“Community policing” summary — Robert C. Trojanowicz

Introduction

You face a modern dilemma when rising crime and urban decay isolate local neighborhoods from traditional departments. Decades of relying solely on rapid car responses and reactive enforcement have left you with alienated citizens and burned-out officers.

Robert C. Trojanowicz bridges academic research and practical reform to offer a department-wide strategy that restores order. Community policing replaces isolated incident handling with an equal partnership between officers and residents to solve underlying local problems.

The book details strategic planning, internal management changes, and grassroots partnerships needed for lasting success. You will discover how to restructure your agency by asking several key questions:

How do you transition an agency from reactive response to proactive problem-solving?
What steps ensure effective community engagement and trust-building?
How must recruitment, training, and evaluations adapt to support the new philosophy?

1. What Is Community Policing

Community policing replaces reactive incident response with an equal partnership between police and the community to address neighborhood decay.

By the 1950s and 1960s, modern communications and mass transportation pulled beat officers into patrol cars. Policing transformed into a purely reactive model of answering calls and making arrests. This created alienation, which was highlighted by events like the Kitty Genovese murder where witnesses failed to intervene or call authorities. Community policing replaces this expert-driven model with an equal partnership focused on proactive problem-solving and community building.

In New York City in 1964, Kitty Genovese was murdered while 38 neighbors heard her screams for half an hour without coming to her aid or calling the police because they did not know or trust the officers.

The Shift from Reactive Policing

You must recognize that community policing is a department-wide philosophy and organizational strategy. It pairs citizens and police to solve contemporary neighborhood problems. The strategy requires a commitment from all personnel to balance immediate emergency responses with proactive initiatives.

To correctly implement the framework, you must avoid misconceptions that reduce community policing to a mere buzzword or public relations campaign. It treats arrest as a vital tool rather than the sole yardstick of success.

The implementation requires a customized approach guided by strategic questions rather than a rigid list of standardized rules. You can use the Community Policing Implementation Checklist to evaluate your agency readiness across administrative, operational, and cultural dimensions.

Organize, create, monitor, and evaluate the community policing process using the Community Policing Implementation Checklist.
Inform internal policies and questions using the succeeding chapters of the book.

The Big Six and Core Principles

You can build lasting coalitions by identifying and including The Big Six stakeholder groups within your community. These groups move beyond relying solely on the police department to address local disorder.

Identify and include the Police Department, encompassing all personnel from chief to civilian staff.
Include the Community, ranging from formal and informal leaders to average citizens.
Engage Elected Civic Officials such as mayors, city managers, and council members.
Involve the Business Community from major corporations to local mom-and-pop stores.
Collaborate with Other Agencies including public bodies, code enforcement, social services, and non-profits.
Incorporate both electronic and print Media.

Your department must revise its mission statements, values, and code of ethics to reflect an organization-wide commitment. You should solicit input from all internal levels and external stakeholders.

Write or revise vision, values, and mission statements to reflect organization-wide commitment.
Solicit input from all internal levels including sworn, non-sworn, and civilian personnel.
Solicit input from outside the department including the community, businesses, civic officials, and local institutions.
Write or revise a Code of Ethics discussing civility, courtesy, respect for civil rights, and sensitivity to diversity.

Community policing operates through the Ten Principles of Community Policing that guide your organizational culture. You can employ collaborative processes to address root causes of chronic issues.

Change: Use the transition to community policing to improve police service delivery.
Leadership: Reinforce vision, values, and mission at all levels of the organization.
Vision: Maintain an image of how public safety and quality of life are improved.
Partnership: Develop equal partnerships and consensus among all community groups.
Problem Solving: Employ collaborative, analytical processes to address root causes of chronic issues.
Equity: Deliver effective, respectful service reflecting need rather than arbitrary equal amounts.
Trust: Demonstrate integrity by fulfilling promises to reduce mutual suspicions.
Empowerment: Create opportunities for line personnel and citizens to exercise autonomy and ownership.
Service: Provide decentralized and personalized service by treating citizens as customers.
Accountability: Maintain mutual accountability between the police and the community.

2. The Planning Process for Change

Successful implementation demands comprehensive strategic planning, internal audits, and the removal of bureaucratic obstacles.

You must implement community policing as a department-wide philosophy through strategic planning rather than as a limited pilot project managed by a handful of volunteers. Adopting it as a localized program with no training or management support sets it up for failure. Strategic planning ensures that the entire department understands and applies the new philosophy from the start.

