On the Beat
HighGrader gets the low down on community policing
by Linda Pannozzo
HighGrader Magazine November/December 2000
Scratchy static followed by a disembodied voice from the police radio seems out of place in the police office in Beaver Bank, Nova Scotia, a small rural town about thirty minutes from Halifax. Once in the door you'd swear you'd just stepped into a local community centre. And for the volunteers who spend many hours every week staffing the office, this is exactly how they want you to feel.
About 18 volunteers take a four-hour shift every week. Apart from the paid constable, money for office supplies is raised locally by the community association. Emergency calls are handled by the larger police detachment in Lower Sackville which means that calls made to the community office aren't usually serious.
Volunteers answer the phone, take complaints, fill out "incident reports," give people directions, help people log onto the office's two computers with internet access and on a really slow day, hand out pins and colouring books to neighbourhood children who drop by.
Beaver Bank is part of a growing trend in policing. Throughout North America, there's been a major move back to community policing, and yet little is really known about whether it works.
Community policing is supposed to ameliorate local crime and disorder problems. Since the late 1980s community offices have been popping up all over the country and it seems everyone has jumped on the bandwagon. Nova Scotia's Department of Justice spokesman Richard Perry says the province is "100% in support of community policing."
In l998 the Federal government announced a $32 million-a-year national crime prevention program aimed at developing community-based responses to crime, with particular emphasis on youth.
But on a local level how much is there to fight?
RCMP Constable Rick Head works in the Beaver Bank office. "The major portion of the stuff we deal with in the office is just general assistance to the community...it might not be related to a specific crime."
In fact, Beaver Bank has little in the way of crime, says Head. "It's like any residential community with some cottages, you get some break and enters but very seldom do you see problems with violence. A lot like Little House on the Prairie."
But with so little crime why do they need a community police office? Head says the move within the RCMP to develop satellite detachments was spurred by a desire to have a closer link with the community and promote co-operation between police and community members.
"People feel more comfortable to come in and report something whereas before they wouldn't," he says.

To get a better sense of the Canadian situation it would be good to look at the American experience. According to an article published in the Canadian Journal of Criminology, community style policing was replaced in the U.S. with a more authoritarian model as law enforcement officers assumed exclusive responsibility for crime control.
"In order to minimize corruption in American police forces, they intentionally distanced themselves from the community they served," writes Barry Leighton, a researcher with Canada's Solicitor General's Office.
But the "professional" policing model hasn't fared well. A lack of public confidence and pressures around funding have left American lawmakers exploring a return to the community policing model of the past.
But even though the name is the same, community policing efforts in Canada and the U.S. have taken two distinctly different routes.
In Canada, community volunteers play a role in running the office. Programs such as Citizens on Patrol rely on the use of unarmed community members on foot patrols to help beef up local policing efforts.
In the United States, on the other hand, community policing means putting more armed police in communities.
In l994, despite an overall decline in crime rates, President Bill Clinton pledged to put 100,000 more police officers on neighbourhood streets and pump $8.8 billion over six years to promote community policing.
To implement the effort, Attorney General Janet Reno created the Office of Community Oriented Police Services (COPS). Another program COPS MORE puts more police on the streets while volunteers run the offices.
Leighton warns that a lack of home grown research on community policing, and policing in general, has left Canada "more vulnerable to trends from the U.S."
Despite an almost hysterical pitch about unsafe streets, Canada's crime rate has been declining for years. According to the most recent data at Statistics Canada the crime rate fell for the seventh consecutive year in l998, the lowest rate in almost 20 years. And even among youth, the focus of much of the reported fear these days, Statistics Canada's tally for l999 shows a 7% drop in charges, continuing a long term trend.
But Leighton doesn't necessarily attribute any of these changes to this friendlier model. He doesn't pull any punches when he likens community policing to oat bran.
"There is a general agreement that it has some beneficial effect and it has many devotees, but scientists are not quite sure how or why it works."
He also says police executives claiming success without any rigorous evaluation is like "prematurely announcing a cure for colon cancer."
He points out that success of community policing offices is almost impossible to assess because of the few evaluations that do exist, the methods of evaluating differ and there's little agreement on all the criteria.
Constable Frank Skidmore is the coordinator for community policing for the Halifax detachment.
"We'd like to think that community policing has a lot to do with the fact that crime is down, but prevention is very hard to measure - it's the nature of the beast." He attributes less crime to community involvement and more enforcement.
Rollie Thompson disagrees. He teaches law at Dalhousie University and sits on the board of Dalhousie's Legal Aid Services.
"The principle reason behind the decline in crime is demographics - most crime is committed by young people in their teens and early twenties and as this group gets smaller crime declines."
He adds that even within this age group reported crime is down. Thompson says there is a gross imbalance between the public's perception of crime and the reality.
He says making the link between community policing and the decline in crime would be difficult.
"Community policing is a good thing. It provides a presence in the community and a much more relaxed approach. It may even mean better use of police resources. Whether it reduces crime rates or not, we just don't know."
This view is echoed in an article first published in the RCMP Gazette in l995 entitled Beyond Public Relations: Community Policing in Canada. The author, John Anderson, emphasizes we have to get beyond the rhetoric of community policing. He writes that while these programs may be important to particular communities they are still managed by and run for the benefit of the police.
He recommends community police stations be used to exchange information and ideas with the community for dealing with local concerns.
But, he says "the public expectation that crime will be deterred by the visible presence of the police should be actively discouraged by the RCMP."
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