When I first joined the police, one of the first things I was educated about were the merits of community policing. Its principal proponent was an English politician by the name of Sir Robert Peel, the founder of the modern English police force (it’s from Robert that the nickname Bobby for an English police officer comes from) and he came up with the following principles:
1. The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.
2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions. Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.
3. The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.
4. Police seek and preserve public favour not by catering to public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.
5. Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient.
6. Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
7. Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.
8. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.
To think that this type of thinking was around since the early 1800s seems astonishing when you think there is many a lesson to be had in those principles today. I had always assumed that harsh punishment to criminals such as public hangings was the crime prevention “du jour” back then. Of course, intellectually and spiritually gifted people have long been trying to help the rest of us understand that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure, in so many different ways.
It seems that the challenging part has always been the leap of faith that it takes to actually do it. Humans are funny creatures. We wait until things hit a crisis point before we break out of our natural lethargy and do something about it. Imagine how your quality of life would improve if you took every opportunity to invest in things at the front end and avoided the crisis at the back end? Because this is often not our reality, we become used to (and thus normalize) the dysfunctional reality of getting really good at dealing with the crisis at the back end.
Police have long prided themselves at being good at investigating crime and bringing the perpetrators to justice, but in doing so, we miss the many opportunities to get really good at preventing the very crimes we are so good at processing at the back end. This flies in the face of Sir Robert Peel’s first principle.
There have been many times throughout my career when I really questioned whether police really get the concept of community policing because many of my colleagues are very passionate about bringing those who are in contravention of the law before the courts and less passionate about engaging the community to become involved in proactive long term solutions.
Police traditionally place more value and recognition on officers who excel at catching the “bad guy” and our media reinforces this by making these types of events front page news, especially if it is a high-profile case such as a gruesome murder. Many a cop movie or TV series has been based solely on a heroic cop chasing down criminals with tenacity that is to be admired. Knowing that there are officers out there who fight crime on our behalf allows us to sleep at night knowing that we are safe.
Are we really? How would life look if there was less to worry about because crimes such as murders, rapes, beatings, robberies, shootings, drug trafficking and home invasions were so rare because the root cause of these occurrences was dealt with at the front end? Cynics (or realists) would say: “you’re dreaming buddy” because they have already assumed that this is not possible to achieve and will quickly point out that this is not today’s reality.
My colleagues are no different, as they are a direct representation of our society and are subject to the same belief systems. The difference is that police have been educated on Peel’s principles and we are paid professionals who have a very unique outlook on what it takes to make community policing a reality. We are experts in the field of knowing what happens when our communities do not engage themselves and expect us to pick up the pieces. We live the frustration of being caught between a rock and a hard place when we work hard at bringing people to justice, just to see those people back out on the street showing no improvement and often they become even more hardened and anti-social because of the incarceration experience.
How do we turn this around? How do we go from accepting reactive policing as the norm, to seeing it as a dysfunctional short term solution that only perpetuates a cycle of non societal progress? I look for the solution in Peel’s sixth principle.
If society saw the police as themselves and not some foreign robotic entity tasked with dealing with their problems, then a shift in how we saw things could occur. Call it a paradigm shift if you want, but that is precisely what is needed to allow for us to break free of the current cycle. As long as you need to see police as your savior and not as your neighbour, then you will never allow us to be anything else but that. Your tax dollars pay us and we respond to your need to feel safe. Lost in this, is the opportunity for us to work together collaboratively on an equal footing so that the ownership of community problems becomes everyone’s business, not just ours. That is sustainable.
To this end, allow me to share a bit of my vision about community policing.
Community policing will become the norm when people place less importance on “catching the bad guy” and “punishing the bad guy”. Not that this is not important, but this line of thinking needs to be balanced with people asking questions such as: “how did this person turn out like this in the first place and how can we prevent others from following this path”. That is where they become aware of the root cause of criminal behaviour and will realize that they own part of the problem and therefore need to be part of the solution.
I have had the pleasure to work with many community members who “get it” and they are equally frustrated at the lack of overall community engagement and political will to deal with the root cause of societal issues that foster criminality. They see the police doing their best, but understand that the police can only do so much, especially if citizens hold on to the expectation that “reactive policing” is the solution. In my vision, we should not celebrate the fact that more police have been hired, or more people are calling police. We should rather celebrate when more police officers are assigned to walk the beat again and interact face to face with the community. We should celebrate and make it a front-page story when we use all this fancy technology to free up officers so that they can have more time to proactively engage the community and be a part of long-term solutions.
The ultimate success story would be that police officers are being laid off because there is less demand for their service, as the crime rate has plummeted and communities are operating with less law and more self sustaining order.
A pipe dream? Perhaps, but it is never reaching the destination that is important. It is always the journey towards that destination that teaches you more about yourself and the world you live in. All you need is to be open to something different and have a clear vision of where you want to go and take some sort of action to get there. Without this, nothing will ever change in your backyard.