Clients Last Name Goes Here 1 Community policing is good for the community The word "police" is currently

used to identify that institution of social control which, for the community, attempts to prevent crime and disorder and preserve the peace, and for the individual, attempts to protect life, property, and personal liberty. Prior to the 19th Century, protection was afforded through "folk police" as exemplified by the old "hue and cry," "watch and ward." Full-time governmental policing, as we know it today, is a product of the industrial revolution, and dates from the Peelian reforms of 1829. Historians have rightly concentrated on the establishment of the "new police" in early Victorian communities and on the political and ideological motives for police reform. They have perforce neglected the organization and daily activities of the reformed police: the origins of police recruits, their pay, pensions, and promotion, the functions performed by the first constabularies, and the relations between the police and their paymasters (Kelling et al., 1990). Yet the County and Borough Police Act of 1856 was not simply the culmination of a long campaign to compel all areas to establish police forces, but also the departure point for the evolution of a policed society. Policing continued to be a local service under the close supervision of rural magistracies and urban watch committees. The local powers of local governments were endorsed, moreover, by Home Office staff whose personal experience of county government led them to rely on the local interpretation of the law. Provincial police forces were not, therefore, mere carbon copies of the metropolitan model, as many historians would have it, but were based on distinctively rural patterns and precepts of policing. Then, the second and more substantial section the processes by which police recruits, largely ex-rural labourers, were made and made themselves into a modern

Clients Last Name Goes Here 2 constabulary, one that increasingly became the agency of central rather than local government (Radelet et al., 1994). Recruits enlisted for different reasons: to escape rural poverty, as a means of migration, as a temporary relief from unemployment (a civil equivalent of taking the King's shilling). But few stayed for long. Of the 48,000 men who joined county forces between 1839 and 1874, over 24,000 resigned and 12,000 were dismissed. A minority of career policemen struggled to find a corporate identity and to secure the rewards of professional men. Police authorities helped this process by enforcing regulated patterns of life and work. More crucially, policemen themselves sought better pay (with strikes in Manchester and Hull in 1853) and campaigned for pension rights. All this undermined the autonomy of local police authorities, and promoted the vision of a national police organization (Radelet et al., 1994). Again, policing is one of the most masculinized of all occupations. The ideal policeman has long been conceived as a tough, aggressive crime fighter. A unique feature of the Australian and New Zealand community policing is that they were designed and conducted by police personnel as well as by academics. From these presentations, it is evident that the successful community policing program depends not only on the support of the senior police but also on the confidence and support of the community it serves. Indeed, crime prevention, a function which involves all activity that attempts to keep crime from happening, is not a newly identified function of police. It might be helpful if we were to consider a change of name for the police as they come to assume a more broad role than that of "thief-catcher," and as they change from a law oriented to a people oriented operation. Perhaps the police-man should be re-named "human affairs officer," or "public

Clients Last Name Goes Here 3 welfare officer," "public service officer," "public safety officer," or "human relations officer (Trojanowicz et al., 1990). Police methods are now being examined by legal, managerial, and academic researchers. Many outmoded procedures have survived the test of time and are just as ineffective today as they were 50 years ago (Suttles, 1972). Some myopic police agencies look to increased efficiency and applications of modern scientific technology to solve all problems of modern policing (for example the police state Victoria, Australia, have started to use dogs equipped with video cameras) without giving sufficient attention to the values of a democratic legal order, and without giving sufficient attention to the professional development of police personnel (Johnson, 1984). Certainly, we have a great need in the Australian police service for people who understand the basic values of our society as well as they understand how to manipulate the radio squelch knob; for people who understand themselves and their fellow men as well as they understand how to take a burglary re-port; and for people who understand the alternatives to detention and arrest as well as they under-stand how to apply the police "strangle." Hence, what, then, of the police, now charged with the job of identifying and collaborating with community, and energizing them in the process? Indeed, in a wonderful analysis of police culture, there is a deep-seated selfconception of separateness, fatal to the collaborative ethos of community policing. In part this reflects codes of professionalism, and a desire for deference. It also reflects the reverberant effects of violencethe coercive force that the police are empowered to mobilize. Cops, put simply, have guns. This helps shape a particular set of cultural

Clients Last Name Goes Here 4 dispositions, all of them hostile to the forms of engagement imagined by community policing. So, for example, a celebration of adventurousness and danger predisposes officers to deride community policing as a form of feminized social work, far from the rough and tumble of real police work. A felt need to assert authority, understandable given the potential danger of police work, is not conducive to empathetic encounters with the citizenry (Currie, 1985). Police are coercive agents, not community builders. The organizing ideas of community policing are thus fatally flawed, both in theory and in practice. This does not mean that the police should abandon democratization and collaboration (Currie, 1985). However, we should give up the idea that the police can play a central role in the reenergizing of civil society. Moreover, we must recognize that community is unbearably light; it cannot bear the institutional weight it has been assigned by programs such as community policing, and its voice goes largely unheard by state institutions such as the police. So, in conclusion, effective and edifying community policing rests upon these requirements: The police must demonstrate, by attitude, pronouncement, and deed, that the goal "to protect and to serve" applies to every individual and group within the community young and old, liberal and conservative, rich and poor, black and white, popular and unpopular, believer and non-believer-that crime prevention has as high a priority as crime repression, that human rights are as highly regarded as property rights, and that all policies and procedures are implemented with essential fairness al-ways and everywhere. The citizenry must demonstrate, by attitude, interest, and action, their commitment to ordered liberty, their understanding of criminal justice, their support of, cooperation with, and

Clients Last Name Goes Here 5 control of police, and their involvement always and every-where, so that community policing is the pride of every citizen.

Clients Last Name Goes Here 6 References Currie, E., (1985). Crimes of Violence and Public Policy: Changing Directions. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Johnson, E., (1984). Fast Food Chains Act to Hold Down Crime and Prevent Lawsuits. Wall Street Journal (November 8). Kelling, G., and Moore, Mark H., (1990). The Evolving Strategy of Policing in Perspectives on Policing. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice. Radelet, L.,& Carter, David L., (1994). The Police and the Community, 5th ed. New York: Macmillan. Suttles, Gerald D., (1972). The Social Construction of Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trojanowicz, R.,& Bucqueoux, B.,(1990). Community Policing. Cincinnati: Addison Publishing Company.