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By Ann Grogan (11-16-09)
The San Francisco Supervisor got it right!
| "Community
policing gets lots of points at the conceptual level,
but suffers at the implementation level. We are chronic
sufferers of lack of community policing in San Francisco.
Everyone talks a good game, but we have nothing policy-wise
or practice-wise to prove we are actually doing it.
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So
said Ross Mirkarimi speaking at an August 17, 2009 meeting
of the Public Safety Committee of the San Francisco Board
of Supervisors.
However accurate Mirkarimi was in his assessment,
he got it wrong in terms of exactly who is the proper group
to accomplish community policing. Public police are simply
not equipped by culture or tradition to "make community
policing happen," as the Supervisor suggested. That's
so for three primary reasons.
First, public police and their organizational
culture and language are hierarchical and alienating. To change
or reorient an organizational culture that develops over many
years takes time and money. If a viable alternative is available,
then pursuing community policing by public police will surely
waste funds sorely needed for social and educational programs.
Public police are particularly experienced,
trained, and skilled in the exercise of persuasive authority
to command compliance with their safety orders and needs.
They are also trained and effective in the use of tactics
such as undercover policing, arrest, use of weaponry to protect
themselves and the public as needed, and investigation related
to preparing cases for referral to the prosecutor.
On the other hand, public police must be
taught 'how to' do community policing, a type of policing
which requires an entirely different approach and language.
It requires a different manner of speaking and a different
choice of words from traditional policing. It requires a different
mind set and attitude toward the public, and a different kind
of leadership from the top down.
Community policing requires officers to stay
put in one neighborhood and build long-term relationships
with shoppers, residents, businesses, and employees. It requires
officers to be much more proactive and friendly than normal,
receptive to suggestions, and willing to use a participatory
process to set at least some policing goals and priorities.
It requires language that is not command-oriented and language
that does not tend to escalate emotions or raise hackles of
those being questioned and not in trouble, or those causing
disturbances. It rarely requires arrest as the first resort.
It usually requires conversation, negotiation, and mediation
that moves both parties toward the center, and toward a mutually-satisfactory
reduction of tempers and threats.
Second, the present economy will not support
community policing. It takes time to accomplish and funds
set aside for retraining, two luxuries a cash-strapped economy
may well not have. Expenditures designed to retrain traditional
police officers how to change their attitudes and behavior
seem wasted especially where as Supervisor Mirkarimi noted,
there is no political commitment or will to implement the
concept of community policing to begin with.
Admittedly, since March in San Francisco there
are some amazingly positive results regarding a small pilot
project in one of ten police districts, regarding community
policing, funded by post 9/11 federal funds. For 28 years
I have resided in a neighborhood of this district. Arriving
at his new assignment in January, 2009, within three months
Captain David Lazar reorganized 125 officers and set up a
community policing unit of 9 dedicated officers, each one
assigned to a specific neighborhood in the district. I learned
the name of an officer specifically assigned to my neighborhood
and was amazed to note Captain Lazar's daily email message
included in his crime report, encouraging residents to communicate
directly with that officer regarding safety questions or concerns.
Another first by Captain Lazar involved my
renewed inquiry to him about the current status of an ongoing
one-year old investigation of a serious and vicious attack
on a beloved neighborhood market owner. Within one week Captain
Lazar assigned an officer to answer. Six months earlier I
had inquired about the case status via email sent to the prior
district captain, and before that in a letter sent to the
main San Francisco Police Department investigations unit,
but as expected, I had never heard back from either.
Nonetheless, in an economy where 'down less'
is the new 'up,' just how secure is funding for Captain Lazar's
new approach to community policing? Even more to the point,
how likely is it that San Francisco will find funds to expand
the pilot program to nine other police districts? How will
other major urban areas find funds when the federal government
is also in dire economic straights and most post-9/11 funding
has now ended?
There well may be better, faster, and thus
more cost-effective ways to accomplish the goals of community
policing-and that's where the policing model of the San Francisco
Patrol Special Police comes in.
