Times-Pic today. NOPD Superintendent Riley received a consultant's report last month advocating the concept, and Riley has embraced it.But at Maggi's article points out, exactly how this new paradigm will play out in New Orleans remains to be seen. For a police department that is notoriously stingy with information on crime (recent reports notwithstanding) and which, like all police departments, operates under a code of silence to keep its misdeeds out of the public eye (and granted, sometimes to keep investigations on the down-low), NOPD has a lot of community-relations repair work to do. No smart catchphrase is going to succeed where years of racist enforcement and wanton corruption and brutality have been standard operational procedure. It's going to require new thinking, and you can bet that there are powerful forces in place that will resist any new approaches. From federal funding requirements that keep the police from assuming a sane stance on controlling the drug trade to the absolute primacy of police to serve property and other interests of the city's power elite, there are walls behind walls behind walls to break through before substantial change can occur.
In theory, though, the idea of community policing is sound. Officers who know the neighborhoods -- and neighbors they are allegedly here to "protect and serve" -- make better enforcers of the law, and are able to keep communities safer. In the city where I used to live years ago, a domestic disturbance once threatened to escalate into violence. SWAT teams were put at the ready, and a messy situation was likely to be precipitated, until one officer who grew up in that neighborhood stepped forward. He knew the perpetrator, knew his family, and knew what the disturbance was about. That officer was able to approach the perpetrator and convince him to cool down and surrender peacefully.
That's real community policing. And that's what would be good to see in New Orleans.
On the other hand, it might be worth pointing out, just for context if for nothing else, that the first major municipal police force -- Sir Robert Peel's famous "Bobbies" of 1830s London -- was greeted with hostility by Londoners. Indeed, some of the first officers were thrown to their deaths into the Thames River; it seems they didn't adequately know the people they were trying to "protect and serve."
Not that anyone's going to pitch any NOPD officers into the Mississippi anytime soon...
