become more like the military.
They are
The Needed Use of
Community-Oriented
Policing
By: Lauren Woodis
We have seen them all over the news in
recent times. Images of protests and
videos of police officers using an
unneeded use of force against people of
the United States, particularly people
who live in poor, disadvantage
neighborhoods. Police officers are
trained to fight against threats and much
of their training is effective, but most
police academies don’t put enough
emphasis on teaching and implementing
ethics into every situation they are a part
of.
The police and the military have
ultimately become more intertwined
recently. Police are designed to keep
people safe on the streets and within
our own country and the military is
designed to keep up safe from
international threats, not necessarily
here at home where they were designed
to be separate entities. The police have
training that is very similar to that of the
armed forces, like weapons training as
well as mental and physical tests but the
military’s training does not focus on
ethics as much as a police academy’s
should. The police are being militarized,
or being given the force and vehicles
that the military has, causing them to
being handed down military vehicles
and weapons that are not of use to them
any longer. They should not be allowed
to have military vehicles and force to
use against people in the United States.
These vehicles have been designed to
use overseas and in war meaning that
there is no reason why the police
officers should have these resources to
use against citizens of our country. They
are damaging their reputation and their
people in the process. Instead, they
should be taught better ways to handle
crime and problems that don’t involve
the unneeded use of force against our
own citizens.
The police should implement a form
of community-oriented policing that aims
to protect and serve the population,
which is the main goal of many, if not all,
police departments. They should focus
more on keeping the citizens of the
United States safe with as little violence
as possible which would be focusing on
acting as harmless figures, or even
friends, to people who are doing no
wrong. The spread of
community-oriented policing as well as
more training on ethics, would help to
improve the relationship between the
justice system and the citizens,
particularly those who are in lower-class
neighborhoods. The training that the
police have to go to should be more
focused on teaching them to be ethical
and what constitutes as an unneeded
use of force as well as how to avoid
that.

Community-Oriented
Policing
Law enforcement has their ties dated
all the way back to England in the
1820’s. Sir
Robert Peel
was appointed
by the prime
minister in 1829
to put in place a
new force,
outside of the
military, that
could help keep
the peace at
home and thus
began what we
now know as police forces​1​.
Since then, there have been three
major changes and reforms to the way
that police are trained and the ways that
they should handle themselves when it
comes to the citizens. For about 100
years, the police system was closely
tied with politics. Police chiefs and
officers would be appointed by their
friends who happened to be politicians
and it wasn’t until the 1930’s that people
began realizing that this was one of the
main sources of corruption within the
criminal justice system. People would
just be appointed to the position without
any knowledge of what it means to
protect and serve the people of the
United States, which caused much
corruption, such as police officers taking
bribes, as well as many people
beginning to realize that the police
should be tied closely with the citizens,
not with politicians1.
Between the 1930’s and the 1980’s,
a man named August Vollmer reformed
the police systems and began to give
cops more tools,
such as being on
bikes instead of in
cars to give them
more opportunities
to gain closer ties
the the public since
after all, they were
created to keep the
public safe.
Since the 1980’s,
policing has been
more closely tied to the community and
the system has gained more of a desire
to be problem solvers for the public, as
well as using the public’s help to solve
crimes. The most popular definition for
community policing is “an emphasis on
improving the number and quality of
police-citizen contacts, a broader
definition of ‘legitimate’ police work,
decentralization of police bureaucracy,
and a greater emphasis on proactive
problem-solving strategies2.”
1
​Peak, Kenneth J., and Tamara D. Madensen. 
Introduction to Criminal Justice: Practice and Process​. 
SAGE Publications, Inc., 2019. 
 
2
Rosenbaum, D. P. (1988). C​ ommunity Crime 
Prevention: A Review and Synthesis of the Literature​. 
Justice Quarterly. 
 From the beginning, Sir Robert Peel
designed the police force to encompass
the mentality that “‘the police are the
public and… the public are the police’”​1​.
Until recently, this was not the main
focus of most police departments. They
just wanted to solve their crimes quickly,
meaning that most would not use
resources like the public to do so.
It has been proven that
community-oriented policing improves
police relations with the public along
with improving the way that the public
sees and thinks
about police
officers and the
work they do in
general.
Specifically in
Houston, Sargent
Steve Wick has
been assigned to
Houston Police
Department’s
homeless outreach team. He states that
“what my team tries to do is to eliminate
the complains associated with the
people living on the streets by getting
those people off the streets. Seems
3
pretty simple doesn’t it? ” They provide
these people with things like housing,
food and identification cards for them to
have the resources that they need to
find a permanent job as well as
permanent housing. Their main goal is
3​
“This Is What Community Oriented Policing Looks  them that the police are a resource and
Like.” Y
​ ouTube​, NationSwell, 3 Dec. 2014, 
youtu.be/TqWdlDABmvo.  that they are not there to fight a battle
 
