COMMUNITY ORIENTED POLICING
IN SMALL TOWNS
By DANIEL A. ALLEN, Personnel Director/Assistant to the City Manager, City of Rock Island, IL
Over the past few years, a good deal of attention in
local government and law enforcement literature has
been focused on "Community-Oriented Policing."
When people hear that term, many different visions
come to mind — those of officers on foot patrol, bike
patrols, returning to permanent neighborhood beats for
officers, establishment of neighborhood resource centers, and the like.
What people sometimes fail to realize is that
community-oriented policing is not just foot patrols or
bike patrols or neighborhood beats. Those are simply
tools of the trade. Community-oriented policing is a
philosophy of law enforcement that must permeate the
law enforcement organization to be successful. It is the
manifestation of this philosophy that often results in the
development of neighborhood beats, foot patrols, and
other mechanisms to improve the level of service to the
community.
The philosophy of community-oriented policing is a
vision of the law enforcement agency as a customer
service-based entity. This vision must begin at the highest levels of the organization and be regularly reinforced. Police agencies that succeed with community-oriented policing initiatives are those that have a strong
directive from elected and appointed leaders that the
main focus of the agency is to provide effective, courteous service to those it serves.
Effective community policing organizations focus
not just on the traditional reactive aspects of law enforcement; they also try to be pro-active in dealing with
issues. One basic premise is that, while it is great to have
a good record as an agency of responding to and solving
crimes, it is an even better allocation of resources to
work to prevent a crime from occurring in the first
place. Being pro-active can mean many different things
depending upon the setting. Additional education programs for youths, establishing relationships between an
agency's officers and neighborhood residents, and having officers notice environmental and nuisance issues
such as weeds and abandoned vehicles in areas can all
play a hand in preventing an area from deteriorating
into a haven for criminal activity in the future.
The techniques that are most often trumpeted in the
media as examples of successful community policing
efforts typically involve large, central cities, places
where neighborhoods can be fairly well-defined and
where certain neighborhoods seem to be particularly
troubled with crimes and violent activity. Elected and
appointed officials in smaller communities, though,
should be aware that the philosophy of, and concepts
associated with, community policing are also applicable for small towns and villages. In some instances,
larger communities are taking their cues from smaller
towns.
In most communities in Illinois, the entire city is
essentially one neighborhood. In smaller towns where
the city staff is small and there are no full-time building
and health inspectors, the police are the only employees
on the job in city vehicles after normal working hours.
Finally, in most smaller towns, the response call activity
would not prevent officers, during the day, from doing
some community-oriented activities. The combination
of these factors makes small towns the ideal location for
implementing community-oriented policing.
Once the elected and appointed leadership of the
community makes a decision to focus the police department on community-oriented activities, the tools to
make that vision a reality can be in hand. It is vitally
important throughout the process of community-oriented policing for the leadership of the department
to continually reinforce the police department's mission
and work to make the mission part of the organizational
culture of the department.
Once that culture is ingrained in the department and
the officers individually, the tools of community-oriented policing such as foot patrols, bike patrols, and
additional education programs can fall into place.
Without hiring a slew of additional officers to be permanently assigned to specific beats or spending a great
deal of additional money, the typical small, rural community with a police department of 5 to 20 officers can
incorporate community-oriented policing into its programming.
June 1995 / Illinois Municipal Review / Page 15
Rather than constant "preventive" patrolling, especially during the early morning hours, officers can be
assigned responsibility for such things as checking for
violations of city weed ordinances, junk and unlicensed
vehicle enforcement, and street lights that might be
inoperable. All of these issues, while not traditional law
enforcement in the reactive sense, can be a portent of
problems to come if the community does not take action. This is a major new program in many larger communities, but many small town departments already
utilize their personnel for these types of activities.
In addition, officers in small towns, especially during the day shift, can often be made available for short
periods to perform a variety of functions separate from
the traditional law enforcement function. Officers can
foot patrol through the business district, meet with business owners and customers informally, play ball in the
park with a group of kids, make a presentation to a local
civic organization, or present an educational program
at the schools.
Initially, once a community-policing progam is introduced, a few comments about officers on-duty
"wasting" time with these activities, particularly the
foot patrols or playing kickball with school kids at
recess, may be expressed. However, I have always felt
that there is a lot more good that can be done by an
officer spending time with people, getting to know
them and their problems and concerns then can ever be
done riding by faceless behind the rolled up window of
a squad car. As these efforts take root in your communities and problems are nipped in the bud, those negative
expressions will be heard less and less often.
There are a myriad of educational programs that
can be instituted in schools today by local police departments, including DARE and Officer Friendly programs in the lower grades, and such programs as DUI Prevention in high school drivers ed classes and substance abuse in high school health classes. Beyond those
formal educational programs, though, it is the informal
interaction with kids that can make community policing programs successful. With more single-parent and
dual career families today, officers can serve as role
models for our youths, but only if the officers are willing to take the time and make the effort. The philosophy and tools of community-oriented policing make
that time and effort possible.
Some communities could be better served by deploying a full-time officer to work with youths at the
school rather than putting that officer out on patrol in
the traditional law enforcement sense. By working with
the youths it is possible to reduce that need for constant,
reactive patrolling and responding to incidents, as the
number of incidents involving youths should decline
over a period of time.
Selling the idea of a full-time youth officer working
in the schools as a positive, pro-active effort rather than
as a reaction to a problem can be a difficult task. As is
the case with many community-oriented policing initiatives, though, the positive results of the endeavor in
the long run will, hopefully outweigh the negatives
associated with trying to get the initial program put into
place. With the persistence and vision of our elected
and appointed leaders in small cities, the tenets of
community-oriented policing can be ingrained in the
lifeblood of small communities in the same manner that
it is taking root in our larger cities. •
Page 16 / Illinois Municipal Review / June 1995
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