Rebuilding trust: The future of community policing

Posted 12/18/14

This hasn’t been a good year in terms of public relations for a lot of police departments across the country.

Events in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island in New York have dominated the national …

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Rebuilding trust: The future of community policing

Posted

This hasn’t been a good year in terms of public relations for a lot of police departments across the country.

Events in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island in New York have dominated the national headlines since late last summer, and discontent with police policy has been expressed through demonstrations across the country.

On a local level, none of that has helped the Cranston Police Department as it struggles to rebuild trust within the community. A year filled with controversy - from the so-called “Ticketgate” flap to the departure of the entire command staff and the emergence of several personnel and legal issues - hasn’t made reorganization efforts any easier for Col. Michael J. Winquist, the new chief of police.

The situation has confused and frustrated local officials and citizens, and Winquist has turned to one of the younger members of his command staff, Capt. Vincent McAteer III, to jump start a community outreach program to build renewed confidence in the department.

“Basically, we’ve had a terrible couple of years and we have been going out into the community, working within the community to forge a relationship and increase our understanding of their problems,” said McAteer, who acknowledged his work was cut out for him. He feels that community engagement, often called community policing, is the key to building public confidence.

“There are tons of definitions of community policing but, realistically, it calls for treating all complaints coming from the community as important,” he said. “It’s a philosophy that community investment is a daily goal. People have to trust police before they’ll call them.”

McAteer said situations like the chaos in Ferguson can be avoided by working with community leaders, social service providers and other agencies to see what the underlying problems are.

“For instance, you notice that police have gone to the same house four or five times in a relatively short time,” he said. “To stop being sent there, you have to go below the surface to find out what’s driving the problem. Often, getting in touch with the appropriate social service agencies can help. If you take a holistic approach of finding the right help for a family, you can help prevent crime by relieving some of the problems they are going through.”

One of the primary goals of community engagement is to get patrol officers out of their cars and into the shops and public places that people attend. McAteer has been taking advantage of the good will that comes with the holiday season to get his officers out and among people, promoting toy collections for children and inviting people to call them when they want to give back to the community.

“We are training our officers to become familiar with organizations and agencies that help people,” he said. “If mental illness is an issue, they will know who to call. We want people to feel that calling the police can have a positive outcome. They need to trust us to do the right thing.”

Of course, local departments have always employed some form of community policing, and there are some advocates who worry about the increasing use of military-style equipment and see it as a threat to the concept of community policing. The Community Policing Dispatch is a journal devoted to the concept. In it, Senior Policy Analyst Karl Bickel said last year that:

“When Sir Robert Peel developed his plan for the London Metropolitan Police circa 1829 - which U.S. policing was loosely patterned after - he borrowed heavily from the military in organization and administrative structure, but he wanted there to be a clear distinction between the police and the military. To achieve that, the uniforms of the London Metropolitan police (Bobbies) were blue, in contrast to the red uniform of the day’s British military, and Bobbies were forbidden to carry firearms. While the military’s mission is predicated on the use of force, Peel’s principles of policing emphasize crime prevention, public approval, willing cooperation of the public and a minimal use of physical force.”

Bickel sees the proliferation of siege-style military equipment among local departments as a threat to engagement with the community.

“While the community policing movement has drawn heavily from Peel’s principles of policing, which emphasize the importance of the relationship between the police and the community they serve, the concurrent militarization trend may be undermining those relationships.”

Bickel doesn’t question the need for SWAT teams, but does think that having them tends to prompt commanders to use them.

“SWAT team use increased as well, with team deployments jumping by 939 percent from 1980 to 1995, reaching about 30,000 deployments. The nature of their use changed as well. Search and arrest warrants related to drug cases accounted for a significant amount of the increase in SWAT deployments.

“Some evidence suggests that the military-type battle dress uniforms (BDU) that are becoming more prevalent as standard dress for patrol officers, and the stress training patterned after military boot camps, may have a negative impact on the very relationships between police and community members…”

So far, local departments have stayed with uniforms identified with civilian peacekeeping and not military control.

Next door, in the town of Johnston, Police Chief Richard S. Tamburini has been developing his own version of community policing. He’s done it by encouraging his patrolmen and women to get out of their cars as well.

“We want to have our officers interacting with people when it’s not a call for service,” he said. “They get out of their cars and go to malls and shops and meet people. We have a satellite office at the senior center that has been very successful. Our seniors have been a great help to us. They are like the eyes of the community. They see what’s going on and they call us.”

Tamburini has been chief for almost 20 years and has been encouraging interaction with the community all that time.

“We regularly go to the park and walk around with people,” he said. “We get to know the people and they get to feel like they are really a part of our efforts.”

He also has officers assigned to the high and middle schools.

“Every day, if we are not called away for something else, we have a car at the elementary schools in the morning, when they are going in and in the afternoon, when they are getting out,” the chief said.

Tamburini said he has a SWAT team that trains regularly and is familiar with the schools, but he’s done it without having the children feel they are under siege. He said he tries to give his officers everything they will need in an emergency, but he doesn’t want his department to look like an occupying army.

“But, if we are needed, we are ready for anything,” he said.

With the small series of successes that McAteer has racked up, like the toy collecting, Cranston may well be on its way to an exemplary community policing program.

“On Thursday, Dec. 18, we are going to be at the Little Falls café on Broad Street in Pawtuxet,” McAteer said. “We’ll be there from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. so people can meet us and tell us what’s on their mind. We will be doing things like that all over the city at least once a month.”

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