Community Policing
Definition
A policing model that builds sustained partnerships between officers and residents through foot patrols, neighbourhood liaison, and joint problem identification. Emphasises prevention over reactive response and gives front-line officers discretion to address local concerns.
- Core methods
- Foot patrol, neighbourhood liaison, joint problem identification
- Emphasis
- Prevention over reactive response
- Officer role
- Greater local discretion
- Contrast
- Reactive, incident-driven patrol policing
Common questions
How does community policing differ from problem-oriented policing?+
Community policing centres on building sustained relationships and trust between officers and residents as the mechanism for reducing crime, while problem-oriented policing centres on analysing recurring problems and designing targeted interventions; the two overlap and are often combined in practice but rest on different core mechanisms.
What is a common criticism of community policing?+
Critics point to measurement difficulty, since its effects on trust and legitimacy are harder to quantify than arrest or clearance rates, and to the risk that discretion given to officers on the ground produces inconsistent enforcement across neighbourhoods.
Related terms
- Beat System
- The division of a police jurisdiction into fixed local patrol areas, each assigned to an officer expected to build familiarity with residents;...
- Community-Based Crime Prevention
- Any prevention approach that relies on residents themselves, rather than police or situational design alone, to reduce crime and disorder in a...
- Neighbourhood Watch
- A scheme in which residents of a street or small area agree to watch out for suspicious activity, report it to the...
- Selection Bias
- A distortion that arises when the group being studied is not a random sample of the wider population; in Neighbourhood Watch research,...
- Collective Efficacy
- A concept developed by Robert Sampson referring to the combination of social cohesion among neighbours and their shared willingness to intervene in...
- Discretion
- The latitude police officers exercise in deciding whether and how to act. Studies by James Q. Wilson showed that street-level discretion shapes...
- Exclusionary Surveillance
- Watching or reporting that treats unfamiliar people, particularly on the basis of race, age, or class, as inherently suspicious, turning a crime-reporting...
- Hot-Spots Policing
- A tactic that concentrates patrol resources on small high-crime micro-locations (street segments, addresses, or intersections). Supported by consistent evidence from randomised controlled...
- Informal Social Control
- The regulation of behaviour through neighbours noticing, commenting on, or reporting on one another, rather than through police or courts.
- Mohalla Committee
- A local resident committee, prominent in Mumbai and Bhiwandi from the early 1990s, that meets periodically with a beat constable to flag...
- Police Legitimacy
- The public belief that police authority is rightful and deserving of voluntary compliance. Distinguished from compliance secured through fear of sanctions. Legitimacy...
- Problem-Oriented Policing
- A model developed by Herman Goldstein in which police identify and address the specific conditions generating recurring crime or disorder, using the...
Explained in these topics
- Neighbourhood Involvement in Crime Prevention (UGC-NET Unit II)A police-led strategy in which officers are assigned to build sustained relationships with a fixed local area and work with residents to identify and solve rec...
- Neighbourhood Watch and Resident-Led Crime PreventionA policing strategy built around sustained partnership between police and residents to identify and solve local problems, rather than reactive patrol and respo...
- Policing Styles and Legitimacy