Conducting an audit and needs assessment is an essential first step to establish a baseline of existing resources, community demographics, strains, and gaps. You must look beyond traditional crime data and budgets to evaluate community demographics, business perceptions of safety, and overlooked neighborhood strengths like single mothers wanting office skills.

Strategic Audits and Envisioning

An envisioning exercise utilizing a hypothetical hot-air balloon ride helps teams disengage from preconceived ideas and build a shared, positive future vision. Participants in a public housing training program through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Justice used the hot-air balloon envisioning exercise.

Loosen any tight clothing and jettison shoes
Dim the lights and close eyes
Envision entering a hot-air balloon in the middle of town that floats away and returns five years later
Envision how the community, interactions, and specific problems would be different if community policing were fully implemented

Revisiting the police mission during strategic planning helps operationalize the vision and values through clear statements remembered by all. The Aurora (CO) Police Department under Chief Jerry Williams and the Tulsa (OK) Police Department under Chief Drew Diamond created concise mission statements early in the community policing movement.

Overcoming Internal Resistance

Internal resistance from personnel who resist change or fear the loss of a macho image must be met with targeted strategies focused on benefits, compliance, and leadership. Chief Harry Dolan of Lumberton, North Carolina, stresses that employees must join the team or find another line of work.

Collect, analyze, and share relevant information internally and externally regarding community problems.
Gather and analyze data on social and physical disorder and quality-of-life concerns alongside crime data.
Capture and document solved neighborhood problems that do not involve arrest.
Take full advantage of new technologies like the Internet and the World Wide Web.

3. A Formula for Success

Police must concentrate their activities on leadership, building community, and solving problems, as anything else is a waste of time. You can summarize this approach with a precise formula: Community Policing equals leadership multiplied by the sum of community building and problem solving.

Community policing operates through leadership as style, paired with community building and structured problem solving as substance.

Leadership acts as the style and form, guiding the substance and functions of community building and problem solving. This expands the traditional mandate beyond merely answering crime incidents. Leadership must be operationalized across every level of the department, from the chief to line-level officers. The chief serves as the visible symbol of sustained commitment and explains the change externally. Top command translates broad strokes into actionable plans while avoiding getting rolled by critics. Middle managers and first-line supervisors bridge top-level pressure and lower-level resistance by fostering mutual trust. Line-level officers are empowered to initiate community building and problem solving directly.

Chief Harry Dolan inspires through humor and warmth. Lee Brown utilized detailed written plans in Atlanta, Houston, and New York. Drew Diamond exhibits quiet passion for protecting everyone.

Critics argue departments lack time due to rising 911 call loads, but officers frequently mistake the time between calls as exclusively theirs. When officers list their daily activities, you realize the time exists to treat situations with the diligence usually reserved for homicides. Former Tulsa Chief Drew Diamond has officers list out what they do in a typical day to prove that the time for community policing is readily available.

Activities like picnics, sports leagues, and senior center visits help build trust and identity in neighborhoods suffering from a disproportionate share of problems. Police act as catalysts because it is in their enlightened self-interest and no one else has stepped up to do the job. Officer Don Christy of the Lansing Police Department established alcohol-free New Year's Eve parties and an annual summer campout where families camped in tents erected by the National Guard.

The SARA Problem-Solving Model

The SARA framework consists of four continuous steps to address chronic problems intelligently:

Scanning: Gather as much information about the problem as possible using official data, background information, surveys, personal impressions, and news accounts, focusing on who, what, when, and where.
Analysis: Examine how and why the problem occurs by turning it around to discern the dynamics that allow it to persist.
Response: Brainstorm ideas, narrow them into a legal, ethical, and doable plan with assignments and deadlines, and execute in proper order.
Assessment: Develop a system for constant monitoring and evaluate success or failure based on various outcomes.

Drew Diamond created a framework of barriers that response plans must encounter and evaluate. Recognizing these hurdles helps departments determine if a barrier itself is actually the primary problem that must be tackled first.

Evaluate People: Determine if there are enough people, the right people, or the wrong people with proper skills.
Review Policies, Practices, and Procedures: Check if any operational rules pose problems or need modification.
Assess Legal constraints: Account for legal, moral, and ethical boundaries.
Examine Money: Verify direct or indirect costs, budget sufficiency, and resource shortages.
Anticipate Politics: Confront the biggest and toughest hurdle to anticipate.
Identify Other hurdles: Account for anything else that could threaten success.

