Community Policing

Abstract

Community policing has come to represent an ‘iconic’ policing style where officers foster close relations with citizens, understand their concerns and act on them in accordance with their wishes (Fielding, 2005: 460). In so doing community policing has been viewed by governments and police administrators as a mechanism for stimulating a smorgasbord of positive outcomes including the legitimisation of police practices, repairing police-community relations and reducing crime and fear of crime. Through stressing working with citizens — rather than simply for them — community policing has been a key juncture at which the state has sought to responsibilise citizens to take ownership for crime control, it has been seen as a way of rendering officers more ‘responsive’ to their ‘consumers’ and, through enabling citizens to hold officers directly to account, it has also been viewed as a primary way of instilling democratic principles into policing.