Real Community Policing
By Albert B. Kelly
Truth be told, everyone I talk with wants to live in a safe
and secure community. It doesn’t matter whether a person is white, black,
brown, green, or purple- everyone wants to live and work and raise their
families in a community that is as safe and free of crime as may be possible to
achieve.
The other thing that I know to be true is that it only takes
a very small handful of individuals to shatter the peace, violate that sense of
safety, or install fear and loathing in a neighborhood.
It matters little that crime is at lows not seen in a
generation. A few headlines and a little playing on our fears and all the hard
data in the world won’t matter if it comes down to a choice between the numbers
and our feelings- feelings win every time.
The other thing I know is that people want to see more
police on the street and not just more police, but officers from the community,
in the community- community policing. If only it were that easy.
Between budget constraints, turnover and retention, it’s a
never-ending challenge, but we’ll working whether it’s innovative ways to do
public safety, walking a beat, bike patrols, and building better relationships-
all good suggestions expressed to me at a recent meeting of neighborhood
residents.
But real community policing actually involves the entire community-it
can’t be one-sided, meaning only officers. I say that because on any given day,
there are far more civilians then officers.
Department-wide, there’s perhaps 1 police officer for every 380
citizens and even if my math is off, the ratio is still a thing to be reckoned
with from shift to shift.
That means police have a lot ground to cover, they can’t be
everywhere, and the few bad guys count on decent people not getting involved- on
them staying quiet-even if they know something is about to happen- in the wind-
or just went down in the neighborhood.
Reaching out, even anonymously, may not be an easy thing to
warm up to in racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods given some of the
doubt and suspicion, real or imagined, out on the street and baked into
headlines.
At the end of the day, in addition to fair and just
policing, we also want to live in as safe a community as possible. These are
not unreasonable desires, but they’re separate issues and the one should not
keep us from helping to create the other.
Our community would be safer and more secure if all decent
people were willing to reach out when something is wrong, or about to happen,
or in the wind, or maybe already happened…to let our police help us in creating
a safe and more secure community.
Reaching out to police can be done completely anonymously
and for those who are convinced that it’s a big trick- that some cop is sitting
at some computer able to trace back anonymous text message- that’s just not the
case.
There will always be a handful of people who won’t believe that
no matter what proof is offered or by whom; but the fact remains that the
identity of anyone offering information remains completely unknown if that’s
the way you need it to be.
So you if you know something- heard something, you can
remain anonymous while helping the community by texting “Bridgeton” plus your
tip to 847411. This anonymous service is part of TIP411 which handles multiple
departments through the County Prosecutor’s Office.
We all agree that no one wants problems or retaliation from
the bad guys, so the only way to do that is to have a way that lets people
reach out without having to fear that somehow they’ll be “outed”.
Citizens need a way to remain unknown and we need the
benefit of a thousand eyes and ears from a thousand citizens telling us what we
need to know to make our community as safe as possible.
We either work together to make it happen-proactive; or we
keep going as we are-reactive. A safe and secure community is no longer
something we can outsource to a few dozen officers, it takes a village
So the next time you see something, know something, hear
something that takes us away from safe and secure text “Bridgeton” plus your
tip to 847411.
And you can check out the Tip411 app at https://blog.tip411.com/tag/cumberland-county/
…no one will ever know.