from reactive “fire brigade” policing, this connects it with problem-oriented (POP) and intelligence-led (ILP) approaches to policing. This requires action to be initiated and directed by the engagement process, not shaped by existing, unreflective police definitions of local problems. (The problem- oriented model of policing was originally developed by Goldstein and comprised a system through which police officers develop effective strategies to prevent and reduce crime by a process of in-depth analysis of community crime problems, the crafting of a targeted response, followed by an assessment of the impact of the police intervention on the orig- inal problem.) (5) Philosophy—community policing heralds a changed understanding of real police work akin to peace officers embedded in the networks of their communities rather than as reactive law offi- cers, although law enforcement remains important and should not be neglected. A separate review conducted on behalf of the New Zealand Police, Coquilhat (2008) at around the same time and which also included a 36 T. Parsons review of international literature reached, unsurprisingly, almost iden- tical conclusions. This review identified partnerships, decentralisation and problem-solving as key components in any successful community policing strategy, adding flexibility and accountability as being equally important considerations. Oversight and Accountability Other studies of community policing, particularly as part of a wider police reform process in emerging democracies, have highlighted the requirement for a series of further supporting structures if commu- nity policing programmes are to endure and deliver positive results. Groenewald and Peake (2004, p. 10) suggested that these include struc- tures for national and local oversight that encompass mechanisms with real and not just symbolic power and the authority to address problems. They go on to argue that there should also be clear roles and division of responsibilities with civilian participation in conducting oversight activities. In addition to appropriate oversight structures, a transparent process of police accountability should also be put in place. Account- ability structures should provide a clear system of police accountability to government, parliament and the public (p. 18). Included in this system should be methods of direct communication with the public, including the introduction of hotlines and anonymous reporting mechanisms for complaints against the police. To be effective the public must have easy access to any complaints procedure. To ensure successful implementation of new community policing programmes or the revision and refinement of existing programmes the role of the citizen is central. For community policing to work police organisations need to inform their public of any new strategy, raising awareness and enlisting the participation of the local community in making the initiative work. Murray (2005, p. 10). This should include raising people’s awareness of their legal and human rights as well as their civic responsibilities. If required the police can assist local community groups to organise and mobilise public support.  3 Community Policing: Often Advocated, Rarely Practiced 37 Organisational Levels of Community Policing Williams (2003), argues that delivering an effective and sustainable community policing strategy requires some major internal reform and re-organisation in the police service itself. At the central command level a major organisational change programme has to be initiated to realign internal departmental structures and resources to best support the imple- mentation of a community policing approach at local level. Management structures must also be reformed with decision-making devolved down to neighbourhood level; empowering first and second line supervisors to respond quickly to locally identified problems and concerns by designing and delivering solutions using a problem-solving approach. Traditional and often long-established management approaches based upon military hierarchies would need to be changed, with a shift of emphasis away from discipline and compliance and towards leadership and empower- ment. Mechanisms for providing reward, recognition and promotion for officers would ideally be aligned to qualitative measures (public satis- faction, letters of appreciation, increased community participation) and not crude quantitative measures of performance such as the numbers of arrests and stops and searches carried out in any given period. Finally budgeting and finance would have to be re-organised to support commu- nity policing with control over local policing budgets being devolved down to local commanders circumventing the need for central budget and spending authorisations. Converting strategic objectives into tactical successes can present some significant challenges. And hovering above this theoretical corpus rests a fundamental question that has to be answered: if the essential compo- nents of a successful community policing strategy have been clearly identified, comprehensively described and widely circulated, why does the encounter with community policing in practice so often prove to be elusive? The first point to make here is that successful and recognisable community policing can only occur in a democratic space. That is to say that community policing can only be established and maintained in a constitutional environment inhabited by democratic government. Why is this distinction so important? Simply put, countries with no democ- racy, no rule of law no fundamental rights and freedoms, are unable 38 T. Parsons to provide a system of policing that could remotely resemble commu- nity policing. It is an observable fact that in countries where autocratic regimes hold power there are present in the streets and other public spaces large numbers of men and women wearing