There are a few different ways to improve community policing. What I propose is to extend the Basic Peace Officer Training Academy up to a year to implement a mental health & safety course. The reason it is crucial to implement a Mental Health & Safety course is because the extra courses will give the Deputy Sheriff Trainee time to learn and practice their knowledge. As part of the job description, a deputy sheriff is required to build relationships with community members. However, if the officers who respond to mental health calls do not know how to effectively communicate with the victim or the family, the trusting relationship between law enforcement and that community will deteriorate. Additionally, mental health is one of the leading factors …show more content…
Currently, the police academy is six months long, giving instructors a limited amount of time to cover the basics of search and seizure, reports, defensive tactics, and other necessary in-depth educational topics. As a result, the lack of time results in the trainees lacking proper training in communicating with the mentally ill. Regarding this, according to the academic journal, “A Co-Responder Model for Policing Mental Health Problems at Crime Hot Spots: Findings from a Pilot Project” the author stresses that, “police are often the first and only community resource to respond to a situation where a person is having a mental health crisis, but they do not necessarily have the training and resources to respond properly to these encounters” (par.1). By implementing a mental health and safety course in the academy, this course allows deputy trainees to learn and practice their knowledge in a learning environment. This will improve the communication between law enforcement and the mentally ill, which is likely to increase relationships within the …show more content…
The main reason why is that this party is associated with defunding the police (Cillizza, par. 4). This movement started after the incident with George Floyd. To reconstruct the community and public safety, Minneapolis liberal members “(and the activist community) were pushing for the party to embrace the ‘defund the police’ movement” (Cillizza, par 8). The main reason why the community and some liberal government members believe in defunding the police is to move more funds to schools and other resources that will not “criminalize your own kids” (Cillizza 7). In fact, according to an article by ABC News, “64% of Americans oppose the 'defund the police' movement, key goals: POLL” states that “a majority of black Americans support the movement to ‘defund the police,’ (57%) and put the money towards other community programs (64%), a departure from the other groups” (par.4). Although this movement took place during the year 2020 when the George Floyd incident happened, the idea of funding the police academy to include a mental health and safety course is bound to stir conflict with the individuals who want to defund the police. Mental health and safety courses at the academy have the potential to improve community
Policing is a very difficult, complex and dynamic field of endeavor that is always evolves as hard lessons teach us what we need to know about what works and what don’t work. There are three different Era’s in America’s policing: The Political Era, The Reform Era, and The Community Problem Solving Era. A lot has changed in the way that policing works over the years in the United States.
Police departments would have to hire certain outside professionals such as psychiatrists to train the police officers on how to handle mental health situations or how to recognize the time. Some police departments only train a few specialized members to go on calls with mental health situations to help, but they cannot go on all of the calls. The funds for mental health are not being used correctly. Most funds are going towards mental health institutes or therapies and treatments. Little is going to the police departments.
Community policing is a strategy used by various departments in order to create and maintain a relationship between the law enforcement agency and the community being patrolled. Community policing is composed of three critical components, community partnerships, organizational transformation, and problem solving (Gardiner, 154, 2016). Community partnerships are pivotal in community policing since they increase public trust and create am improved relationship in law enforcement agencies better serving the community (Gardiner, 87, 2016). These partnerships not only offer public input but also encourage the public to cooperate with law enforcement agencies in order to minimize crime within the community (Gardiner, 88, 2016). Unlike, the traditional strategies of policing, community orientated policing has been adopted by two-thirds of agencies in order to improve public safety and control crime. (Gardiner, 148, 2016).
There has always been a love-hate relationship between the public and the police. When called upon to help, they can be something sent from God, but when they are writing tickets, or taking a friend to jail, the view changes from a savior to a presence that is unwanted and often hated. An effort to improve the public view of law enforcement is being attempted by many departments. Using different styles of policing techniques, mainly community based policing, has proved to be the best way to improve the image of law enforcement.
