As tensions arise between residents and police forces across the country, researchers say the key to successfully establishing community policing programs hinges on both groups understanding their community’s needs.
A new study by West Virginia University Department of Sociology and Anthropology professors Rachel Stein and Candace Griffith shows that residents and police often perceive and understand the same neighborhood differently.
Stein and Griffith used survey data from three neighborhoods in a Midwestern city. Each neighborhood was categorized as high-crime, high-disorder (abandoned buildings, crumbling infrastructure). The study also gauged cohesion (neighbors working together) and efficacy (how the neighborhood residents get along together).
“What we found is resident and police do not have the same perceptions,” Stein said.
Of the three communities, police officers rated the primarily white neighborhood as safer, even though crime statistics proved otherwise. In an outsider view, as police may not be residents of these communities, they noticed the race of the population. Such judgments could also be informed by the presence of a federally funded crime prevention program, Stein said.
The difference in how residents and police see these communities, Stein and Griffith said, is a result of a lack of communication.
“When police are fully immersed in a community, they are able to see the struggles and can better communicate to their chain of command the issues their area faces,” Griffith said. “This should lead to a larger discussion in the city government to focus on the problems the community and police have noted as problems.”
“Part of the problem is that they’re on two different pages,” Stein said. “In these high crime neighborhoods, people just get used to (the crime). If it happens around you all the time, it’s not different. It’s normal. It’s just how it is.”
The only time crime tends to be reported is if the crime itself is changing – differing from the normal occurrences, Stein said.
“There’s a general distrust of police because police don’t really do anything about the cause of the crime,” Stein said. “Police are the people that come in and make arrests and don’t fix anything. So in these high-crime, high-disorder areas, there’s a distrust.”
If police see neighborhoods as more problematic than do the residents, the two groups will identify different programs as the most effective crime prevention strategies. Communities and police must work together to combat such breakdowns, according to the study.
“You’ve got to have the communication across the police to listen to the residents to figure out the underlying problems,” Stein said.
-WVU-
dr/05/05/2015
CONTACT: Devon Copeland, Director of Marketing and Communication, Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, West Virginia University, 304-293-6867, Devon.Copeland@mail.wvu.edu
Check http://wvutoday.wvu.edu/ daily for the latest news from the University. Follow @WVUToday on Twitter.