Community policing: origins, philosophy and principles

On the first morning of the course, Professor Ray Desjardins puts a photograph on the screen. It shows a police officer in the late 1980s standing in a doorway on Mercer Street in Port Ardent's Eastgate neighborhood, talking to a shopkeeper. 'That's me,' he says, 'eleven years into patrol, the week the service started its first foot beat in Eastgate. I thought it was a punishment. Within a year it was the best job I ever had.' He tells the class that he spent the last part of his career running the community response unit, and that most of what he learned there is the subject of this course: how police work with the people they serve, how trust is built and lost, and how bias, history and difference shape every encounter.

This course builds on LES-101, where you saw the purpose of police in a democracy and the history of policing, and on LES-111 and LES-112, where you studied the Constitution and police powers. Those courses asked what police may do. This one asks how police should do it, and with whom. It follows the same cohort at Maumee Valley Community College in Toledo, and much of it takes place in Eastgate, a neighborhood of about 9,000 people on the east side of Port Ardent.

What community policing means

Community policing is a philosophy, not a unit. It holds that the police and the public share responsibility for safety, that the police should work with residents to identify and solve problems rather than only respond to incidents, and that the way police act, not just what they achieve, matters to whether people accept their authority. A service that has a community policing unit but treats every other officer as a call-taking machine has not adopted community policing. A service where every patrol officer knows the people on their beat, uses their discretion to solve problems and is measured partly on how well they do so has.

Most definitions share three elements. The first is partnership: working with residents, businesses, community groups, schools, social services and other agencies as equals, not as sources of information. The second is problem solving: looking beyond individual calls to the conditions that produce them, and using a wide range of responses, many of which are not enforcement. The third is organizational change: adjusting how a service assigns officers, trains them, evaluates them and makes decisions, so that partnership and problem solving become normal work rather than special projects.

Desjardins writes the three words on the board and asks which is hardest. Marco DiSanto, the army veteran, says organizational change, because every institution he has worked in resists it. Priya Sandhu says partnership, because partners have their own priorities and do not take orders. Desjardins says both are right, and that the third element is the one most often missing when community policing fails: services adopt the language without changing the incentives.

Where the idea came from

The idea is older than the name. The principles often attributed to Sir Robert Peel, compiled by later writers from the instructions given to London's Metropolitan Police in 1829, include the statement that the police are the public and the public are the police, and that the police depend on public approval to do their work. American policing borrowed from that model, but its early history was shaped by local politics, and in the South by slave patrols and later the enforcement of segregation. Through the middle of the twentieth century, reformers such as August Vollmer and O. W. Wilson built a professional model around rapid response, random patrol and investigation, partly to free policing from political corruption.

The professional model had real strengths: training, standards, records and less political interference. But by the late 1960s and 1970s it was under strain. The Kerner Commission in 1968 found that police practices were a major source of grievance in the urban disorders of the previous summers. Research then tested the model's core assumptions. The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment of 1972 and 1973 found that varying the level of random patrol made little difference to crime or to residents' fear. Studies of response time found that faster response rarely led to arrests, because most crimes are reported long after they happen.

Two ideas grew out of that research. In 1979 Herman Goldstein argued that police should focus on the problems behind repeat calls rather than on the calls themselves, which became problem-oriented policing, the subject of the next lesson. In 1982 James Q. Wilson and George Kelling published 'Broken Windows', which argued that visible disorder signals that no one is in control, increases fear and can lead to more serious crime, and that police should pay attention to order and residents' concerns. By the late 1980s, George Kelling and Mark Moore were describing a community problem-solving era that was replacing the reform or professional era.

How it spread in the United States

In the United States, community policing spread rapidly in the 1990s. Chicago's Alternative Policing Strategy, begun in 1993, assigned officers to beats and held regular beat meetings with residents, and it was closely studied by Wesley Skogan. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 created the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, the COPS Office, in the Department of Justice, which funded the hiring of tens of thousands of officers and still funds training, technical assistance and research. In 2015 the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing made building trust and legitimacy its first pillar, and the COPS Office continues to publish guidance based on it.

Today almost every police service says it practices community policing. What that means in practice varies enormously. In some places it is a philosophy that shapes how every officer works. In others it is a small unit that attends events and runs programs while patrol carries on as before. Part of the job of a new officer is to recognize which kind of service they have joined and to practice the philosophy in their own work regardless.

