Return to community policing is getting results in Providence, RI

12 November 2007 by Rod McLaren

Colonel Dean Esserman, Police Chief of Providence Rhode Island, gave an interesting talk at Business Innovation Factory 3, 2007. My quick notes:

• There are c.50 murders a day in the US
• Esserman’s son’s bike gets stolen: he calls Dad rather than 911, and dad doesn’t tell him to hang up and call 911. Why? Because crime is intimate, affecting.
• Problem: we no longer know who the police are, despite those collar IDs and name tags. If we don’t know them, why would we go to them when something intimate, affecting happens to us? (We don’t.)
• Therefore: much crime goes unreported to the police. Actually, it is reported, just to personal contacts rather than the police. [Is there also a perception that the police can’t fix things/do anything about it?]
• thus 911 – the promise of a nationwide, predictable and anonymous system of report-and-response for all sorts of emergency – is partially broken. Predictable and anonymous isn’t perhaps what citizens want.
• People do call police for everything else – police as agency of first and last resort. But they’re not calling police about crime, because they don’t know police.
• thus: RI has been pursuing a return to community, neighbourhood policing. Moving back into the community, becoming part of the community again.
• People are beginning to know who the police are again.
• Results: Providence crime is down 5 years in a row, on the same number of officers.
• How are they achieving this? 1. An honest mayor, who “gave the police dept back to the people”, where previously it “was a king’s army”. 2. Rebuilding community policing.
• Patrolmen starting to get calls from the people about what’s going on.
• Esserman hopes that one day people will be able to ask each other ‘Who’s your family cop?’

Would be interesting to contrast this to police experiences in the UK, where there there has been considerable community policing activity in recent years, and is one of the core strands of the Flanagan review.

Disclosure: Some Police Services in the UK are Mobbu customers. (And, frankly, Providence Rhode Island we’d like to have as a customer.)

That soft, messy people factor Security at London 2012 Olympics