Week Five Blog Entry: Community Policing in Dealing with Crime

I believe community policing, is a fantastic solution to help the police forces in preventing crime. I think this serves as a form of target hardening, making it more difficult for crimes to occur in the first place. It gets the citizens involved, and furthermore, helps the police become more in touch with the communities, fostering stronger relationships and open lines of communication. Who better to protect the communities than the people who live in the communities? Also, by community members taking better care of their communities, they may be able to prevent “broken windows”, a theory which shows how signs of neglect leads to social decay. By showing that a community is involved and that it “repairs their broken windows”, communities can discourage further crimes from being committed.

Community policing may also serve as a form of stigmatizing shaming, a method which has proven successful in Japan. For instance, people may be deterred from perpetrating crimes against people and property in their own communities if these people are involved members of the community and they would have to see them and be labeled as outcasts by them every day if they got caught committing a crime.