Community policing, like most general policies adopted and used by modern police departments start out very well in the conceptual phase...

Then "community policing" turns into something else.

It becomes a by-word, used like D.A.R.E. to reassure the public that a police department is "doing something".

Want a good example of HOW community policing works? Ask any regular patrol officer in denver if, at times, they are asked to "deemphasize" any particular classification of crime.

In Aurora public schools, and Cherry Creek Schools violent crimes are simply not written up as violent crimes. Get beat up at school, and you WONT find a crime report written about it. Drug buy? "de-emphasized" by school administration on school grounds.

so, as long as politicians can de-emphasize any particular police activity, any statistics associated with police work are inherently a lie.

When they study drugs in clinical trials, they use "double blind" so even the researchers dont know who is getting what.

how does the study affect the outcome? the politicians KNOW the study is taking place, or the time period when it will take place - and policies are changed to affect that study.

I was sort of wondering, in Albuquerque when crime rate went to 0 - was this from the UCR? Because the FBI gets it's stats directly from departments, it simply follows that if a department isn't writing up any crime, then the stats MUST be 0.

For folks that actually think that they have an 'effective' community policing effort - ask 10 residents who their PAR officer is - if 1 out of 10 knows the answer, I'd be surprised. Ask any PAR officer what the vacancy rate is in an apartment complex, and they wouldn't know that -

In short, "community policing" doesn't encourage an actual intimate relationship with the neighborhood you are assigned to. Even if it DID, between calls for service and the required paperwork, there is almost NO time that can be spent learning things about people in a neighborhood who ARENT criminals.