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What’s in it for me? 

This question seems selfish but it can be motivating question for a very altruistic aim. Believe or not, this is the question that I want community members to answer when deciding to participate in one of the central features of modern policing – Community Oriented Policing or COP.

I teach policing classes, and every time I ask students if they attend community policing meetings, no hands go up. I am not really surprised because I have attended community policing meetings myself and hardly anybody was there. Out of the one hundred thousand or so residents in the city where I attended community policing events, we’d only have a dozen people show up. At that time, I asked myself a question, “Where is the community in community policing?”

One of the major pitfalls in community policing is the lack of sustained involvement by community members. A renowned police scholar, Wesley Skogan, who studied COP in Chicago found that there was lack of participation by the community in COP programs. This finding became more troubling when he noted that communities that needed COP the most were the ones that were least involved with the COP programs. In the end, he said that community policing benefited more affluent communities. In the opposite, more disadvantaged communities don’t tend to reap the same rewards.

The community is the Key to COP

 It has been found in research over and over again that a witness is the key to crime solution and suspect apprehension. Police cannot be everywhere all the time. The police need the eyes and ears of the community. Not only are ordinary citizens instrumental in solving crimes, the engagement of the community is also the key component to crime prevention. It is their civic action that can remove disorders in society when they paint over gang signs, provide support for the homeless, repair dilapidated homes, or simply admonish people to stop littering and loitering. This same strategy of engaging the community is even used in counter-terrorism efforts where everyone was encouraged to be on the lookout for suspicious behaviors, spawning the rise of the “If You See Something, Say Something” movement.

Using the community is an age-old principle similar to the hue and cry — a system where the person who witnesses a crime is obligated to alert everyone else. Physical cry for help has now begun to take a new form as it became digitalized with Amber Alert. This type of response is a testament to the importance of the community in the provision of safety, but why are the communities missing in community policing activities?

COP Should Be Mutually Beneficial

What’s in it for me?

I believe that answering the question in a selfish way could be a stronger motivator for someone to invest in this crime prevention and crime control effort. Community involvement in crime prevention and crime control is a huge investment of time and safety. Currently, the major benefits from COP are couched in such terms as improved quality of life, reduction of disorder in the community, less fear of crime among community members. I don’t know about you but these outcomes are too abstract. Communicating these goals this way to community members is not attractive. It does not invite a call to action.

Instead, the incentives that should creep into the individual’s psyche should be, “What’s in it for me?” Quality of life should be defined in econometric terms such as greater economic investments in the community, increased valuation in real estate property, and fewer financial and emotional losses as a result of reduced crimes. These benefits are more tangible, and tangible benefits are the language that is understood by key stakeholders of COP such as businesses, community leaders, and ordinary citizens.

The police should also be asking what’s in it for them. Community involvement should become beneficial for the police too. What’s in it for the police? They will become more efficient and effective with their job of preventing and solving crimes. For the police, community involvement will result in less time, resources, and personnel required to carry out law enforcement. More importantly, it has the potential of smoothing out strained police-community relations.

The Police are Hardly the Answer to Crime

Police scholar Gary Cordner critiqued our tendency to rely on the police. He said that we placed too much emphasis on the police as crime control and crime prevention agents. A cursory survey of the theories on crime hardly identifies the police as the cause of crime, nor are they the solution to crime.  Criminologists have primarily blamed crime’s occurrences on social and individual shortcomings. The major catalyst for change in this situation is community members. Citizens who care to provide goods and services, mutual aid, and social control.

Policing as Self-Help

The delivery of police services has been reshaped in the last 30 years. Two renowned police scholars, David Bayley and Clifford Shearing, make the claim that the business of defining safety needs and the provision of this safety is no longer the monopoly of government. The government has, in fact, allowed the community to actively share in these two tasks. Not only are communities allowed to define the level or state of safety in their community, the community members are allowed to partake in the provisions of these safety measures through programs such as night watches or citizen patrols. In other words, the government is reverting back to the old practice of policing as a self-help endeavor. No, we are not reverting to vigilante policing. Current self-help measures where the citizens are patrolling the streets, increasing vigilance against crime, or engaging in community actions to address physical and social disorders are regulated and supervised by the police and the community themselves. Our justice system still outlaws vigilantism. Safety should be everyone’s responsibility and it should start with the individual.

New Directions

Community involvement needs to be reinvigorated. Recasting COP goals into econometric terms can potentially enhance community policing. Another major change should be to put the community at the center of this effort. Let’s start with changing the acronym COP. Subconsciously, the acronym, COP negates the centrality of the community. Instead, the acronym provides a self-serving promotion of the police (a.k.a. cops). I think these two factors are hindrances to greater community involvement with crime prevention and crime control.

We need to bring back the community in community policing. Let the community define their own safety needs and be actively involved in the provisions of this safety. Let’s make community members realize that they will benefit from community policing. Let’s make the police benefit from community policing. Sometimes, selfish motives result in altruistic results and the common good. Don’t you agree?

Melchor C. de Guzman, Ph.D. is a full professor of criminal justice and criminology whose main research involves policing, citizen participation in policing, and citizen control of the police.