The Future of Community Policing: Community-Led Policing
“In community-led policing, the community and the police share the responsibility for the regular decision-making process on a strategic level.”
Community Advisory Boards. Citizen Review Committees. Independent Police Auditors. Regardless of the name, the current models of external police oversight implicitly separate the roles of the community and the police in the decision-making process.
In fact, most civilian oversight models exist to address the consequences of decisions already made by the police agency and its individual officers. Even the Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing reinforces the separation of the community and the police by recommending “some form of civilian oversight in order to strengthen trust with the community” (p. 26), and yet that same report acknowledges that there is no evidence that civilian oversight of the police strengthens the level of trust between the community and the police.
The Task Force rightly calls for more research into the efficacy of civilian oversight, but there is another model that should be researched at the same time. In this model, there is no need for civilian oversight of the police, as the community and the police share the responsibility for the regular decision-making process on the strategic level, as well as the joint examination of those things for which civilian oversight is regularly sought-citizen complaints and questionable uses of force.
This model is called community-led policing.
The rationale behind community-led policing is simple. External police oversight may never be able to foster the desired level of trust between the public and the police because it perpetuates the idea that the public and the police are separate.
Community-led policing seeks to end that separation by creating mechanisms for the public and the police to work in concert with each other. Members of the public do not merely serve in an advisory capacity to the police: They have an equal say in how their community is to be policed, but they also have an equal obligation to understand policing and what research says about its current best practices.
What does community-led policing look like? While community policing is seen as a philosophy that promotes partnerships in solving crime and disorder problems, community-led policing is an organizational framework that transforms the philosophy of community policing into action.
Community-led policing begins at the strategic level, with the community creating the vision they desire for their police agency. The community and the police then collaborate to develop a long-term strategic plan to achieve the vision. Once the strategic plan is set in motion, a second level of collaboration is necessary, one that provides regular communication between the community and the police regarding the progress of the strategic plan. Finally, community-led policing involves systems that monitor its impact on community perception, routinely reporting the results back to the public and creating a feedback loop to inform necessary changes in strategy or tactics, or in the management of the agency.
Unlike civilian oversight models, there are few, if any instances of true community-led policing. There are, however, some good ideas out there upon which to start. In a guest commentary that appeared in the Denver Post several years ago, Gerrard Cleveland and Gregory Saville outlined six concrete steps to create “an informed citizenry overseeing police leadership [through] a more functional method of police governance.”
The first and most important step is the creation of a Local Board of Police Management (LBPM) that “holds the Chief and senior police executives accountable for specific reforms, especially as they relate to their community-building role.” The LBPM is not inherently adversarial in nature like civilian review boards that seek to punish police officers for past bad acts. It is also not political in nature, as its leadership does not come from local government. Instead, the LBPM is collaborative in nature, working both with the police and with the community at the neighborhood level to create “a deeper commitment to the community and a greater level of police accountability.” By bringing the police and the people together for the common goal of effective, fair, and equitable policing, the LBPM becomes the bridge between community oversight of the police and community collaboration with the police.
With the LBPM, we move closer to democratic policing, or what the Policing Project calls front-end voice. As Cleveland and Saville write, the LBPM helps to determine “the proper balance between service functions (such as crime prevention) and enforcement functions.” This can lead to establishing police legitimacy in a stronger and more lasting way than anything policing alone has attempted. To be clear, Cleveland and Saville outline five other steps that are necessary for the LBPM to succeed, including extensive training for its members so that they are highly effective at working together and highly educated about the demands of modern policing.
If the mission of 21st Century police reform is the same as that given the President’s Task Force, namely to find “ways of fostering strong, collaborative relationships between local law enforcement and the communities they protect,” (p. 5), then should not equal attention be given to the idea that what is needed is a way to eliminate the separation between the community and the police?
Nearly 200 years ago, it was said that the public and the police are the same. Community-led policing, if developed and implemented properly, could create a path to realize Sir Robert Peel’s principles and to change the current course of national conflict between the public and the police. And it could create a new, future policing model for America in which elected officials, cops, and the people they are sworn to protect agree that policing in their community is effective, empathetic and just.