Why is there a need for community policing?
There are several number of compelling reasons why politicians and police officials have looked at community policing as another way forward. The reasons seen are basically grounded in the history of policing, the ever changing nature of communities, police researches that have taken place in the past quarter century as well as the shifting of the characteristics of violence, crime and disorder. The practitioner all agree that there is and always has been a very pressing need for some innovative practices within police vehicle supply in order to help straighten what has been considered for so long to be a crisis of violence in many communities. The changing nature and also the elevated level of the crime scene in the nations in the West during the early 1970s up to the 1900s caused the police departments to look for more effective means in curbing disorder and in controlling crimes. It also has been recognized that curbing disorder, increasing feelings of personal safety and fighting crime will require commitment from both the public and the police.
In the 1960s it has been noted that the public has surrendered its role in being able to control crimes to the police and relied on the police to do their corresponding jobs efficiently. It was during those times and also in previous decades that police administrators implemented different strategies and also made use of new technologies in order to increase the distance between the different police personnel and the public which they offered services to. The effort was largely taken by the police managers in order to lessen the corrupting influence which was believed to come from the neighborhood or community. There were a lot of police departments who made use of militaristic and hierarchical management systems which imposed a greater sense of accountability on the police managers and also emphasized the professionalism of police officers. There were many who argued that the advances in the policing methods as well as their technologies like radio dispatching, motorized patrols and the use of immediate response techniques usually created a rift between the police and the community as a whole. Another way of saying this is that police officers no longer walked beats and did not anymore get to know the residents in the area they were assigned. This resulted in the police having less involvement and awareness in the problems of the communities they were serving. The police were often assigned different patrol areas on a rotating basis and were also instructed to alter their routes frequently in an effort to prevent criminals from doing malicious acts.