Community & Problem Oriented Policing

Community & Problem Oriented Policing

Introduction

Crime is a social menace that has impacted the welfare of people in a negative manner since the inception of human beings. As humans progressed and became civilized, they realized the importance to controlling these criminals by devising various techniques. Problem-oriented policing and community oriented are two of the most widely used strategies that are adopted by policing authorities to identify and critically evaluate the situation to reach an appropriate response. This essay discusses the pros and cons of these strategies along with the challenges that policing authorities have to face in administering these strategies.

Discussion

Problem-Oriented Policing

Policing authorities struggle with the increase in the crimes in the large urban areas, due to the large number of youth embracing the use of drugs and social menaces. The Problem-Oriented Policing strategy was developed by Herman Goldstein after a series of events that started with the publication of his article Crime & Delinquency in 1979. Goldstein remarked that strategies like “rapid response to help calls” and “proactive patrolling” were not effective due to the fact that policing authorities had become too focused on their management rather than their core job. Goldstein maintained that policing authorities required a major shift in their patrolling model by being proactive rather than waiting for the incident to happen and then responding to it (Goldstein 1990, p1-2). The term “problem-oriented policing” was coined to maintain that policing authorities need to be proactive and focus on identification and analyzing of problems. He asserted that the scope of policing should not be focused on crimes but also the chaos caused by social and physical violence. Goldstein was of the view that police should utilize the community resources and not restrict itself to the jurisdictions of criminal law. As a result of Goldstein efforts and his affiliates like john E. Eck, the SARA model was developed to help the policing authorities implement the POP model.

The SARA model began with the “Scanning” of the potential problems that might be arising in the community. The second step would involve the “analysis” of the data collected from the sources used in the scanning activity. The next step would involve developing a strategy that serves as an appropriate “response” to the problem in hand. The last step would involve the “assessment” of the strategy that was used to solve the problem in the third step (Weisburd 2010, P140). POP is one of the most widely used policing strategies adopted in the United States. For Example, the policing authorities suspect that a club might be involved in drug trafficking. The “scanning” would involve sending a few agents into the club to identify if the problem really exist. During this phase, the agents would gather data and later analyze it in accordance with other sources like accounts of people living in close proximity the club. The agents would have developed an understanding of the issue and determined if the club is indeed involved in drug ...