Collaboration and Consensus

Coordination merely informs others of independent actions, and cooperation offers basic goodwill help, but collaboration demands working side-by-side as equal partners. Achieving consensus ensures all affected groups buy into the plan, preventing grassroots failure. An alternative school in Bedford, Massachusetts, uses a voting strategy for decisions:

Hold up three fingers to signify strong support.
Hold up two fingers to signify consent.
Hold up one finger to signify a veto that halts the plan until the person can be brought on board.

4. Building Partnerships with the Community

Individual responsibility and family upbringing act as primary and secondary layers of social control. As mass transportation and communication shift people toward communities of interest rather than geographic ones, local informal mechanisms like shame and shunning erode. This erosion leads to a rise in reliance on formal external control.

Rebuilding informal social control requires engaging grassroots stakeholders, addressing petty crimes, and fostering collaborative civic support.

Bruce Benson points out that society lacks effective solutions for reforming hardened criminals at age 30. True crime reduction requires intervening effectively with 10- and 12-year-olds, often by paying attention to so-called petty crimes. Chris Braiden compared bank robberies and bicycle thefts in Canada and found a monetary loss ratio of five or six dollars to one in favor of bicycles. Solving petty crimes involving youngsters prevents future criminality.

In a suburb of Toronto, an officer convinced a resident to talk to kids playing on his street. The resident discovered they had no safe play space and agreed to become their sports coach. Officer Wayne Barton of Boca Raton, Florida, secured a pledge of over $250,000 from the Zale's jewelry corporation to pay for college educations for kids in his public housing beat.

Rebuilding Informal Social Control

Police organizations must prioritize calls for service and establish permanent beat assignments to free up officer time for community building. Critical social theory proposes people act on enlightened self-interest through enlightenment, empowerment, and emancipation. Normative sponsorship theory dictates that a community effort must be within established standards and agreed upon by at least two major groups.

You must follow these core practices:

Prioritize calls to free up patrol time for community building and problem solving.
Involve the community in decisions about prioritizing calls for service and train call takers on alternative handling protocols.
Ensure beat boundaries correspond to neighborhood boundaries and are manageable in size.
Assign patrol officers to specific areas and permanent shifts long enough to make a difference, avoiding cross-beat dispatching.
Ensure any new effort reflects the community's basic standards.
Secure agreement from at least two major groups that the project is consistent with their values.
Leverage common ground among leading groups to agree on shared goals.

Grassroots Organizing

Overcoming community apathy requires starting small, focusing on youth activities, and designing accessible, inviting meetings. The Neighborhood Network Center concept places police officers and other professionals in shared space to foster formal and informal information sharing and coordinated interventions.

You can organize successful local efforts through these steps:

Start small with community building before tackling major crime goals.
Get the kids involved first through soccer leagues, documentaries, or reading programs so adults follow.
Choose convenient, accessible, and secure locations for meetings.
Provide child care, refreshments, and door prizes to encourage attendance.
Pre-plan meetings with two or three informal community leaders.
Publicize meetings with at least three exposures using flyers, newsletters, and announcements.
Publish a community-focused agenda.
Utilize a telephone tree for last-minute reminders.
Establish decentralized facilities where police share space with helping professionals.
Assemble a multi-professional team including school counselors, social workers, drug counselors, and code enforcement officials.
Supervisors must ensure professionals focus on outreach rather than only talking among themselves.

5. Issues in Hiring and Training

Traditional recruitment systems often emphasize physical traits and narrow criminal justice backgrounds. Community policing requires shifting this focus toward individuals with superior communication, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills.

Recruitment must target interpersonal skills over physical traits, and training must adopt adult learning and joint community participation.

Recruiting Profile and Andragogy

Entry-level officers act as mini-chiefs in the community. You need the ability to talk equally with diverse populations from street panhandlers to bank vice-presidents. Departments should broaden recruitment beyond traditional criminal justice or military backgrounds to include disciplines like education, social work, and nursing to reflect a cross-section of the community.

You must overhaul hiring and training to attract individuals with strong interpersonal skills and thoroughly instruct all personnel in community policing philosophy.

Expand recruiting efforts to reach college students in nontraditional fields such as education and social work.
Conduct a job-task analysis to develop a new community policing entry-level officer job description.
Design the screening process to weed out those who categorically reject community policing principles.
Provide line-level personnel sufficient skills training in communication, interpersonal relationships, and conflict resolution.

