On Monday April 18, 2016 I attended a town meeting at the Techier Village Point Fortin Community Centre. It was put on by the South Western Division of the police service. This meeting was well attended by the residents and it turned out to be well-participated in.
Deputy Commissioner Dularchan, Senior Superintendent, South Western, and his two assistant superintendents were the hosts of this meeting. Residents raised pertinent issues regarding their community and the Deputy Commissioner handled the questions and concerns with aplomb. He must be commended for his efforts.
I used the opportunity to raise concerns of our traffic woes in Point Fortin and submitted solutions for easing the congestion and resulting traffic pile-up on two of our main roadways.
My main focus, however, was making a case for a more serious community-oriented police programme. I stated my dissatisfaction with the level of community policing which presently exists and went on to indicate the importance and benefits of a well-planned community policing programme. I reproduce here excerpts of my case.
“Community-oriented policing is an aspect of intelligence-led policing because it allows for working with others in the community and using those relationships and partnerships to resolve problems within the community. In other words police can take information about the criminal environment, analyse that information and then use it to guide strategies.”
“Police are not magicians, they can’t go into the mind of people to know when they are going to commit crimes. Police depend on information from the public. To get information people have to trust the police, but there is a lot of mistrust between the police and community members. The only way to repair the mistrust individuals have in the police (apart from weeding out police with misconduct) is through a well-planned community police model.
“Community policing involves forming partnerships with community organisations, actively pursuing feedback and establishing programmes that allow police to engage with residents outside of the law enforcement arena. The practice allows community members to feel heard, respected and empowered to help police control crime in their neighbourhoods rather than feeling that officers are solely there to enforce laws through aggressive stopping, questioning, arresting
and incarcerating.
“Community policing is not soft on crime; quite the contrary it can significantly improve the ability of the police to discover criminal conduct and make arrests. Improved communication with citizens and more intimate knowledge of the geography and social milieu of the beat enhances, rather than reduces the officers’ crime-fighting capability.
“The community is reliant upon the police to curb disorder and help in times of emergency.
“The police, on the other hand, rely on the community to report crime and provide vital information that is necessary for them to solve crime and address community concerns. Police are in the relationship business and at a time of strained relations, community-oriented policing offers a different approach, one that makes good relationships essential to police work.
“With a well-planned community policing programme officers are encouraged to spend considerable time and effort in developing and maintaining personal relationships with citizens, businesses, schools and community organisations. Police are to be encouraged to serve in leadership positions in community organisations.
“With a renewed focus on community policing, many communities in the South Western division can serve as models for others looking to adopt the philosophy in a serious way. The community needs to embrace the police and the police can create the environment for this embrace through a heightened community oriented programme.”
Cuthbert Sandy,
Point Fortin