By ANN RICHARDS
Across the country, escalating crime rates and diminishing municipal budgets are motivating police departments to develop new ways of deploying services. The
City of Flint, Michigan is no exception. To improve public safety, the city is using a
$1,150,000 grant from the C.S. Mott Foundation to reinstitute a community policing strategy – originally developed in the late 1970s in Flint - that relies on neighborhood foot patrols and data-driven crime fighting.
Flint’s 21st Century Community Policing (CCP) effort – as the new initiative is known – will revive the legacy of community policing and neighborhood foot patrols in the city, incorporating new technologies and police/community partnerships to deliver effective public safety services.
Flint’s pilot foot patrol program – started in the late 1970s - was a precursor to what today is known as community policing. |
“The City of Flint and the Mott Foundation have a long and rich history with community policing and neighborhood foot patrols,” said Foundation President William S. White, noting that since 1937, the Foundation has granted $8.8 million ($31.8 million in inflation-adjusted dollars) to support policing and public safety in its home community.
“Based on this past experience, we are confident that these grants to assist the city with the pilot-phase of the 21st Century Community Policing effort ultimately will help reduce crime and lead to more stable and secure neighborhoods.”
In addition to the grant to the City of Flint to reinstitute neighborhood foot patrols, reopen police mini-stations and establish quarterly crime reduction targets, the Foundation also granted
$350,000 to
Michigan State University’s (MSU) School of Criminal Justice to provide training, technical assistance and “real time, corrections-based evaluation” to support the effort. Since 2006, the Foundation also has provided $975,000 to the City of Flint for downtown security.
Flint is ranked as the fifth most dangerous city in the U.S, according to the CQ Press, the book-publishing unit of the Washington-based Congressional Quarterly, Inc. High rates of crime, coupled with the municipality’s budget crisis, which has caused a simultaneous reduction in the police force and public safety resources, prompted the city to successfully apply for federal
COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) funding in 2009.
The new CCP effort will deploy 18 foot patrol officers across all nine wards of the city. The city also plans to utilize CityStat, a data-tracking and management computer software program, to assist officers in identifying areas of criminal activity in each ward and prioritize neighborhoods for patrol. Now being used in dozens of cities to improve the delivery of municipal services, CityStat enables law enforcement officials to track and map data on all types of crime, spot trends and allocate limited resources more strategically, according to a report issued by the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan research and education institute in Washington, DC.
In Flint, the goal of the CCP project is to reduce all categories of crime across the city, according to Flint Mayor Dayne Walling. The foot patrol officers will work in coordination with motorized officers as well as community volunteers, all of whom will receive training in community policing techniques through
MSU’s Michigan Regional Community Policing Institute.
In addition to training and assistance to officers and supervisors, civilian dispatchers, volunteers and other stakeholders, MSU also will assist the police department in building its capacity to report, analyze and use data being collected through CityStat.
“One of our goals is to send part of our team in to pull crime data and see what information the department has, how they store and access it, and how they use it,” said Jerry Boles, retired chief of police in Lansing, Michigan and associate director of the Michigan Regional Community Policing Institute at MSU.
Michigan State University evaluations indicated that foot patrols not only reduced crime, but led to an increased perception of safety in neighborhoods. |
Foundation grants for community policing during the 1970s and 1980s were instrumental in disseminating the tactic of neighborhood foot patrols nationally. Moreover, according to evaluations by MSU, foot patrols – when originally instituted in Flint in 1979 - reduced calls-for-service by more than 43 percent and reduced crime by 8.7 percent.
Between 1977 and 1983, more than
$3 million ($8.9 million in inflation-adjusted dollars) in Mott funding directly supported the operations of the Neighborhood Foot Patrol, which provided full law enforcement services while emphasizing the social service and problem-solving aspects of the patrol officer’s job.
In collaboration with MSU’s National Neighborhood Foot Patrol Center, established in 1982 with more than $1 million in Mott support, the Flint program served as a national model for reform through the end of the decade. Ultimately, Mott granted slightly more than $2 million ($4.2 million in inflation-adjusted dollars) for national community policing efforts.
According to Boles, a large percentage of police departments in the country claim to be using some type of a community policing strategy. Few however, have been successful in embracing a department wide community policing philosophy.
A 30-year veteran of the
Lansing Police Department, Boles is a long-time advocate of community policing strategies.
“You have to leverage the resources you have in a community,” he said. “Cities across Michigan are reducing police and other public services because the revenues just aren’t there. Flint’s economic situation demands that the city look at ways to better utilize what they have.”
“The Mott Foundation and the City of Flint have requested our assistance in re-emphasizing community policing in Flint. Our mutual goal is to make police operations more effective and more efficient through training, technical assistance, and organizational change.”
Aggressive, accountable policing is the first step toward achieving a long-term response and solution to social disorder and crime, said Boles.
“Post- 9/11, I’ve had a number of officers question the effectiveness of community policing – but I believe rapport with residents and the trust of the community is more pertinent to public safety today than ever before.”