Community Policing Essay

Community policing has faced challenges in measuring the effectiveness of its strategies. Community policing has led to officers making fewer arrest (Mastrofski et al., 1995). Some people may see this as a positive thing, but critics of community policing may see this as a fault. Many officers are evaluated on how many criminals they get off the streets and the fact that less arrests are made by community policing officers can be a reason for skepticism. When it comes to serving the public with non-crime fighting services, community policing officers and regular officers seem not to have any difference in positive interaction of the people in the community, dealing with problems that citizens have, or doing order maintenance (Snipes, 2002).

The Chicago Police Department had this issue of getting the hierarchy to go along with the training (Skogan, & Hartnett 1997). Without hierarchal support, there is little potential for community policing to be fully implemented because the supervisors are the ones who are responsible for giving out assignments and performance evaluations. Chicago, like many big cities has had issues with getting residents and officers wanting to be involved with community policing (Skogan et al., 2004). Chicago has had also some of the highest murder rates in the country and many skeptics look at this as a failure of community

Compstat tries to reduce crime by making police officers accountable (Godown, 2009).The information that the police get from Compstat could be used to increase the amount of resources the police give to those areas. If the areas have large amount of robberies community police officers can start asking and gaining trust of residents and find the people who are involved. Pulling levers policing is a deterrent strategy motivated by the research that a small number of criminals do most of the crime (Garside, 2004), and punishment and deterrence should be focused on them. This strategy can be used with crackdowns or specific target of groups of people and or gangs. This can be used by giving those who follow the rules social services and employment opportunities, which is where community policing could serve the community. This can show the police are here to help as well as fight