The Police and Neighbourhood Safety - Essay Example

 The article, ‘Broken Windows: The Police and Neighbourhood Safety’, describes the plight of contemporary policing activities, focusing on moral, ethical and even legislative complexities that make policing communities arduous and challenging. The article begins with an examination of the potential effectiveness of assigning foot patrol officers, as opposed to those equipped with an automobile, to better engage community citizens and maintain a more watchful eye over criminal behaviours occurring in the community. Despite objections from officers assigned to these foot beats, Newark, New Jersey police officers were instructed to maintain foot patrols and engage citizens as it was believed that this effort would reduce criminal behaviours. Five years after implementing this new policing strategy, a study was conducted by The Police Foundation in Washington in an effort to measure the return on investment for the new foot patrol project. The data concluded, unfortunately, that crime had not been reduced as a result of walking police officers. However, it was concluded in the study that community residents that were aware of and engaged with police officers felt safer and Newark residents held a much more favourable impression of police officers than in other cities. Even the officers involved in foot patrolling had a higher level of morale and maintained positive impressions about the citizens within the community. This is the aim and objective of the article: to reinforce that there requires a renewed sense of community and cooperation between police forces and community citizens in order to more effectively fight crime. The article attempts to illustrate that a breakdown of community and resident engagement with one another can substantially improve the condition of the city and more effectively deter crime. Using examples that compare police officers to old-world night watchmen illustrates that the role of policing has transformed throughout the centuries from deterring criminal behaviour to actually being forced to fight crime. It is the alleged breakdown of community relationships and, in some instances, failed urban development that actually serves to invite criminal behaviour and vagrancy. The article seems to lend support for the positive benefits of having foot patrol officers even though the statistical data does not illustrate that it serves to reduce criminal activity. Why is this? Having foot patrol officers allows for better and more positive interaction with community residents that ultimately manages to restore the necessary community relationship so that all members of the city or region play a vital role in reducing crime. This is the main problem with why criminal behaviour has increased in the 21st Century: for fear of personal safety, community residents are becoming rather desensitized to problems in the city such as vagrancy, drunkenness and gang congregations (to name only a few). They are less-involved and, when witnessing criminal actions, attempt to remove themselves from the environment with an “it’s not my battle” style of attitude. This attitude has been created, again, with the breakdown of community and less engagement from officers that could better create connections with a variety of different demographics within the region where the police patrol. Burke (2004) strongly reinforces the aforesaid notion, stating that policing is actually quite pervasive in society and involves more than just police officers to ensure criminal behaviour reductions. The author argues that in order to effectively police and deter crime, it requires community organisation involvement, community citizens and families working cooperatively in conjunction with traditional policing efforts (Burke 2004). Kelling and Coles (1996) also support the notion that police officers should be removing themselves from their vehicles as a means of challenging traditional policing orthodoxy and begin face-to-face partnerships with civic organisations and community citizens as a means of more effective policing. The authors argue that instead of simply responding to criminal behaviour after it has occurred, they should be more responsive to prevention tactics and creating cooperative solutions between all members of the local region; a type of community policing that makes all stakeholders responsible for discouraging criminal activities not just the local police department. The article was written for a vast and diverse audience that includes police officers, policing authorities at the highest level, community citizens, and a variety of individuals involved in civic organisations. Why? Because policing impacts everyone in society, as well as crime occurrences, it is simply impractical to believe that a small margin of police officers can manage the complexity that crime is founded upon. It is, theoretically, an unattainable goal especially in an environment where local budgets are strapped and police officer volumes continue to be reduced as a result of downsizing to satisfy budget. The authors appear to be proposing a new type of policing restoration that involves much more than simply the police department to tackle the contemporary challenges of modern crime and what serves as the underpinning for its growth and pervasiveness. Matthews (1992) agrees with the growing sentiment that community involvement is absolutely critical to reducing criminal activities in a region. Matthews blames a variety of civic reforms that occurred during the 1950s that turned policing activities into a crime response rather than working holistically toward crime prevention. The inadvertent consequences of these reforms changed long-standing policing policies (such as those in the 1800s) that involved volunteerism and community responsiveness as a means of preventing criminal behaviours. Matthews (1992) again reinforces that police units need to be seeking out community-minded strategies to re-shift policing from crime fighting to crime prevention. Furthermore, the authors of the main article utilise very strong evidence to support their arguments, citing a 1969 experiment in the Bronx and Palo Alto (two radically different community cultures and environments) in which a car was deliberately abandoned and researchers waited to determine the level and frequency of vandalism that would occur once citizens realised the car had been abandoned. In the Bronx, a region often referred to as a slum, the car was vandalized immediately and individuals that were involved in the defacing seemed to have little care for their criminal actions. This was a result of the nature of anonymity that community life provided in the dilapidating Bronx. However, in Palo Alto, the car was left untouched for a week and it was not until researchers deliberately smashed a window that vandalism