uniforms with the word police written on them, but in reality these state officials are not engaged in policing. They are there to suppress dissent, to deny people their human rights and to use physical force to protect an undemo- cratic and unaccountable regime. That is not police work. Democratic policing, which must include a community policing approach to win public trust; cannot flourish in a vacuum, indeed it cannot exist at all unless it can be situated within a wider constitutional landscape. To be both effective and durable, a community policing programme will depend on a number of essential supporting pillars being in place. These would include; political oversight but not direct control, an indepen- dent judiciary, a free and independent press, strong civil society, public scrutiny and accountability, the rule of law and commitments to human rights and an independent body to investigate complaints of police malpractice. It is immediately obvious that none of these supporting pillars are likely to be present in a dictatorial or autocratic regime. But what might be the barriers to effective implementation and durability of community policing in a democratic country? Here the essential pillars of support outlined above are almost certainly going to be present and well-established. One of the explanations put forward to explain the lack of success in establishing effective long-term community policing programmes is that the nature of police culture militates against it. This point is raised specifically in Coquilhat’s paper as a likely barrier to implementation and acceptance. Concerns about the corrosive nature of police culture, some- times referred to as canteen culture, have been raised on many occasions. In the UK the issue of a perceived malign police sub-culture came to prominence after incidents of violent disorder occurred in cities across Britain in 1981. The catalyst for these was a breakdown in relations between the Metropolitan Police and Black communities in Brixton and other areas of London. These events prompted the Home Secretary of the day to establish a judge-led inquiry into the causes of the trouble chaired by Lord Scarman (1986). Although complimentary about the efforts  3 Community Policing: Often Advocated, Rarely Practiced 39 of the police in confronting and stemming the violence, Scarman also reflected on the need for the police to maintain the consent and support of the community. He also advised that officers should be trained in the problems of policing a multicultural society. These recommenda- tions were accepted by the government, Belstead (1981) and yet four years later, following a raid on a premises in Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham where a black woman Cynthia Jarrett collapsed and died following a police raid on her house to conduct a search for evidence against her son, a violent mob surrounded and murdered an unarmed community police officer, PC Keith Blakelock. Blakelock was slashed and stabbed by thirteen different weapons (and therefore presumably that number of assailants), with efforts made to decapitate him. To date no one has been brought to justice for his murder. These two events were significant, not just because of the public concern that they gener- ated about the state of British policing, but because they also fueled a compelling narrative about a racist, aggressive and misogynist sub-culture that emanated from a white, largely male, working-class police work- force. Waddington (1999, p. 289), sought to analyse and untangle this narrative as thoroughly as possible. As a former senior police officer he had had the opportunity to observe this phenomenon at first hand. But taking a methodical approach and reviewing a considerable body of asso- ciated literature he concluded that “there is little relationship between the privately expressed views of police officers and their actual; behaviour on the streets, it appears that the concept of a police sub-culture contributes little to the explanation of policing”. On the issue of alleged misogyny among the police workforce Waddington concluded that the sexist attitudes of male police officers, which he didn’t deny existed, was straightforwardly a manifestation of patriarchal beliefs abroad in wider society. An entirely plausible expla- nation. Writing at around the same time, Hall (1999, p. 189) was dismissive of suggestions that police attitudes largely reflected those of the population that they were recruited from. For Hall such arguments were “cynical and constitutionally unacceptable”, he believed that they “could not be legitimately advanced”. And yet, to hold a group of low-paid, poorly-trained and relatively low-ranking public servants to a higher standard of probity and ethical conduct than that found in wider 40 T. Parsons society seems risible. Particularly in light of so many well-publicised cases of parliamentarians, members of the judiciary, hospital consultants and senior officers in HM armed forces being prosecuted and convicted of a wide range of criminal offences, ranging from fraud, to paedophilia. Hall and many like him; wrote with confidence and authority about an institution and organisational culture about which he knew nothing. Waddington rather sourly observed that the literature on police sub- culture “tells us more about the peculiarities of academic life than it does about the distinctiveness of the police”. But Hall was confident of his own thesis that racism and bigotry were part of the organisational culture of policing and that discriminatory practices were an “indestructible part of the institutional habitus”. Harnessing a term brought to prominence by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s (1996, p. 10) societal critique is relevant here, although perhaps not in the way that Hall envisaged. Bourdieu’s conception of habitus describes a social space