The role of police services is changing rapidly. The 1980s saw a shift towards community policing, which was contrasted with what is now called “traditional policing”. Traditional policing emphasised a rapid response to calls for service as the most effective way of dealing with criminal activity. At the time, “the solution to serious crime simply required identifying, arresting and then locking up all the bad guys”. The increasing numbers of offenders who have contact with the criminal justice system, and the resultant delays in dealing with offenders today, highlight the inadequacy of this as the primary response. Even when one offender is dealt with there is always another in the queue.
While there has been a recent move towards community policing, the global nature of many crimes today—illicit drug and people trafficking, terrorism and money laundering—makes them inappropriate to community policing and demanding of a new focus. This paper highlights the increase in the use of private security services and how that overlaps with public policing and changes its role.
This paper also refers to the lack of success in community policing. Measuring success on the basis of community satisfaction may seem somewhat nebulous. It seems that, for some police, the change towards community policing was seen as a “total rejection of their life’s work”—it is not what they were hired to do. Police are “action oriented” and it would take a great cultural shift to have them accommodate the philosophy of community policing. The paper makes the important point, however, that while community policing may have fallen out of favour, a problem-solving approach continues to be part of police strategy, but with the strategy being developed through analyses carried out at headquarters.
Professor David Bayley participated recently in an Australian Institute of Criminology roundtable seminar on capacity-building in law enforcement. This paper summarises the main themes of the seminar, in essence offering nine recommendations for crime control. These recommendations will certainly form the basis for discussion as police services pursue the essential challenge of working smarter.