Community policing not what you think.

New Earswick was a 1000 house village near York in the UK. It was built by the Joseph Rowntree foundation. (Yes the same Rowntree’s as Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles) In an effort to make people feel safer in the community they started to introduce community policing in an effort to make the people feel safer and reduce crime. In the first year crime fell by 5% suggesting that it worked. However a year later crime had doubled. This trend was pretty much the same as the crime rate in the surrounding area.The next year crime was pretty much in line with the surrounding areas but people’s anxiety and fear was higher then before. Why?

The main reason it seems from the study on the issue was the community policing was less effective then people thought it would be. From the research.

Visibility: the research suggests that small-scale changes to the level of patrol presence will largely go unnoticed by residents, even in a relatively confined and geographically bounded place such as New Earswick. Projects that seek to implement marginal changes in the level of policing may serve to heighten residents’ expectations without delivering a noticeable difference in the level of patrol presence or policing cover. These expectations may easily be dashed, resulting in increased levels of anxiety.

The level of crime and peoples fear of crime is not related. We here in Ireland have one of the lowest levels of crime in Europe and it is not rising an awful lot. True there is a slight rise in violent crime but compared to Europe we are quiet safe. Yet according to a recent European survey we think we have one of the highest crime rates. That leads me to suspect that compared to the rest of Europe we fear crime more and this community policing idea like in New Earswick might lead to greater fear without results.

In a research paper on community policing comparing the effect of it in America and China. This is what it said about some of the people that push it.

Community policing reform, unlike the professional policing reform before it, captures the imagination of its followings not because of a clearly defined vision (e.g. police professionalism) and well articulated mission (e.g. police education), but because it can be made to fit policing reform agenda of very political persuasions, ideological orientations, leadership style, organizational culture and community setting, without compromising community policing as a theoretical concept or strategic program.

And certainly the idea of community policing is a nice one and does appeal to certain swathes of the political spectrum namely the left. Hence why it seems that it is the likes of Labour that are pushing on community policing. Yet after 3 years in New Earswich 78% of the residents thought that they should exclude troublemakers from the village by eviction if necessary. One comment was.

Two years ago I felt reasonably safe living in this village, I no longer do. It would appear more families with social problems chiefly behavioural have become tenants, I blame JRHT and not the police for what is occurring. The management of the Trust no longer care about the type of resident they admit into this village

Now while this would seem not to be a problem with the community policing itself, it seems the idea of it did not create community harmony in anyway. Possibly the opposite. This was the views of the people on whether it worked in preventing crime, encouraging greater respect for authority etc etc . Most people felt either uncertain or thought it was not successful. But maybe that was just that village.

On the issue of patrols George L Kelling Professor at Rutgers University, a Research Fellow at Harvard University, and an Adjunct Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Contains that increased patroling does little to reduce crime and in fact becomes aggressive patrolling targetting male youth’s often from minority backgrounds. He was involved in two experiments the Newark Foot patrol experiment and the Kansas city patrol experiment. The difference being, Newark reduced fear of crime and involved walking while Kansas was not really noticed and involved marked patrol cars. The similarity was that neither reduced crime. But the Newark system was interesting in that it made people feel safer. Because  it tackled issues like graffiti and prostitution. Issues that people in neighbourhoods felt made the area less safe. In many ways it was similar to the zero tolerance measures that were taken in New York. A similar result was found in Houston’s Citizen Patrol Program. Which basically involved as the name suggests citizen’s patrolling.

How more patrols work is not by stopping crime basically people wait for the cop to go around the corner but by basically putting a presence on the street to stop the likes of loitering. Things that are treating but not specially illegal. Anti-social as they call it. This does not need to be done with trained police officers as the Houston program showed. Many places are actually moving away from having officers on patrol preferring reservists to do the job. As it is the sight of the uniform as much as anything that does the job that it can do. While trained officers are better used investigating crimes and actually trying to reduce the crime rate. So perhaps moving officers from investigation to patrol would be a bad move. Maybe McDowell’s Garda reserve was not as bad as people thought it was. That it was not policing on the cheap in fact it was not policing at all. It would have just been an excersise in public mental well being rather then crime reduction. Also the idea that large Garda numbers are all that is needed is bogus. Washington D.C has the most officers per-population of any US city yet has one of the highest crime rates.

We in Ireland seem to fear crime more then experience it and this the idea of more patrols is a good thing. But it is only a cosmetic issue. It is not going to reduce serious crimes, that is done through “proper” police work. People need to realise this. Much of Labour’s policies seem to be based on this idea of more presence on the streets. As a way to tackle crime but if we go by experience of other places it will not. Crime will simply go on the way it is going. But it might reduce the fear of crime and considering crime is already low maybe that is all that is needed in a successful crime policy. Then again it did not reduce fear in that small village in York so will it reduce fear here? What are we more like Newark or am English town?  Who knows but Community policing while it has its place is not going to be the magic pill that reduces crime.