that a person occupies. It refers to a person’s tastes, habits, interests and opinions. Here lies the seed of another substantial barrier to community policing being both effective and enduring. Over the last thirty years in Britain at least, the shape and character of the police workforce has changed markedly. What was once a largely if not exclusively proletarian occupation employing white working-class men and women in a blue-collar job that required only basic levels of literacy and numeracy as requirements for entry, has meta- morphasised into a profession: now into an all-graduate profession. This puts social distance between the police officer and the community being policed. But the process of distancing does not end there. Bourdieu also reflects on the meaning of space, of physical space and social space. “Social space is an invisible set of relationships which tends to retrans- late itself, in a more or less direct manner, into physical space in the form of a definite distributional arrangement of agents and proper- ties”. It is significant that as the police population transformed from working-class to middle-class, so too did the physical distribution of those officers change. From the mid-1990s onward changes to police housing allowance and the provision of police flats and houses for offi- cers to live in, underwent wide-ranging reform. Allowances were reduced and police flats and houses sold off, thereby reducing the likelihood that  3 Community Policing: Often Advocated, Rarely Practiced 41 officers, certainly in London, would continue to live close to the area where they worked. In a research report published by a UK think tank Gaskath (2016, p. 8), revealed that of the 18,179 officers assigned to local borough policing only 8896 lived in Central London and only 1261 lived in the borough that they policed. Some London police officers lived as far away as Cornwall or the South of France. This matters because it serves to undermine the fundamentals of community policing doctrine. With physical detachment comes emotional detachment and the crime and security problems of the area being policed can easily be forgotten on the journey home from work. This is unlikely to happen if the officer lives in the neighbourhood that he or she polices. In that circumstance local crime problems become personal; because they also affect the officer concerned and the officer’s family. So with police officers being in some sense distant from the community they police the likelihood of them developing a close and trusting relationship with the citizens they are responsible for is quickly diminished. So what conceivably can be done to address the structural weaknesses of current approaches to establishing long-term community policing programmes, as well as some of the cultural barriers articulated above? A recent study by Walton and Falkner (2019, p. 29), seeks to address these very points. The study is given greater gravitas by the fact that one of the authors Richard Walton is a recently retired commander in the Metropolitan Police with important insider perspectives on how present problems have evolved and the sort of measures that might be taken to ameliorate them. Walton and Falkner postulate that there are five key challenges facing UK policing at present: increasing crime levels, linked to greater demand and reduced budgets, neighbourhood decline, national security threats a disempowered workforce and a policing model that is outpaced by technology. In a classic defence of the community policing approach and with a gently muted echo of Bourdieu they state “The presence of dedicated officers in a local “place” allows them to build up their knowledge of an area and gather better intelligence of local issues and individuals most likely to be involved in crime, either as perpetrators or victims”. The authors argue for a new community policing strategy to be 42 T. Parsons rolled-out nationwide. Specifically, they call for “high-impact commu- nity policing re-invigorated with a stronger focus”. They acknowledge the problem outlined above of community police officers having to commute into the areas that they work in, rather than being domiciled in the local area itself. Their solution is to use the power of local govern- ment to ensure that some houses in new developments are allocated to local police officers and that interest-free loans are made available to officers to assist them to offset or defer some of the costs associ- ated with moving home. Importantly, Walton & Falkner also call for a new national policing infrastructure with a service that is “nationally led, regionally co-ordinated” but still “responsive to local communities”. The authors recommend the retention of the 43 territorial police forces in England and Wales (the eight police forces in Scotland were amalga- mated into a single force, Police Scotland, by the Scottish Government in 2013), and acknowledge the importance of the National Crime Agency in tackling the threat from organised crime. The Way Forward It is undoubtedly true that the societal environment in which policing operates is changing. A consequence of globalisation and the combined effects of conflict, political instability and climate change in some parts of the world means that people are on the move and populations are changing. Technological change, the evolution and near universal adop- tion of internet services including social media platforms has led to new opportunities for organised crime groups and terrorists to operate and expand their influence across multiple jurisdictions. For politicians and policymakers these changes have acted as a catalyst for new thinking about the function, role and structure of modern police services. In the UK there is a move towards an all-graduate service with a need for a better-educated, more technologically proficient class of officer being required, located