Community Policing: Barriers and Issues - Essay Example

Barriers are persistent concentrations of related incidents. Often these barriers are defined by location, when incidents cluster in small areas. Poverty, inequality, and minority group size, once considered to be related to policing barriers and difficulties only insofar as they influenced the rate of crime, are now seen to be important in police resource determination. Although the impact of stratification and power on public commitment to social control has been established, the exact nature of the links of minority group size, poverty, inequality, crime, and threat with social control resource determination has not yet been specified and requires more theoretical and empirical consideration.

Areas to be further researched involve the extent to which stratification, the distribution of power, and minority group threat: (b) Affect the nature and quality of policing activity, the hostility level of police/community relations, and the direction of municipal policing funds toward development of a weapons arsenal and training in crowd and riot control. A form of social capital . A form of social capital is a community's capacity to analyze the real nature of these barriers and compare them from the outside world.

While problem-oriented policing promotes the image of communities "pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps," in many areas handling the most pressing problems may be beyond the capacity of residents alone. In the areas we studied, these types of problems included infrastructure deterioration and the collapse of city streets; blatant and continual drug dealing and prostitution; and high rape and murder rates. Other areas needed job-training programs, health clinics and literacy classes. Beats that rank high on Putnam's "vertical" social capital dimension were more closely bound to city- or area wide institutions that could deliver goods, services and economic capital these communities require to tackle local problems.

(Rohe, 81-88) For example, some beats secure grants to freshen the appearance of their retail strips and residential streets. A community's homegrown capacity for problem solving reflects the general pattern of social advantage and disadvantage that dominates American society. All capacity indicators were closely linked to affluence and racial homogeneity. Older, better-off homeowners predominated in the self-regulating and well-organized areas, while poor apartment dwellers with large families were concentrated in areas where it is hard to get people involved.

Community policing also stresses crime prevention. Where traditional policing largely involves responding to calls for service once a crime has been committed, community policing involves identifying the underlying conditions that lead to crime and then organizing efforts to alter those conditions. In this sense,