Training adults requires andragogy rather than pedagogy, utilizing interactive and experiential learning methods instead of crowded lectures. Adult learning theory shows that adults are sophisticated, inquisitive, demand relevance, tire more easily, and learn best by connecting new information to their prior experience through discovery, brainstorming, and teamwork. Trainers must act as partners rather than authoritarian experts.

Allow more frequent breaks because adults tire more easily.
Use larger print so aging participants do not need to strain their eyes.
Tie theories and principles to specific, real-life examples using police expertise.
Go from the general to the specific in training delivery.

Comprehensive Curricula

A comprehensive community policing curriculum must cover six core content areas integrated across all aspects of basic academy, field, and in-service training. Training cannot remain a stand-alone topic but must infuse all operational courses, including patrol, investigations, traffic enforcement, ethics, and defensive tactics, ensuring that non-sworn and civilian personnel also receive customer service and problem-solving education.

Involving both police and community leaders in joint training sessions produces remarkable synergy and builds the partnerships necessary for long-term safety. Traditional training limits the community to citizen academies and ride-alongs, but joint training on leadership, problem solving, and community building helps overcome hesitation and red tape, creating concrete plans for neighborhood safety.

Carl S. Taylor, a Michigan State University professor and community violence expert, launched the Center for Community Leadership to provide grassroots training in community leadership so citizens can work with police as equal partners.

6. Management, Assessment, and Promotion

Inverting the management pyramid transforms supervisors into facilitators while shifting evaluations toward qualitative problem-solving outcomes.

Inverting the Power Pyramid

Traditional police management relies on a top-down paramilitary system designed for command, control, and obedience. Community policing inverts the police pyramid to push authority down to line-level personnel. You must treat management as the art of getting work done through others by providing vision, resources, and freedom from red tape.

Chief executive officers and top command must act as internal and external advocates while cutting bureaucratic obstacles that stifle creativity. You must deal firmly with internal resistance and marginal employees while backing well-intentioned mistakes made by officers attempting creative problem solving.

Shift power, authority, and responsibility to line-level personnel by inverting the power pyramid.
Serve as facilitators who access resources from inside and outside the department.
Act as models, coaches, and mentors who inspire, instruct, guide, and support.
Establish mechanisms to prevent, identify, and deal with burnout.
Assemble and educate a management team committed to translating the new vision into action.
Cut red tape and remove bureaucratic obstacles that stifle creativity.
Back those who make well-intentioned mistakes and occasionally jump the chain of command.
Adopt a zero-tolerance approach to abuse of authority and excessive force.

Qualitative Evaluation and Promotions

Performance evaluations must move beyond quantitative metrics and negative disciplinary tracking toward qualitative assessments focused on problem-solving outcomes. Traditional evaluations focused on documenting failure for dismissals under the old pyramid. Community policing requires evaluating officers based on harm reduction, community building, and documented efforts to solve specific neighborhood problems, even when well-intentioned projects fail.

Officers X and Y collaborated with local community residents, school principals, ministers, code officials, and landlords in a low-income neighborhood to clean up a drug and prostitution hotspot, upgrade housing stocks, and resolve tenant disputes.

Promotional processes must be updated to evaluate candidates on their practical application of community problem-solving leadership rather than traditional paramilitary metrics. You should integrate written exams with oral examinations and in-basket tests administered by panels that include community members, ensuring a bias-free assessment of judgment and leadership.

Performance evaluations and promotional criteria must measure success based on positive community impact and collaborative problem solving rather than bureaucratic metrics.

Base performance evaluations on taking action to make a positive difference in the community from the citizen's point of view.
Reward managers and supervisors for delegating authority, cutting red tape, and securing resources.
Include one or more community representatives to sit on oral board panels during promotions.
Recognize that a well-intentioned failure should not be perceived as a minus in the promotional process.
Document an individual officer's performance against job task inventories.
Require officers to build a case tying their community-building activities directly to outcomes.
Assess progress in leadership, community building, and problem solving.
Provide a foundation for promotional evaluations.
Hold oral examinations in front of a panel that includes community members.
Use in-basket tests asking for written responses to realistic operational scenarios.
Test candidates using real-life scenarios requiring internal and external community policing leadership.

7. The Future of Community Policing

Declining voter turnout and social movements reflect a growing sense that citizens lack a voice in public institutions. Applying community policing principles creates a total community approach where partnership, trust, accountability, and empowerment form the foundation for public reform.