in a far more professionalised working environment  3 Community Policing: Often Advocated, Rarely Practiced 43 than was the case only a few decades ago. Explaining the rationale behind this new approach the College of Policing notes that1 : “Police officers make difficult decisions which impact the public every day. They face complex problems, often in dangerous situations, with growing demands from digital investigation and vulnerable people. The existing recruit training programme for officers at the start of their career wasn’t designed with these demands in mind. The new programme recognises constables operate at a level where they take personal respon- sibility for decisions in complex, unpredictable environments”. All of this may be true, but it is also the case that the fundamen- tals of policing have not changed and that much, if not the majority of police work is low-tech, if not no-tech and requires the same skills now from police officers that were required fifty years ago. Officers routinely deal with people who are drunk, drugged or mentally ill (often a combination of these three factors are in play). Similarly, officers have to respond to incidents of domestic abuse and sexual violence, child exploitation and in some communities, ongoing problems with anti- social behaviour. None of these problems are new or particularly enabled by developing technology. To address these problems effectively officers require, patience, empathy, communication skills and personal integrity. None of these vital attributes are confined to or necessarily associated with degree-level learning. By instigating these policy changes linked to recruitment, police leaders are effectively excluding from participation in the service the very demographic that has provided the bulk of offi- cers for the past 180 years. That is to say, white working-class men and women and diversity targets notwithstanding, working-class individuals from other ethnic groups. For recruits drawn from the working class the police service has historically provided a career that could be accessed with the minimum of educational requirements and which provided opportunities for development and professional advancement. Thirty years ago, the majority of UK Chief Constables would not have had degrees, nor indeed would they have had experience of any higher- level education. And yet those men (and they were at the time all men), were in the main, charismatic and effective leaders; police officers who 1 www.college.police.uk “what we do”. 44 T. Parsons had worked their way up through the ranks gaining knowledge, expe- rience and professional expertise as they went. To deny future access to the service for people such as this seems short-sighted, pernicious and counter-productive. For community policing to work the community police officers need to understand and experience the life led by the citi- zens that they are there to protect and support. If community police officers are socially, professionally and for much of the time physically distant from the people they serve, or occupy an entirely separate habitus as Bourdieu would put it, then the whole enterprise risks becoming some grim sociological experiment where well-educated professionals travel in each day to examine, analyse and categorise the threats, risks and chal- lenges confronting the local residents. Where is the human component in this? Walton and Falkner are right to call for changes to the national policing infrastructure and the College of Policing is right to identify that policing occurs in a complex and unpredictable environment. But rather than simply establishing better structures or co-ordinating bodies to respond to evolving change across the national (and international) landscape, a more radical reform to structure and organisation might be called for. A new National Constabulary (perhaps a Royal Constab- ulary), could be established to provide a stronger and more effective enforcement arm to compliment and support the crucial and expanding workload of the National Crime Agency (NCA). Providing a national force would solve some of the cross-border confusion and dissipated effort that inevitably results from having so many separate and autonomous police forces. This new force would be permanently armed thereby addressing the obvious vulnerability to mass- casualty terrorist attacks that a country with a largely unarmed police service is exposed to. Assuming responsibility for firearms operations, public order policing, roads policing, much of the counter-terrorism policing effort and border security the new force would, to all intents and purposes resemble a UK gendarmerie or civil guard. Of course such an innovation would be anathema to many police leaders and politicians who would argue with some justification that it would completely change the established UK policing model. But if the most valued and valuable aspects of that model are to survive, radical changes must be made. A  3 Community Policing: Often Advocated, Rarely Practiced 45 major structural change such as this would allow for the continuation of the 43 force structure with local and community policing remaining in the hands of provincial forces with local governance and accountability and importantly, locally focused recruitment. A more flexible and pragmatic approach could be taken to how community police officers are selected trained and qualified. The days of the police generalist must surely be at an end. In the not so distant past, police officers could join the service undertake some rather rudimentary basic training and then with experience and support from above move into more specialised areas of policing, whether into criminal investiga- tion, forensics, economic crime, public order, firearms or many other discrete specialisms within the service. Such a system is no longer viable for reasons of cost and