In perhaps no other area of public policy are there as many controversies and paradoxes as in the use of information technologies by the police. I began to learn this last month when I participated in a workshop on the subject in Chicago, called "Beyond the Rhetoric: Facing the Challenges of Community Policing."
The conference of about 750 law enforcement officers was co-sponsored by the Justice Department's COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) program and the Chicago Police Department.
"Community policing" is the new mantra of police departments throughout the United States, especially in Los Angeles after the issuance of the Christopher Commission report--in the wake of the riots that followed the Rodney King verdict--that recommended the LAPD be reoriented to community policing strategies.
The COPS program defines community policing as a "philosophy that promotes and supports organizational strategies to address the causes and reduce the fear of crime and social disorder through problem-solving tactics and community-police partnerships."
Among the goals: personalizing police officers and strengthening their ties to communities, solving problems before they become incidents of crime, improving quality-of-life factors, and expanding the range of problem-solving strategies available to communities beyond arrests and police crackdowns on crime.
The Internet can play an important role in community policing. Three basic tasks in community policing are information gathering, analysis and information referrals. The Internet, as an information tool, may make these tasks easier.
Crime statistics, for example, have proved to be an integral part of community policing. Police departments sit on mountains of information about communities, gathered and processed by officers in the routine course of their work on the streets. In New York City, crime statistics have helped the police focus on "problem areas" and work with local residents to reduce the crime rate. Now a lot of police departments are putting their "crime maps" online, such as the South Pasadena Police Department (http://sppd.org/).
Information referral means pointing citizens to places where they can find solutions to neighborhood problems that are best handled by service agencies rather than the police.
In this role, police officers--who are often the most visible agents of the public sector--become expert information referrers, possibly with the assistance of well-designed Internet resources. This "one-stop shopping" is one of the most promising approaches of community policing.