to get these people off the streets
permanently and to improve the
relationship that citizens have with the
homeless population in their cities.
“Since 2010, they have placed more
than 400 people into temporary and
permanent housing​3​.” They want to
show the homeless that they care about
them and that they are not just there to
write them tickets and give them
warnings for not having somewhere
permanent to live. One homeless man
described it as “meaning a great deal
because at least
someone out here
cares. You know,
it’s someone in a
uniform that
cares​3​.” Another
one states, “I have
two friends in this
world, one is Mr.
Wick and one is
my cat​3​.” Mainly,
community-oriented policing gives the
homeless population access to the
resources that are already available to
them. They have the ability to look for
jobs, food and housing but many of
them do not know where to begin
looking. The community outreach team
gives them the contacts and the
resources to make a better life for
themselves. It also improves the way
that these homeless people view the
police and vice versa because it shows
against homeless, but to actually end it.
 Another police officer in one of the The main pros about making more
roughest neighborhoods in the country police departments who implement
described his switch to community-oriented policing is that the
community-oriented policing as being police gain better relationships with the
attributed to his realization that, “it community. The police should be seen
should never have been us against as a resource and a friend to anyone
them4,” meaning that it should never and community-oriented policing
have took a turn to the police against strategies would be able to partly
the citizens. accomplish this.
One of the main cons for
implementing community-oriented
policing in all police departments is the Improved Ethics
major use of the department’s resources Training
that would be needed to cover a
community outreach branch. They
would have to devise a new recruiting Policing is very much based on
program, training, award systems and ethics. Every decision that a police
promotions​1​. They officer needs to make
also must have more revolves around what
resources to be able they believe to be
to house, clothe and right and wrong.
feed people on the When it comes to
streets. This means arresting someone,
that they would need giving them a ticket or
to have connections just letting them off
when it comes to with a warning, the
knowing places that cop or cops need to
they would be able to use their morals and
house the homeless their ethics to decide
populations. They what is right for that
also need to have specific
information about circumstance.
potential jobs for people that are looking The police academy
for one. is the first and main place where the
potential police officers are introduced to
4 ​
Melvin Russell, TED, , accessed April 09, 2019,  the different aspects of their jobs,
https://www.ted.com/talks/melvin_russell_i_love_bei
ng_a_police_officer_but_we_need_reform?utm_camp including firearms, operations and
aign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=t
edcomshare.  ethics. They are trained to recognize a
  threat and disregard someone who is
 
not one, and this can come with a lot of
complications.
That being said, about 98 percent of
police academies train the officers in
ethics​1​. This may sound like a good
statistic at first but surprisingly, out of
the average of 537 hours that these
police recruits are in different training
academies, only about 8 of these hours
are spent doing training on ethics and
integrity​1​.
If police departments spent more
hours in the academy teaching ethics
and training police officers to be better,
they could reduce the amount of
violence that happens in citizen-police
interactions. Police would know more
about having to treat citizens with
respect and to use as little violence as
possible.
Ethics is one of those things that you
either have or you do not have. It takes
a certain kind of person who has the
“sixth sense”, or having “​suspicion, fear,
intuition, and even common ​sense,”​5​ to
realize what is right and wrong and how
to handle different situations. A
successful police officer will look at the
situation as it is, without racial, social or
economic judgements and biases but
these traits can not always be learned,
many of them are inherited. In order to
improve the police-citizen contacts, the
police officers need to deal with
situations in a fair and just way, no
matter who the situation involves. This is
just one more step that police officer can
take to reduce unneeded violence and
force used by police forces.5
Conclusion
The police work very hard to keep
our citizens safe but sometimes, they
participate in the violence themselves.
They use unneeded force in some
circumstances and two ways to move
towards solving this problem would be
to implement more community-oriented
policing strategies as well as expanding
the training that new recruits get on
ethics. This could teach them that our
citizens are our friends not foe. In
conclusion, some of the enhancements
that these departments would be able to
take would be to make a community
outreach branch in all of their
departments. This would create more
face-to-face contact with citizens in their
jurisdictions. This would greatly
influence a positive change in how
citizens view police and vice versa. If
they rode on bicycles instead of in cars,
this would further influence a positive
bond because the police officers are
way more likely to be seen as a normal
citizen, not an authority figure if they are
not in their police cars. Another possible
solution would be to commit more hours
in the police academy to teaching and
5
W
​ orrall, John L. “The Police Sixth Sense: An 
Observation in Search of a Theory.” A ​ merican Journal 
of Criminal Justice​, vol. 38, no. 2, 2012, pp. 306–322., 
doi:10.1007/s12103-012-9176-0.
enhancing ethics in policing. This could
greatly impact how citizens and police
interact because the officers could
resort to compassion instead of violence
in more stressful situations. These two
solutions would not cause an immense
amount of resources and they can both
be easily implemented in any and every
police department from now forward to
improve the relationship between our
nation’s citizens and police.