Policing In the United States - Module 6 Assigment

Module 6 Describe the principles of community policing: Community policing is a form of policing trying to replace and improve our traditional policing styles and patrol where the police officers and the community all take on a new healthier approach. Traditionally people believe that law enforcement would always protect them. However, as community policing was making its way, we saw a shift in how people think about law enforcement and the community. As stated above, the traditional style of policing was being replaced with a healthier approach. This means we are seeing a change over the years from big brother protecting us to a method where everyone in their communities is friends, along with the police officer, in the protection of those communities. These police officers work in a proactive partnership with the communities they police and identify, solve and prevent future crimes. Explain how community policing is a valuable approach for today's problems:  High crime rate.  Homelessness is continuing to grow.  Community-police relationships are not where we would prefer to be. The community policing style approach has incorporated new technology and tried to implement new procedures and policies to respond to the problems we see in the communities. Community policing has been a success because we have a unique technology available to us today. Our police departments take advantage of this technology to further their outreach to the community. One advancement we have seen today is that many departments are now creating social media websites to share their philosophies, essential updates to the community, information about personnel, and other important information surrounding the community and the department. Explain how community policing can be applied to the issues surrounding homelessness in LA: The only way I see the community policing method working to address the issues of homelessness in LA would be some monitoring and reporting system. This system would be a team effort between the LAPD, the communities they police that include areas with high homeless activity, and some form of social service to help the homeless. The system would be implemented in areas with more homeless people and could be used as a reporting system. For example, concerned community members could call their local police departments to let them know about the high concentration of homeless people in their area. The department could then work together with social services to move them into homeless living communities and shelters. This idea would require the community members, the police, and social services to work as a team and effectively help the people on the streets who need it. Community policing in this aspect would also bring community members and their local police departments and personnel closer together. If LAPD and the social services of LA see how concerned their citizens were with the growing homelessness problem, then there could be a seamless and effective solution to this problem in LA. Describe specific tactics the LAPD has used in the past to address the issue of homelessness. The LAPD had a problem record in successfully dealing with the homelessness problems in LA communities. Although the police department has handled many citations and arrests, these arrests and citations have degraded the quality of life for many homeless people in LA. The city has cleared out the concentration of homeless people in multiple areas. However, rather than providing alternatives to a skid row that could have improved the lives of homeless living there, the city decided to cycle people through the criminal justice system or place them in other areas with social services that were just as inadequate. In the city's attempt to reduce homelessness, they ended up displacing many homeless individuals but did not solve the problem of homelessness and made it more difficult to escape the crutches of homelessness. Explain the philosophy of policing the tactics show: The LAPD tactics used to displace homeless and poor people living in the Skid row area of LA align mostly with incident-driven police tactics. I believe this policing philosophy aligns with the tactics shown because the LAPD and the Safer Cities initiative actively started working on the homeless problem only after it became too big to ignore it. Suppose the city officials and the LAPD had begun this process sooner and recognized homelessness's effect on their city and communities. In that case, I believe they could have found a solution earlier. I believe that this solution could have also been more effective than displacing the homeless or cycling them through the criminal justice system as they did. The policing tactics of the LAPD also align with the philosophy of Incident driven policing because the departments and city officials did not try to solve the cause of the extreme homelessness like they would if they were practicing Problem-oriented policing. Instead, they knew that the problem of homelessness would continue if the problem that created it still existed. Therefore, dealing with the homelessness problem, an incident-driven police department like the LAPD responded only by dealing with the Incident horribly, and I might add, and not by trying to get to the root of what is causing such a high number of homeless and poor people in LA.