Core principles in practice

Desjardins gives the class six principles he used to brief new members of the community response unit. They are not a legal standard, but they summarize what the research and his experience suggest.

• Know the place. An officer assigned to an area for long enough to learn its people, its history and its problems makes better decisions than one who arrives for each call as a stranger.
• Listen before acting. Residents often define problems differently from the police, and their definition usually reveals something the call data does not.
• Solve problems, not just incidents. A call that keeps coming back is a sign that something underneath it has not been addressed.
• Share decisions. Partners who help define a problem and choose a response are far more likely to sustain it than partners who are told what the police will do.
• Act fairly every time. Trust is built in thousands of ordinary encounters and lost in a few bad ones.
• Measure what matters. Count outcomes such as fewer repeat calls, less fear and more trust, not only arrests and tickets.

What the calls say about the work

One reason community policing makes sense is that most police work is not about crime. Desjardins shows the class the breakdown of Port Ardent's 54,300 calls for service in 2025, which they first saw in LES-101, and asks Linh Tran, who now works part time as a call-taker, to group them.

# Port Ardent calls for service, 2025
calls = {"traffic": 9800, "disturbances": 6900, "suspicious person or vehicle": 6100,
         "theft and property": 5900, "well-being and mental health": 5400,
         "animals and other": 4950, "alarms": 4300, "collisions": 3400,
         "follow-ups": 3200, "domestic": 2700, "assaults": 1650}
crime = ["theft and property", "domestic", "assaults"]
total = sum(calls.values())
crime_calls = sum(calls[k] for k in crime)
print("total calls:", total)
print("calls about a reported crime:", crime_calls, round(crime_calls / total, 2))
print("everything else:", total - crime_calls, round((total - crime_calls) / total, 2))

total calls: 54300
calls about a reported crime: 10250 0.19
everything else: 44050 0.81

Only about one call in five reported a crime. The rest were traffic problems, disturbances, suspicious activity, people in distress, alarms, animals and follow-ups. Many of those calls come from the same places and the same people again and again. A model of policing that measures success only by response time and arrests misses most of what the public asks the police to do. Linh adds that from the call-taker's chair, the same addresses appear night after night, and that most of the callers are not asking for an arrest; they want the problem to stop.

What the evidence says

Community policing has been studied for more than forty years, and the results are more modest than its supporters sometimes claim. A Campbell Collaboration systematic review by Charlotte Gill and colleagues in 2014 found that community-oriented policing strategies had positive effects on residents' satisfaction with police, perceptions of police legitimacy and perceptions of disorder, but little measurable effect on crime or on fear of crime in the short term. Other approaches covered later in this course, such as problem-oriented policing and focused place-based strategies, have stronger evidence for reducing crime. The honest conclusion is that community policing reliably improves the relationship between police and the public, which matters in its own right and supports everything else, but it is not by itself a crime-reduction program.

Broken windows thinking has a more contested record. Some studies found that addressing physical disorder, such as cleaning vacant lots or fixing lighting, reduced crime and fear. But when the idea was translated into aggressive enforcement of minor offenses and high volumes of stops, as in New York City's stop, question and frisk practices of the 2000s, the costs were serious. In Floyd v. City of New York (2013), a federal judge found that the city's stop practices had violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights of many Black and Latino residents, and the volume of stops fell sharply afterwards without the increase in crime that some had predicted. Kelling himself later said that broken windows was never meant to be zero tolerance or mass arrest. Desjardins asks the class to keep two things in mind: disorder matters to residents, and the way police respond to it matters just as much.

Criticisms and debates

Community policing has critics from several directions. Some officers see it as social work that takes time away from real police work, and some services have treated it as a public relations exercise. Some community advocates argue that it expands police contact with residents who would be better served by other agencies, and that a friendly face does not change policies that cause harm. Others point out that community policing can amplify the voices of residents who attend meetings, who are often older homeowners, over those of tenants, young people and people who distrust the police. Recent debates about shifting some responsibilities and funding from police to other services have sharpened those questions.

Desjardins does not ask the class to settle these debates. He asks them to notice that the critics share a point with the supporters: the police are only one part of community safety, and they do the most good when they work with others, know their limits and act fairly. He tells Jesse Morningstar, who wants to join his tribe's police department, that the communities he will serve have long experience of policing done to them rather than with them, and that the whole course is about the difference.