Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
Policing UK 2013 - Police Federation
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THE ROLE OF POLICE<br />
Neighbourhood<br />
policing<br />
<strong>Police</strong> and crime commissioners will need to<br />
continue to evolve key neighbourhood policing<br />
processes and systems. By Professor Martin Innes<br />
Martin Innes is a Professor in<br />
the School of Social Sciences,<br />
Cardiff University<br />
Neighbourhood policing’s<br />
(NP) DNA derives from the<br />
community policing family. Since<br />
the mid-2000s it has come to provide a<br />
key platform for the delivery of many<br />
local policing services to the public across<br />
England and Wales.<br />
Where it has evolved from its<br />
community policing ancestors is in its<br />
attempt to develop a more programmed,<br />
structured and systematic approach.<br />
This is important because several<br />
commentators have attended to how<br />
the lack of definition associated with<br />
community policing has frequently led to<br />
its failure to really embed within policing<br />
agencies, reducing it to little more than a<br />
rhetorical construct 1 .<br />
Moreover, as Herbert 2 notes, police<br />
have tended to over-estimate the interest,<br />
capacity and capability of communities<br />
to engage in community policing. With<br />
the result that any such reforms rapidly<br />
unravel because communities cannot ‘bear<br />
the weight of expectation’ that community<br />
policing places upon them.<br />
There were two key influences upon<br />
the initial development of NP: the<br />
Chicago Alternative <strong>Policing</strong> Strategy<br />
(CAPS); and the National Reassurance<br />
<strong>Policing</strong> Programme (NRPP). The former<br />
provided an example of a sustained effort<br />
to implement a community policing<br />
strategy ‘at scale’ and to re-engineer<br />
key components of the Chicago <strong>Police</strong><br />
organisation to enable this. Equally<br />
important was how it was subject to a<br />
detailed and independent process and<br />
outcome evaluation – something notably<br />
absent from many earlier community<br />
policing programmes. This evaluation<br />
provided clear evidence of what worked,<br />
what did not, and what benefits were<br />
accrued by police in Chicago 3 .<br />
The findings from CAPS shaped the<br />
quasi-experimental forerunner of NP<br />
in England and Wales – the NRPP.<br />
The NRPP was established to test the<br />
capacity of an appropriately configured<br />
policing to influence public confidence<br />
and reassurance in light of the fact that,<br />
although crime rates had been dropping<br />
“<strong>Police</strong> have tended to overestimate<br />
the interest, capacity<br />
and capability of communities to<br />
engage in community policing.”<br />
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