Community policing is a very important aspect of the Criminal Justice system because we need to be able to depend on the community to cooperate with police officers. Sometimes the biggest struggle is accepting that our perspectives do actually affect everybody else. Sometimes we don’t realize how much of an influence we have on each other and community policing is a perfect example of that.

Community policing depends on both the community and police officers to work together and fight crime together. In less literal terms, it’s a way the community can contribute to their safety. Of course the community believes that they have no importance and this isn’t exactly the most reliable way to do policing however it is the most common.

This method is when police officers use the community as reinforcement for their jobs. A good example of community policing would be neighborhood watch where the neighborhood sets up a watch area for their neighborhood and if they see a problem they would report it to the police, this way police officers can actually do their job without being everywhere at once.

The biggest issue these days is the concept of having to deal with criminals all the time and having no support from anybody outside the force. Being in the force, police officers struggle with dealing with these issues because of the lack of support. Lack of support not only is something that affects the ability to do community policing, it also affects their ability to actually do their job no matter how they’re planning on doing it.

Police officers try to be everywhere at once and of course that fails because nobody can be everywhere at once. The biggest struggle of having any sort of job is not knowing what is expected from you and when some sort of crime actually happens, if you didn’t check carefully, you’re to blame and once again if the community saw something and didn’t report it that just repeats the impossibility of police officers being able to do their job.

The only reason this has become a big issue in the criminal justice system is because people need to be more aware of their surroundings and be more aware of how their behavior affects others, behavior as in believing whether people actually care for their opinion or not. Community policing is the most widely used method of policing.

Before going out tonight and getting angry at a police officer trying to do their job, you could go out and thank them for working hard to make our community safer. We should try and figure out what kind of policing method our community embraces and try to contribute to it by helping out here and there. Every small thing helps. Perhaps the biggest problem is people in the community don’t really know what they’re supposed to do and if their opinion matters at all. This isn’t something that only affects a few people. It could be something that’s affecting the whole community.