Affairs function of the law enforcement agency becomes the primary method of

reassuring the community that the police can and will aggressively address and resolve

unethical behavior. In short, the integrity of the police will always dictate the level of

community trust (Brown, 2014).

Law enforcement executives are constantly striving to preserve a positive, ethical

image of their departments to the public they are sworn to serve and protect. A

community’s perception of its local police department, however, is influenced by many

variables. Every day, tens of thousands of law enforcement personnel throughout the

United States perform honorable and conscientious police work, but irreparable damage

may be done to the entire profession from even one remote story of police misconduct

or corruption. How each community perceives law enforcement depends on each police

department. How the department interacts with its citizens, how accessible it is to the

community, and how it manages Internal Affairs issues are integral to the profession

overall. It is for these reasons that building and maintaining community trust is the

hallmark of effective policing (Rider, 2012).

Often implemented as a result of a local crisis, such as police misconduct, and

usually associated exclusively with the Internal Affairs process in the form of a citizen

review board, citizen involvement can be used as a tool that fosters continuous dialog

between residents and the police department. By formally engaging community leaders

in appropriate internal decision-making (e.g., where to implement Neighborhood Watch

programs or whether it is necessary to start a Senior Citizen Alert program), residents

will feel that they have a stake in programs that the police may implement, that the

police are transparent in their motivations, and that they are assisting the police in
improving public safety. If citizen involvement is used only in response to misconduct or

corruption, citizens are likely to feel isolated and wary of law enforcement. If they feel

included through collaboration, though, they will gain a broader appreciation of police

work and gain insight into, and consequently trust of, law enforcement (Delattre, 2010).

Reducing Crime and Disorder

While it is impractical to think that police and local government can prevent all

crime and disorder in a community, there is a growing body of research and good

practice available to you and your staff that cangreatly help you toward this goal.

Realizing the maximum benefit of this knowledge, however, may require that local

governments, police, and citizens alike challenge some long-held assumptions about

how crime can be controlled and who bears responsibility for doing so. Availing yourself

and your staff police included of this knowledge should leave your local government and

your community better prepared to respond more effectively to problems as they arise,

and to prevent at least some of those problems from arising in the first place (Plant,

2017).

Reducing Fear of Crime

Fear of crime was at or near the top of the list of police priorities in the United

States more than 2 decades ago, in the early 1980s. Many police executives had

accepted the premise that reducing fear of crime was an important objective, and

several promising practices had been identified. This situation helped spur the

development of community policing in the 1980s and 1990s but, paradoxically, the

importance of fear of crime within the explicit missions of most police departments

seemed to recede even as community policing expanded. More recently, however, the
gap between (1) falling crime rates and (2) stable or even increasing levels of fear (what

some call the reassurance gap) has led to renewed interest among police in strategies

for reducing fear of crime. Also, fear of terrorism arose in America post-9/11, making

fear reduction even more salient for local, state, and national officials (US Dept. of

Justice, 2017).

Police departments need to begin measuring and analyzing fear of crime more

systematically. During the past few decades, police have learned that they need crime

analysis to target crime—the same goes for fear of crime. This often requires both

communitywide and neighborhood-level surveys, but those are not the only methods for

learning about fear. Community meetings, key individuals, environmental audits, and

routine public contacts can also serve as very useful sources to learn about the

concerns and worries of community residents. Once police have some information

about fear of crime in the community, they can use it to identify demographic groups

that are most affected, neighborhoods where fear is the highest and other trends and

patterns. Police can also identify anomalies, such as neighborhoods where crime is low

but fear is high. Armed with data and analysis about fear of crime, police can begin to

focus and target their attention, just as they do with crime itself (COPS, 2016).

Once fear problems are identified and understood, the key is to apply responses

tailored to those problems. If the source of a neighborhood’s fear is poor street lighting,

a community newsletter is not going to fix it. If the cause of fear is aggressive

panhandlers in a shopping district, then showing homeowners how to put better locks

on their doors will not work. Specific to the nature and causes of fear of crime as

revealed through information and analysis. In conjunction with this kind of problem