began to occur. This is the concept of the Broken Window, that dilapidation breeds higher instances of criminal behaviours. Police officers, however, are not equipped with the labour or resources necessary to undertake major urban redevelopment activities, hence they appear to be victimised much like the rest of the community in terms of attempting to control criminal activities. Rather than deterring crime, they are forced to fight it recurrently which would not have been as severe as a situation if the urban environment were more developed, clean and without ghetto-like landscapes. It would take local government involvement, community organisations, and even community members to transform urban centres (fixing the proverbial broken window) so that criminals are not inspired to make the situation worse in the region through criminal activity. This is why, from a critical perspective, police officers should be moving from their vehicles directly into city streets and city centres so that the proper engagement and cooperation with community members occurs and city stakeholders can fret less about the dangers of broken windows as a foundation for increased criminal behaviours. There are many political implications as it is the authoritarian bureaucracies that operate police forces that will ultimately make the decision whether to send foot patrol officers into city streets or maintain traditional in-vehicle patrolling. “Policing has traditionally been a closed, slow-to-change subculture” (Stephens 2005, p.53). With this assumption in mind, it is not surprising that police forces are resistant to involving community members and civic organisations in their policing policy developments and strategies due to maintaining a closed culture. This slow-to-change aspect of policing divisions is theoretically allowing for dilapidation of urban centres whilst increasing the frequency by which police officers must now be responsive to crime after it has occurred than identifying opportunities to prevent criminal activities from occurring. According to the article and other aforementioned supporting authors, genuine and effective policing should not be internalised within the ranks of the police force, but extend into the broader stakeholder community. Fixing the proverbial Broken Window cannot be efficiently accomplished without this type of engagement with external partners outside of the policing organisation. Therefore, theoretically, it would take a legitimate desire by organisational leaders at the policing divisions to rebuild a new type of organisational culture that supports inclusion, external stakeholder cohesion, and team methodology in order to curb the problems of rising criminal activities. Now, Bratton (1998) takes a different viewpoint, believing that a zero-tolerance policing policy would be more effective in minimising crime. A rather no-nonsense approach to policing in New York saw a 50 percent reduction in homicide occurrences and the overall crime rate dropped by 37 percent in just three years (Bratton 1998). These are very supportive statistics and the no-nonsense approach to policing was largely internalised without direct involvement with community members. However, a critical argument against Bratton’s standpoint is that a city like New York maintains very high budgets to allow for more patrolling officers in the city and there are ample resources to assist in the challenge of policing a large urban centre; something not all cities can afford. Especially in a world where local budgets are minimal in some cities, it would be more practical to adopt a community-oriented policing strategy in order to guarantee the same type of results as a zero-tolerance policing policy. Police are also restricted with some intensive policing policies that are designed, as described by the article, as removing undesirables from the environment to make the community more appealing and hospitable for law-abiding citizens. This is yet another political implication of the article that police, through legislation, are sometimes unable to simply sweep through the city and begin taking vagrants and drunks off the street. It comes down to a matter of human rights as protected by a variety of laws today that allow people who are not necessarily breaking the law (though undesirable) to continue to remain in the streets of major urban regions. From an ethics perspective, there is no singular set of ethics and morals that can be applied universally, hence some behaviours displayed by individuals must be tolerated, especially when they have not broken any solid laws attempting to control undesirable behaviour. Society must, therefore, remember that vagrancy, drunkenness, and general rudeness that make a region unappealing are going to continue to be problematic which would theoretically conflict the concept of fixing the Broken Window. The article does not come to any specific conclusions, but simply reinforces the necessity of changing urban environments and engaging community members with police officers in order to more effectively police and deter crime; rather than always being forced to combat it. The authors state that police officers should be returning to a policy of protecting an entire community rather than focusing on the safety and security of the individual in order to correct the problems with policing today. The article was well-supported with research study data and made solid arguments about the necessity and viability of changing the closed culture within policing forces so as to open the doors for new strategies that build partnerships and connections with many different stakeholders in order to properly prevent crime. The overall theoretical standpoint is that the nature of today’s criminal behaviours has made it absolutely critical for policing agencies to alter their method of crime prevention in order to fix the Broken Window and return to crime deterrence rather than engaging in crime warfare. References Bratton, W.J., et al. (1998). Zero tolerance – policing a free society. London: Institute of Economic Affairs Health and Welfare Unit. Burke, R.H. (2004). Hard cop, soft cop: dilemmas and debates in contemporary policing. Cullompton: Willan. Kelling, G. L. and Coles, C.M. (1996). Fixing broken windows: restoring order and reducing crime in our communities. New York: The Free Press. Matthews, R. (1992). Replacing broken windows: crime, incivilities and urban change, in R. Matthews and J. Young (eds.) Issues in realist criminology. London: Sage. Stephens, G. (2005). Policing the future: law enforcement’s new challenges, The Futurist. [online] Available at: http://www.policefuturists.org/pdf/M-A2005Futurist_Stephens.pdf (accessed 18 January 2014). Wilson, J.Q. and Kelling, G.L. (1982). Broken Windows: the police and neighbourhood safety, Atlantic Monthly, 249(3), pp.29-38. Read More