The San Francisco Patrol Special Police view
their predecessor as the special constables established in
1847 during Barbary Coast Days in San Francisco prior to formation
of the public police department in 1850. While the public
police stumbled along for years hamstrung by mass resignations
and illegal activities, a "special police" continued
to serve until the present day, and became a noted force reporting
to the command structure of the public police department.
Today applicants are vetted by the San Francisco Police Department
and officers are regulated by the civilian police commission,
yet they have authority to solicit their own private clients
and contracts in 'beats' that senior officers own. Over time,
a special culture of care for not only their private clientele,
but for the entire neighborhoods where they serve, has developed.
Today the Patrol Special Police provide enthusiastic merchants,
residents, and associations with a different kind of policing,
one that they call "neighborhood policing:"
www.sfspecialneighborhoodpolicing.org
http://www.sfspecialneighborhoodpolicing.org/issues.html
This
is policing that is egalitarian and participatory from the
start. The precise type and scope of services provided to
private clients who pay a reasonably and competitive hourly
rate around $50 per hour, arises out of the needs and desires
of those clients. It is not derived from needs defined by
politicians or delivered from the top down by civil servant
public police who are not be motivated by the private marketplace
to provide responsive policing, and often not even familiar
with specific neighborhood crime trends, problems and priorities.
It is policing that is not as costly as expensive public policing
provided at an enormous cost to taxpayers considering employee
salaries and pensions paid for years after retirement.
Third, for the public police to let down their
defensive stance or devote very many of their scarce resources
to community policing, would seem foolish. The increasingly
violent nature of crime, audacity of criminals, and development
of new forms of crime such as American terrorism, require
continuing careful attention to what Professor James Pastor
calls 'public safety policing." Professor Pastor is a
noted authority in privatized policing, and discusses the
needs of policing in the modern world of crime in his new
book, Terrorism and Public Safety Policing: Implications for
the Obama Presidency (Routledge, August 2009).
He makes the important point that private
police can be the eyes and ears of the public police and provide
critical security intelligence plus routine order maintenance,
thus allowing public police to better protect the citizenry
and the infrastructure from increasingly sophisticated crime.
That crime involves gangs moving into broad terrorist activities
having broad impact on major targets including sporting events,
national monuments, and business centers. Pastor suggests
that the terrorist threat from Jihad movements will increase
and become a serious matter of public police concern and resource
allocation.
In addition, citizens are not always in agreement
that community policing by public police is wise, if it leads
to diversion of policing resources away from law enforcement
including arrest and efforts regarding routine crimes, such
as undercover work. Patricia Breslin of the San Francisco
Hotel Council testified at the Public Safety Meeting on August
17, that while concern for the chronic homeless is a worthy
goal for our public police, so too, is enforcement. She asked
that the San Francisco Police Department and their new Police
Chief Charles Gascon "balance service to chronic abusers
with enforcement."
Apparently
San Francisco's new Police Chief is in agreement. As lauded
in an editorial in the October 5, 2009 SF Examiner newspaper,
the new Chief targeted the Tenderloin district drug market and
the Sunset district marijuana growers for a "crackdown."
He utilized undercover stings, raids and anti-crime strikes,
and made 302 arrests. Demonstrating an amazing failure to grasp
even the basics of true community policing, the apparently clueless
editor of the SF Examiner called this move a "promising
new SF community policing push."
As far as responsible scholars and writers
define and describe community policing, none of it involves
heavy-handed law enforcement, not to mention how undercover
work can prevent crime or elicit input from citizens who can't
even tell that police are present in their communities! Properly
understanding, and then evaluating community policing as a
concept and for a proper place to lodge it's administration
and development, and avoiding the repetition of possibly outmoded
and "outmodeled" policing concepts as Professor
Pastor calls them, seems more imperative today than ever.
There's not much time and certainly no spare financial resources
that will brook mistaken choices made in policy and practice
decisions regarding policing and public safety. Hopefully,
wisdom will be increasingly demonstrated by San Francisco's
leaders as well as by other cities' leaders, as they address
crime problems and public safety needs in the coming months
and years ahead. Just as hopefully, policing choices made
will keep many in the vanguard of what is not only creative,
but logical, effective, and desired by the citizens.
You may contact the author at: anngrogan@gmail.com
or call (415) 587-3863
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