The Pros And Cons Of Community Policing

With most communities, they strongly rely on police departments to "protect and serve" and the police, in return, rely on the community to support and cooperate, but the relationship is not always harmonious. The RAND researchers have examined the relationships between law enforcement agencies and their communities in several countries.
Some communities need routine opportunities for people of many backgrounds to have dialogue with each other and also with the police, who have a voice in decision making and work together for stronger communities. Trust is broken, and safety is compromised, when people experience inequitable law enforcement. Residents may think the police are prejudiced and enforce policies unfairly. This is a problem with most
But there are also drawbacks associated with the community policing. For example, hostility between the police and neighborhood residents can hinder productive partnerships. It also increases in officers' decision-making autonomy and can lead to greater opportunities for police corruption. Lastly, resistance within the police organization can hamper a community policing's successful implementation. With new opportunities in technology, they has to come with a slew of new challenges. Very few police departments understand the full depths of social media or have put together a comprehensive strategy on how to use it correctly/properly. "That is understandable because these folks aren't trained to do that — they're trained to be cops," says Lauri Stevens, founder of LAWS Communications, a consulting company that works with law enforcement agencies to create these strategies. It is also a field that is constantly changing, so keeping up with this requires labor, time and money for the resources that some agencies may not have. Without this, some individual officers can make bad decisions in public forums. For example, a police officer in Texas was under investigation for posting inflammatory comments on a Facebook page; a Florida beach officer was fired over Facebook comments about Trayvon Martin after George Zimmerman's not-guilty verdict. In extreme cases, errant social media use can affect the safety of other officers. Even with good intentions, the scope of the technology limits on how much the police can do online. "Sometimes we can't address people in 140 characters," Gripp from the Philadelphia Police Department says. "It's here to stay," he says. "If anything, it's going to grow. I think the world of social media, when you look at