Community Policing as a Social System and Its Components

Abstract

Community policing is an approach that emphasizes partnership between community stakeholders and the police in solving local security issues. Community policing is modelled here as a social system that consists of four components: elements, environment, structure and mechanisms. The elements (members) of the Community Policing system constitute the system’s composition. Members can be individual citizens, public agencies, community groups, non-profit organization and private businesses. The system is embedded in an environment that imposes a range of political, economic, legal and social opportunities and constraints. Structure is the set of relations between the system’s elements and their relation to the environment. While trust is the foundation for partnership, key properties of relations consist of various activities between the members such as communication and collaboration. Mechanisms are the processes that keep the system running and through which Community Policing aims to achieve its purposes. The prevailing purpose of Community Policing is the prevention of crime and disorder, which makes problem solving the main mechanism of the system. The model consists of abstract concepts without any specific content unless applied to the analysis of particular Community Policing arrangement. The power of these conceptual tools is demonstrated by exploring how Community Policing is implemented in the city of Helsinki, Finland.