Community Policing Pros and Cons

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Community Policing Pros and Cons

Community policing is what is also known as foot patrolling. This is when a police officer, or more than one, patrols a community on foot, being repeatedly assigned to a specific neighborhood so that they can get personally involved with the neighborhood in question.

At first, this looks like it’s something amazing since the officers are going to get more involved with the citizens, but then again it might not be so good. In this article, we’re going to look at the pros and cons of community policing.

List of Pros of Community Policing

1. Direct Contact.
As officers keep on patrolling the same neighborhoods day in and day out, they will get to know the citizens that reside in them and these citizens are, over time, going to start trusting these police officers and as such their faith and trust in law enforcement is going to rise.

In neighborhoods with faith in law enforcement, it is possible to increase funds to the police and in some of them there are programs such as the Neighborhood Watch, in which the community aids police officers patrol and enforce law.

2. Crime Prevention.
As officers get to know a community, they also get to know what is right and wrong with it. Typically, officers are called to an area where crime has taken place and as such they ae left with fighting it as it is going or after it happened. In community policing neighborhoods, the officers are able to tell what might happen and as such the focus might go towards preventing crime instead of fighting it, increasing overall safety.

List of Cons of Community Policing

1. Citizens Might Not Care.
Since the officers are going to be out in the streets patrolling and doing everything they can to keep the streets safe, it just might happen that the citizens of these neighborhoods won’t care about the job and the safety of the officers doing their job, since it has nothing to do with them until it happens on their front lawn.

If citizens don’t care about the work that the officers do, they are on their own to fight and prevent crime, and that might not be enough in some neighborhoods.

2. Relationships Might Worsen.
If a specific neighborhood has had a bad history with the police, the officers assigned to police this community are certainly going to be a lot more severe in order to keep themselves safe. This, in return, might cause the community to strike back and the relationships between the officers and the citizens might worsen to the point where the police officers are endangering their lives. This can cause community policing to have the exact opposite effect of what it should have.