A senior police officer said that community policing brings police and citizens together to prevent crime and solve neighborhood problems.
With community policing, the emphasis is on stopping a crime before it happens.
“Community policing means police becoming part of the neighborhood. This helps police get a better sense of the residents’ needs and helps the residents to develop greater trust in the police,” he said.
In essence, the community as a whole joins the police department, he said. Together, in partnership, the community and police department work together to achieve a common goal of a safer, better place to live, he said.
Unlike traditional policing methods, the goals of policing are expanded and the perception of community is changed.
Traditional policing assumes that the problems of society are not within the realm of the police department. Traditional police departments are strictly reactive and don't look beyond efficiently resolving the immediate incidents at hand.
They do not look either before or after of the society, engrossed as they are on the immediate. But community policing is on the other hand more involved in the society, seeking to deal with problems besetting it from their roots together with one and all, as members of a vibrant whole.
As contrasted to traditional policing, community policing has infinitely more scope and its realm is as large as the society itself.