In the recent years, many police departments throughout the United States have moved from the traditional policing approaches toward new strategies for accomplishing the police mission. The remarkable degree of innovation and change in policing combined with the emergence of new security issues and threats has greatly transformed the extent and nature of policing in the United States.
While these innovative programs and tactics have become highly significant in modern policing practices, there is scant evidence with respect to key working relationships between these policing strategies. This study aims to compare and contrast the four major types of policing strategies, namely community-oriented policing, problem-oriented policing, COMPSTAT, and zero tolerance policing strategies. It will then present the best practice approach synthesizing crucial elements for promoting fairness and effectiveness in policing.
Policing Strategies
Community policing is a philosophy of policing that is mostly associated with efforts to improve relations between police and the community. With this organizational strategy, law enforcement officials develop close ties to the community in an attempt to identify and understand their crime concerns and security problems. Therefore, community policing often promise to build and strengthen the capacity of these communities to fight and present crime on their own through coordinated or collaborative projects with the police. On the other hand, problem-oriented policing puts a lot of focus on patterns of traditionally defined social problems, which are identified based on the existing police information systems. Also known as problem-solving policing, this strategy seeks to address problems and have an outcome without necessarily involving the given communities in a direct manner (Dempsey & Forst, 2010). While problem solving policing and CompStat relies more often on policy autonomy and professionalism, community policing emphasizes the significant role of the community and tend to give more influence over police operations to community groups the (University of Maryland, 2013). Furthermore, although this strategy offers a substantive framework for police to analyze problems and come up with positive results, it may prove more effective if it relied more on maintaining good relationships with the community to encourage positive partnership, dialogue and teamwork (Dempsey & Forst, 2010).
The CompStat model is another innovative strategy employed in policing to fight crime and improve security and quality of life in crime-stricken neighborhoods. As a management process, CompStat utilizes computerized crime mapping software that synthesizes the analysis of crime information and disorder data to drive police response and deployment decisions. This strategy emphasizes on rapid response efforts in lowering crime rates centralizing authority, utilizing statistical trends and targeting crime hotspots within the cities (University of Maryland, 2013). Zero-tolerance policing is also another major policing strategy that emphasizes strict, non-discretionary, law enforcement. Perhaps, this is the most aggressive policing approach, since no exceptions are made for crimes committed or the circumstances under which they occur. While zero-tolerance policing has been deployed to address major crimes such as terrorism, murder, homicide and other human rights abuses, it has also been used to address drunken driving problems in countries such as Australia (Rafilson & Peterson, 2008).
PLACE THIS ORDER OR A SIMILAR ORDER WITH NURSING TERM PAPERS TODAY AND GET AN AMAZING DISCOUNT