Garland (2014), stated “that recurring solutions to the problem of the limitations of the criminal justice state has been the effort to relocate the work of crime control in the community. There is no community without any type of crime. This is always going to be a challenge to the chief of police. Community policing and crime prevention in particular sought to enlist the support of voluntary agencies, business and residents groups, harnessing the social control efforts of these bodies and aligning them with the efforts of the official crime control agencies” (p.123) Education and knowledge is a powerful tool that helps in a community.
Community policing is a policy and a strategy aimed at achieving more effective and efficient crime control, reduced fear of crime, improved quality of life, improved police services and police legitimacy, through a proactive reliance on community resources that seeks to change crime causing conditions. This assumes a need for greater accountability of police, greater public share in decision-making and greater concern for civil rights and liberties.
(Krameddine & Silverstone, 2015) concluded that try to change the behavior and not the attitude isn’t an effective measure, instead one should focus on changing the behavior because it yielded a positive result. There are a lot of mental illness training programs for police officers but because they haven’t been evaluated yet, it’s not known whether or not if they’re effective (Krameddine & Silverstone, 2015). Krameddine and Silverstone came up with a total of ten things that they suggest should be carried out when training police officers to ensure consistency which are: 1. The mental health calls that police attend, 2. The time required during each mental health call, 3.
Lectures, electronic media, role-plays, simulations, and workshops are utilized to educate community members about police training and tactics, with the goal of having participants acquire a better understanding of the authority and limitations of the police. The information and insight gained from the program allows all involved to assess their roles and responsibilities in fostering effective and productive police community
There have already been changes such as the “police force” now being referred to as the “police service”(). Additional courses on empathy and communication would be very beneficial when officers are in the field. If police academies have the opportunity to take an officer and build them from the ground up, it would make sense to provide them with the techniques to not just police communities but be able to be communicative and not just reflective of the policing “norms”. This can also be done with positive conversations about team building and sexual harassment awareness. Next, it is important to break down the barriers about mental health and wellness.
♦ Set up a community police academy or other training to learn more about the police 's job. "Ride along" programs with police on patrol help teach people about this.
When it comes to the world we live in it is constantly changing, because the world is changing so does are police departments, they need to be changing to get better in all aspects of their job. The Public interest in the Community plays a big part in all of this, the public has to be able to trust the police and believe that the police are there to make sure the community is safe. The adjustments for this is the cost of police, the health of police, the perception of the police, the private sector, and the technology advances. Audience The Author of this article was talking to not only the police but the community.
In this paper I will be examining about community policing, what it is, and the means by which and why we need and use it, from administration to police organizations to community helps. First of all we have to know “what is community policing”? Community policing is characterized as any technique for policing that incorporates a cop appointed to the same zone, gathering and working with the occupants and agents who live and work in the beat territory. The nationals and police cooperate to recognize the issues of the range and to team up in workable resolutions of the issues. Moving neighborhoods and community’s to taking care of their own issues, and urging natives to bail and pay special mind to one another.
Police psychologists can provide sensitivity trainings to teach law enforcement officer how to build a bond with members of the community, in addition to control the situation (Hennessy, Hendricks, & Hendricks,
There are commonalities between crime prevention and community policing. Crime prevention and community policing can be similar, but they can also be different. Let’s take a look at the definitions of each of these: Crime prevention is defined as “a pattern of attitudes and behaviors directed both at reducing the threat of crime and enhancing the sense of safety and security to positively influence the quality of life in our society and to help develop environments where crime cannot flourish.” (Peak & Glensor, 2012, p. 84). Community policing is defined as “the building of problem-solving partnerships between the police and those they serve.”
Since campus law enforcement, whether security personnel or sworn officers, are usually the first responders to a crisis, it is imperative for officers to have training in recognizing the signs and symptoms of an individual in crisis. Officers should also know how to properly interact and respond to individuals in crisis. With the proliferation of mental health calls for service, and the outcry by communities in the way officers react to individuals in crisis during any type of encounter, the need for police officer to have training in responding to mentally ill persons led to the development of the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) model for police response. This is a “collaborative approach to safely and effectively address the needs of persons with mental illnesses, link them to appropriate services, and divert them from the criminal justice system if appropriate” (Watson & Fulambarker, 2012, p. 71).