Last month, I wrote about Sir Robert Peel’s principles of community based-policing and the challenges around engaging ourselves to make crime prevention an every-day reality.
To this end, allow me to share a bit of my vision about what community policing should be.
It will become a reality, or the norm, when people place less importance on “catching the bad person” and “punishing the bad person.” 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 making the same choices.”
When society can achieve this level of thinking then it is open to being aware of the root cause of criminal behaviour and the direct impact this has on communities. It costs a lot of money to investigate, prosecute and incarcerate a person. Bigger and/or more jails, more laws, stiffer penalties, more police, is what we typically like to think will solve the issue of crime and disorder – but this is not the case. We can’t afford to continue down this road because we know that it is not sustainable from an economic or humanitarian standpoint.
How do we move away from this habitual response? How do we deal with criminals in a way that gives us hope that something better is being achieved than what occurred in the past? How do we achieve sustainable long-term results that impact our communities in a positive manner?
I believe that we all need to understand that we all own part of the problem and therefore need to be part of the solution. I have worked 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 would not celebrate the fact that more police have been hired, more people are calling police or police arrests statistics are on the rise and more people are going to jail.
We would rather celebrate when more police officers are assigned to walk the beat again and interact face to face with the community, working in partnership with the community to address the issues of crime and disorder. We would celebrate the fact that crime is reduced because the community has taken back its streets due to sustained collaborative efforts with the police, the city, other levels of government, community organizations and business. We would celebrate when police have the time to get out of their vehicles and engage youth in the park, owners of small business, tourists from out of town, kids in day care and the concerned citizen on the sidewalk. We would celebrate when most of Ottawa’s communities become engaged in some sort of on-going form of crime prevention through “pro-community development” programs such as Neighbourhood watch or Business Watch. We would celebrate when the media is able to sell papers because these types of community success stories are front-page news and that the conflict/crisis is a small print story at the rear of the paper.
To make this vision reality, I believe we need to tap into the tremendous resource capabilities that exist within our very diverse Canadian urban communities. Our communities house a tremendous wealth of knowledge, diverse life experience, cultural depth and economic privilege. We sell ourselves short when we do not tap into this pool of natural resources, especially when we are looking for long-term solutions around crime and disorder. When we overlook these resources, we continue to buy into very one-dimensional law-and-order approaches that give predictable and costly results.
One of the resources that we tend to rely on very heavily is the use technology in law enforcement. Today’s police services are heavily dependant on technology and most officers would have a hard time operating without it. The irony is that the very technology that supposedly allows us to connect instantly with people not standing before us also prevents from feeling truly connected with people because they are not standing in front of us.
It is very easy for police officers to feel disconnected from the communities they serve. We sit enclosed in a patrol car driving through the community, reading information from our police laptop, going from one crisis call to the next with no end in sight. We do not get to see the long-term benefits of our work and, in fact, we rarely see any improvements, because the calls for service appear to keep increasing every year. It is hard for us to foster any attachment to the community or people we serve when all we face is the negative aspects of that community. Not a very human experience.
There is nothing more rewarding than walking through a community and being openly accessible to its residents who will tell you first hand what is really going on (the good and the bad) and then being able to work with that person towards a solution, if necessary. Police officers better understand their role when they are in close proximity to the community they serve, because they see first hand the impact of their work.
When one filters everything through technology, things can become very one-dimensional and we no longer get the full story.
For example, there is a drastic difference between reading about an event in the paper and hearing from the person who was there to witness, or experience the event. Reading about break and enter statistics and hearing about a break and enter from your neighbour whose home was broken into, changes how you perceive that crime. And is often your perception and attachment to the event that determines whether or not you will become proactively engaged.
That is why it is so important for citizens to get out in their community and get to know first hand who they live beside and how they can get involved in making their community a safer and more enjoyable place to live for everyone.
It this were to happen, I believe there would be less opportunities for crimes to occur and the community would see that it holds many of the answers to the problems that currently exist. Being the solution instantly empowers the community and reduces the calls for service to the police, which would give us more time to deal with criminal activity that needs police intervention. Beyond this, it would also allow for police to proactively engage to community and support them in their crime prevention initiatives.
The ultimate success story would be that, every year, fewer police officers are being hired because there is a reduced demand for their service.
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 our backyard.