BASED POLICING
By Chief Dan Flynn
As modern-day policing in America has evolved from traditional cops-n-robbers policing
to Community Policing it has paved the way for the police to 1 . Build partnerships and trust
with the community; 2. Use data-driven proactive crime prevention methods; and 3.Engage in
community problem-solving techniques. Insofar as community policing has now been the
standard for modern policing for approximately 30 years, an obvious question is; what is the
evolution? While we certainly have to maintain the advances we have gained through commu-
nity policing, times are changing rapidly and the police need to evolve once again, or suffer
through the kinds of painful catalyst incidents that have caused us to evolve in the past.
The present landscape for policing in America is different than it was as recent as ten years
ago. There are unrelenting media, political and physical attacks against the police, and the
unemployment rate is so low that promising potential police recruits have competing job
opportunities in areas that are far less controversial and more lucrative than policing. Thus, it
is becoming more difficult and expensive to recruit new officers to replace attrition losses in
order to protect our respective communities from shifting patterns of violence and disorder.
So, at the same time the cost of policing is rising, the issues of police job performance are like-
ly to remain in the cross-hairs of our critics.
Elected and appointed public administrators tend to feel the brunt of public criticism toward
the police and find themselves more hard-pressed to have empirical evidence with which
to defend police job performance. They are more likely to press police chiefs for more meas-
urable productivity for the police dollar, and they are less likely to be satisfied with measuring
police productivity only in terms of arrests, drug and gun seizures. They understandably want
more measurable results in terms of crime reduction, but also in the less tangible areas of
police-community relations and enhancement of overall public safety. While it is easy to meas-
ure police work in terms of numbers of arrests, citations, drug and gun seizures, it is not so easy
to measure progress in police-community relations, engagement or feelings about public safety.
www.gachiefs.com • Page 14 • 2nd Quarter Newsletter