efficiency as well increased specialisation, which requires an officer to take much longer to build up and develop the requisite skills. So in an era of specialisation it must be both appropriate and desirable to categorise the community officer as a “specialist”. These officers should be ring-fenced and not placed in a flexible pool of non- specialist officers who can be called upon at short notice to deploy to other areas wherever a short-term staffing shortage is identified. Efforts to protect the status of community officers have been made before, to ensure compliance it should be enshrined in legislation thereby giving status and protection to the vitally important community police officer as well as communicating to the communities that they serve, the impor- tance with which the role is regarded by officialdom, by Police and Crime Commissioners, Chief Constables and Government ministers. Through such a reform can both police and public confidence be restored in the role and function of community policing. Conclusion To conclude, it is obvious that a community policing strategy of any description can only exist in a democratic country with the rule of law and the necessary supporting pillars in place that are described above. There are barriers to the successful introduction, implementation and durability of community policing strategies. Whilst organisational 46 T. Parsons culture, or rather sub-culture may have presented a malign influence in the past its relevance was almost certainly over-stated and its very presence remains a contested area of debate. With changes to wider society have come changes to the demographics of the police work- force. There is a greater representation of women, gay officers and a multiplicity of different ethnicities, nationalities and religious beliefs now being represented within the ranks of the modern police service. These changes have occurred organically and gradually with little influence from policymakers. However, changes to educational requirements for entry, multiple points of entry into the service allowing for the effective introduction of an officer class into what has always historically been a proletarian occupation has occurred as a consequence of deliberate polit- ical intervention. The results of these changes are still being played out and it is too soon to assess their impact with confidence. Structural changes to the police organisation, the formation of a national force with nationwide powers and officers deployed across the regions would seem to present a rational, effective response to changes in crime patterns and the increased threat from cross-border organised crime and terrorism. Enshrining both the role and presence of experi- enced and dedicated community police officers in communities through changes to legislation and public duties placed upon elected Police and Crime Commissioners would provide a permanence and sustainability to community policing that has been absent up till now. A professionalised, all-graduate service may deliver some benefits at the technical edge of modern crime-fighting but it also threatens to undermine and neutralise the accrued benefits of close police-community interaction, co-operation and inter-dependence. References Belstead, L. (1981). House of Lords debate on the Scarman inquiry (Hansard vol. 425, CC 769–787). Retrieved from https://api.parliament.uk/historic- hansard/lords/1981/nov/25/the-scarman-report.  3 Community Policing: Often Advocated, Rarely Practiced 47 Bourdieu, P. (1996). Physical space, social space & habitus: Rapport 10:1996. Oslo: Institute for Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, 11–20. Retrieved from https://archives.library.illinois.edu/erec/University% 20Archives/2401001/Production_website/pages/StewardingExcellence/Phy sical%20Space,%20Social%20Space%20and%20Habitus.pdf. Casey, J. (2010). Implementing community policing in different countries and cultures. Pakistan Journal of Criminology, 2(4), 55–75. College of Policing website https://www.college.police.uk/What-we-do/Learning/Policing-Edu cation-Qualifications-Framework/Entry-routes-for-police-constables/Pages/ Entry-routes-for-police-constables.aspx. Coquilhat, J. (2008). Community policing: An international literature review. New Zealand: Evaluation Team, Organisational Assurance, New Zealand Police. Fielding, N. G. (2005). Concepts & theory in community policing. The Howard Journal, 44 (5), 460–472. Gaskath, G. (2016). Commuter cops: Helping our police to live in the city they serve. London: Policy Exchange, Capital City Foundation. Goldstein, H. (1979). Improving policing: A problem-oriented approach. Crime & Delinquency, 25 (2), 236–258. Groenewald, H., & Peake, G. (2004). Police reform through community- based policing: Philosophy and guidelines for implementation. New York, NY: International Peace Academy, pp. 15–20. Hall, S. (1999). From Scarman to Stephen Lawrence. History Workshop Journal, 48(1), 187–197. Mackenzie, S., & Henry, A. (2009). Community policing: A review of the evidence. Edinburgh: Scottish Government Social Research. Murray, J. (2005). Policing terrorism: A threat to community policing or just a shift in priorities? Police Practice & Research, 6 (4), 347–361. Scarman, L. S. (1986). The Scarman report (Report of an inquiry). England: Penguin. Senior Police Adviser to the OSCE Secretary General. (2008). Good practices in building police-public partnerships. Vienna: OSCE. Retrieved from https:// www.osce.org/secretariat/32547?download=true. Waddington, P. A. J. (1999). Police (canteen) sub-culture: An appreciation. British Journal of Criminology, 39 (2), 286–308. Walton, R., & Falkner, S. (2019). Rekindling British policing: A 10-point plan. London: Policy Exchange, 25–46. Williams, E. J. (2003). Structuring in community policing: Institutionalizing innovative change. Police Practice and Research, l4 (2), 119–129.