Community Policing

Community Policing
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COMMUNITY POLICING
Community policing is the teamwork practiced between the police workers and the community, with the goal of identifying and solving community problems. The entire community members are made active allies, making the efforts of developing the neighborhood quality and safety (Miller, Hess & Orthmann, 2011). Unlike the primitive system where the police were the sole guardians of order and law, members of the community are able to participate in voicing their concerns, contributing advices, and taking actions of addressing the concerns. A number of management and leadership styles may useful in community policing, while some may be detrimental to community policing implementation.
One of the best leadership and management style is currently known as shared or participative leadership. This is an approach to management that tends to dissolve the workplace power, while at the same time influencing the persons that are not equal in terms of hierarchical. The shared leadership views headship as largely distributed among the coworkers instead of concentrating it within few hands of the superiors. The focus in the management of police is beginning to shift as the implementation of shared leadership takes over. However, autocratic leadership and management would greatly be harmful in the implementation of community policing (Rogers, 2009). Autocratic leadership involves giving instructions and commands by the police to the community, without accepting any views from the group. Here, the community leaders or members are not involved, as the police enforce the law as it should be, resulting to hostility and more criminal activities in communities.
On personal opinion, the participative or shared leadership style is one of the most effective means of implementing community policing. This is because the community members will have the sense of accountability and duty to mutually develop quality and safety in the neighborhood. Community policing would be efficient in its practice because the police lay aside their hierarchy and equals the community members, an act that remedies various weaknesses in crime control model. As opposed to development, autocratic leadership would only deteriorate community policing (Baker, 2011). This is because the police would use ...