*Special Note: Due to ongoing events, active consideration on the current question has been extended.*
– J.D. Lewis
The Common Problem . . .
Is that local police have surrendered the street corners to drug dealers and gang lieutenants. To improve relations and communication between urban police and urban populations, the most needed change is to give the police a recognizable face for each neighborhood, instead of the thin blue line all the time. Urban centers were safer places for everyone when there was a neighborhood cop who knew not just the neighborhood, but the actual neighbors. Police intelligence-gathering was an automatic process, because there was a trained observer walking the streets and watching who goes into which doors and comes out of which alleys. We can afford for inner-city cops to skip traffic duty 2-4 hours of their workweek.
Starting out, it may be four officers who all park at a community center or a neighborhood store, grab a cup of coffee and walk the neighborhood in pairs for an hour. For longer foot patrols, have three officers walking, and one in a cruiser to run communications between the walking officers and the patrol desk; the radio officer can also shuttle the walking officers to their cars if they are needed elsewhere. Eventually, it will come down to a single officer who climbs out of his cruiser and walks a neighborhood for an hour or two. It is a simple, but not easy, answer. It may take a generation or two, so departments need to implement it as soon as possible.
The Uncommon Solution . . .
People need to be able to say “the” neighborhood cop again. Even better, would be for them to say *our* neighborhood cop. That will take a generation or two. Traffic stops have their place, but police should be more than traffic cops. Foot patrols, and the resulting face-to-face interaction outside an enforcement or investigative context, will go a long way to putting an individual, recognizable face on the monolithic, mysterious force behind the system.
Copyright 2016 J.D. Lewis
The Common Problem 