PREFACE
Community policing is collaboration between the police and the community that identifies and solves community problems. With the police no longer the sole guardians of law and order, all members of the community become active allies in the effort to enhance the safety and quality of neighborhoods.
Community policing has far-reaching implications. The expanded outlook on crime control and prevention, the new emphasis on making community members active participants in the process of problem solving, and the patrol officers’ pivotal role in community policing require profound changes within the police organization. The neighborhood patrol officer, backed by the police organization, helps community members mobilizes support and resources to solve problems and enhance their quality of life.
Community members voice their concerns, contribute advice, and take action to address these concerns. Creating a constructive partnership will require the energy, creativity, understanding, and patience of all involved. Reinvigorating communities is essential if we are to deter crime and create more vital neighborhoods. In some communities, it will take time to breakdown barriers of apathy and mistrust so that meaningful partnerships can be forged. Trust is the value that underlies and links the components of community partnership and problem solving.
A foundation of trust will allow police to form close relationships with the community that will produce solid achievements. Without trust between police and citizens, effective policing is impossible.
Introducing Community Policing
The movement toward community policing has gained momentum in recent years as police and community leaders search for more effective ways to promote public safety and to enhance the quality of life in their neighborhoods. Security chiefs, sheriffs, and other policing officials are currently assessing what changes in orientation, organization, and operations will allow them to benefit the communities they serve by improving the quality of the services they provide.
Community policing encompasses a variety of philosophical and practical approaches and is still evolving rapidly. Community policing strategies vary depending on the needs and responses of the communities involved; however, certain basic principles and considerations are common to all community policing efforts.
To date, no succinct overview of community policing exists for practitioners who want to learn to use this wide-ranging approach to address the problems of crime and disorder in their communities and it is my hope and desire that this conference will come up with a framework for such especially in the areas of traffic offences and infractions.
Community policing emerged out of public distrust and reactions to the inability of the police to protect them and the disconnection between the public and the police in the community. According to Takagi et al. (2016), the participation of community members (tied with common values and social bonds or friendship ties) has positive effect on crime prevention and control. The over reliance on the traditional (professional) policing style neglected the contributions of members of the community in crime prevention and problem solving.
It made policing to be reactionary without effective engagement of the public to proactively prevent crime and solve problems. The main focus of community policing is problem-solving and community engagement through partnership in crime prevention (Cordner, 1998).
According to Kelling and Moore (1988), and Lee et al. (2019); for policing style to be recognized as community policing, there has to be included some type of consultation or collaboration between the police and local citizens for the purpose of defining, prioritizing, and/or solving problems.
According to Diarmaid (2018), Police partnership with the public is the cornerstone of the contemporary policing. The people present a viable human resource if effectively mobilized for crime prevention and control. The challenge in Nigeria is that the police is a colonial creation, created mainly to enforce colonial laws and not necessarily to serve the security needs of the people. So right from inception, the police in Nigeria were not recruited and trained to serve the people.
This deprivation of service to the people has been sustained through police maltreatment of the public in the stations or in the streets as suspects. The public are therefore apprehensive of partnering with the police in crime prevention and control. This growing mutual suspicion between the public and the police is the major challenge affecting community participation in crime prevention in Nigeria and this the Police Community Relations Committee is at the fore-front of correcting these anomaly.
Community policing focuses on making the police and the public efficient partners in crime prevention and control in a community. It pays more attention to service to the people rather than mere law enforcement. It relies on decentralization of police organization, community engagement/collaboration, and problem solving to achieve its goals and focus on the community.
Another challenge is satisfying the security priorities of members of the community as victims, suspected offenders, residents, visitors, indigenes, settlers and business owners (Kelling& Moore, 1988). According to Moore and Recker (2016), informal means of social control prevents property crime more than violent crimes in a society. This is because violent crimes like rape occur in remote and isolated areas. Harmonizing the complex security concerns of members of the community with that of the police and government of the day is a huge challenge in Nigeria.
For instance while Walklate (2018) argues that violence against women is on the increase globally, women are often not represented adequately in any community platforms for crime prevention and control. In fact in Nigeria women are considered properties to be protected by men and are therefore not given opportunity to participate in community policing operations. This exclusion of women who are major victims of rape and other domestic violence is a dis-service to the society.
Also, it is important to note that that the quality of contacts the police have with the public in the community will affect their perception and willingness to engage with police in crime prevention and control in the community.
Crime occurs in both urban and rural areas of a society. The pattern and rate of crime in rural areas differ from that of the urban areas. Most often studies focus on socio-economic characteristics that lead to low or high rate of crime, neglecting the effect crime has on the social bonds of rural people (Lee and Cho, 2018).
The rural populace suffers from the adverse effects of unemployment and poverty among the youths as a major cause of crime in rural areas in Nigeria. There is usually low police presence in terms of police size and patrol in rural areas. This makes it possible for some criminal elements to hide in rural areas while committing crime.
The community members therefore must be part of the security operations in their community to proactively prevent and control crime through collaborations with the police in community policing, vigilante and other informal means of crime control such as oath taking, age groups, masquerade etc.
The family and religious institutions will help in sensitizing and mobilizing community members to partner with the police in crime prevention efforts in rural areas. To achieve this, the police need to build and sustain the trust of the public through better and human services and contacts with the public.
Members of the public must be perceived by the police as a major resource necessary for crime prevention and control in rural Nigeria. To achieve a safe community, the rural populace and the police must partner through community-policing in crime prevention and control within the rural communities in Nigeria. If this is done effectively, rural areas will no longer be a haven for criminals to hide and perpetuate their havocs undetected or reported to police.
The deployment of ICT, drones and CCTV in crime prevention and control will add value to the crime management strategy in rural Nigeria. The novel contribution to knowledge is adding to existing literature on challenges of rural crime prevention and management approaches in rural Nigeria. A more people-oriented and community participatory policing style is recommended. It unveils common crime challenges in rural Nigeria and helps the police and the people to focus on their prevention and control.
To be continued...
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