Read on Twitter
When I think of community policing, I think of my hometown. I grew up in a small Oregon town with a population of under 2k and a little over 1.5 sq mi of land. We had just 5 cops. I knew them all personally. They lived in the community with us- so very different from city police.
The police officers in this rural community enforced the law gently: If you were making a bad decision, they usually just got you home safe. They knew everyone by name. They seemed to genuinely care to keep the community safe.
“Community policing” the practice is vastly different from community policing that I experienced in my rural community. An officer that isn’t from your neighborhood, that doesn’t look like you, comes through to keep tabs on your community- especially if you’re black or brown.
Community policing doesn’t decrease crime or fear thereof, it just improves perception of cops. Embedding officers in black and brown communities, when they are more likely to kill black and brown people, to make cops look better doesn’t solve our problem. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-014-9210-y
Police shootings are most common in suburban areas, increasing in both suburban and rural communities and decreasing in cities. Taking cops out of cities and putting them in residential areas to be closer to the community could increase instance of police executions.
It seems to me like “police” or whatever “law enforcement” entity you want should be far smaller scale than cities or suburbs- maybe at the neighborhood level. And those “officers” should be required to live in that locality and know the people they live with.
+ all the obvious stuff- give them way less money, far less power and responsibility, and create community support programs in the wake of scaling down police forces.