Community policing principles provide a cornerstone for broader public sector reform, restorative justice, and decentralized criminal systems.

Total Community and Restorative Justice

Decentralizing the justice system by geography rather than crime type helps professionals understand community priorities. Involving prosecutors and courts locally bridges the gap between serious felony cases and minor neighborhood disorders. Montgomery County in Maryland decentralized and personalized its prosecutor's office, while Miami established drug courts and New York City created neighborhood courts.

Retributive measures like fines or jail time do little to teach offenders how bad behavior corrodes communities. Creative sentencing ensures that offenders perform restitution directly related to their infractions. A youngster arrested for graffiti could be sentenced to paint over graffiti on weekends, or a barking dog violator could spend 100 hours at an animal shelter. In 1992, police arrested 535,000 people for marijuana offenses and imposed 6 life sentences for marijuana.

In Michigan, the Committee for Community Awareness and Protection formed in response to the planned release of serial killer Donald Gene Miller, leading prosecutors to uncover a way to charge him criminally for a weapon found in his cell. Donald Gene Miller murdered 4 women in the mid-1970s. The 30 members on the C-CAP roster help keep dangerous offenders accountable when facing early releases driven by issues like a 12-year sentence reduced to roughly one year due to prison overcrowding in a Florida case.

Reinventing Government and Technology

Public service delivery can be revitalized using entrepreneurial principles that clarify core purposes and create employee incentives. Government agencies can improve accountability and efficiency by shifting from a control model to a trust model, allowing managers to retain unspent funds for special projects. Bill Gates pledged 200 million dollars to install computers in public libraries.

Public agencies improve by applying an entrepreneurial framework:

core: clarify purposes;
consequences: create incentives for employee performance;
customer: structure feedback from those who receive the services;
control: empower people to do what is needed;
culture: replace old habits with new commitments.

Police department websites serve as interactive tools to educate citizens, recruit volunteers, and build community partnerships online. The Austin Police Department uses its site for recruitment and memorials, the Burlington department offers safety cartoons, and the Chicago site integrates drug tip submissions with its alternative policing strategy. Infoseek generated 2.8 million references for community policing.

Websites require specific operational standards to succeed:

Respect Your Visitors and Honor the Technology by using ALT tags and maintaining pages under 40k total size;
Avoid Music and Other Jarring Bells and Whistles that disrupt users surfing at work;
Update Constantly with fresh materials like Neighborhood Watch listings, meeting rosters, and online volunteer recruitment.

Action planning worksheets and checklists ensure that teams systematically sequence tasks and assign responsibilities when implementing community policing changes. Fully integrating the community policing approach internally takes 10 to 15 years.

Teams use structured tools to manage the transition:

Document Action Steps and specific Action Tasks needed to achieve change and overcome barriers;
Use the Team Response Action Plan Form to map responsible persons, start and end dates, key stakeholders, and needed resources;
Review work using the Action Planning Checklist covering measurement, sequencing, responsibilities, and stakeholder involvement.

10 Key Ideas

Robert C. Trojanowicz bridges academic research and practical reform to offer a department-wide strategy that restores order by replacing isolated incident handling with an equal partnership between officers and residents to solve underlying local problems.
Community policing replaces a purely reactive model of answering calls and making arrests with an equal partnership focused on proactive problem-solving and community building.
You can build lasting coalitions by identifying and including The Big Six stakeholder groups, which encompass the police department, community, elected civic officials, the business community, other agencies, and the media.
Successful implementation demands comprehensive strategic planning, internal audits, and the removal of bureaucratic obstacles rather than treating the philosophy as a limited pilot project managed by volunteers.
Community policing operates through leadership as style, acting as the form that guides the substance and functions of community building and structured problem solving.
The SARA framework consists of four continuous steps—scanning, analysis, response, and assessment—to address chronic neighborhood problems intelligently.
Rebuilding informal social control requires prioritizing calls for service to free up patrol time, establishing permanent beat assignments, engaging grassroots stakeholders, and addressing petty crimes.
Recruitment must target superior communication, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills over physical traits, and training must adopt andragogy and joint community participation.
Traditional police management must invert the power pyramid to push authority down to line-level personnel while shifting performance evaluations and promotions toward qualitative problem-solving outcomes.
Applying community policing principles creates a total community approach that provides a cornerstone for broader public sector reform, restorative justice, decentralized criminal systems, and modern technology integration.

Book summary “Community policing”: summary

Summary text