Essay On Community Based Policing

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Community Based Policing
In March of 2013 an incident in Omaha, Nebraska lead to local outcry and controversy. This incident involved a total of 21 Omaha Police Department Officers and two command officers. What began as an expired license tag check became something much more. From the second floor window of the home across the street a camera turns on and begins to film the incident. Three police officers are seen and two civilian men are seen. The officers and men stand in the middle of the street and seem to be having a conversation. When suddenly one officer stands behind one of the men and pushes him towards a parked pick-up truck. The officer then hooks the man by his neck and slams him on the street, this occurs although the man was …show more content…

Community based policing offers a different approach to modern policing. It allows for police officers to have more power in the communities they police, it allows members of the community to work with police officers to help prevent crime, and lastly focuses on causes of crime rather than “symptoms” of crime. Community Policing can be defined as, “… a balance between reactive responses and proactive problem solving specifically on the causes of crime and disorder, community policing is essentially about partnership between the police and citizens”. …show more content…

They get to know the members of the community and the people in that community get to know them, making them a member of said community. After some time this small community will have gotten used to and have accepted this officer. Giving the officer more control and assistance. Empowerment of the police officer is vital to community based policing as Kim Pemberton wrote while quote Justice Wally Opal, “Police forces should decentralize and give individual officers more authority to work with communities”. The officer is in charge of making sure that area does not attract any crime, by making sure all broken windows are fixed, lawns are mowed, drunks are off of the street, and so on.
Through community based policing, the opening paragraph of this paper could have been drastically different. The officer would have known who he was dealing whether or not that individual deserved to be arrested. All without the hostile attacks on the man and his family. When you get know a person, you understand who they are and what they are about. When officers get to know and become a part of that community they can help eliminate the root causes of crime. (Wilson,

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