1994 AGN JUN 08 I24 - Laserfiche WebLink

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concept that police officers and private citizens working together in creative ways can help solve community problems. It means partnerships with the community to improve the quality of life. It shifts the focus of police work from handling random incident driven calls to solving community problems. C.0.P.P.S should be a department wide philosophy and approach with the full support from the chief through middle management down to the street officers. It is not a team of officers set out to handle problems i.e.: M.E.T.. The M.E.T. team is a good tool for assisting problem solving but in the past they were never used in the true C.O.P.P.S way. There were a few times the M.E.T. team set out to assist the community with a problem that the community felt was important, but more often than not MET was time, money and manpower spent waiting for a crime to happen in areas where there were no identifiable problems. And when a problem was identified the approach was solely enforcement even when non -enforcement ideas were suggested and would have been less costly. This department needs a leader with vision, determination and openness to cam. The chief who inherits a department that had traditional policing styles has a tough job. His situation is to expose the defects that exist with the present system. That will involve challenging the fundamental assumptions of the organization, its aspirations, its objectives of the current effectiveness of the department, its outdated approaches and even its view of itself. The difficulty for the chief is that raising such questions of well entrenched police practices, may look and feel destructive rather that constructive. It looks (but is not) like an attempt by the chief to deliberately upset the organization. What's known as directed imbalance may help render the organization for the anticipated change in direction that is a must if we are going to enter the 21 st century as a modern progressive police department and city. Directed imbalance within a police organization will be those imbalances that are created in anticipation of the proposed change in orientation. They will be the changes that make sense only under the assumption that whole project is implemented, and that it will, radically, after organizational priorities . Examples of such proposed directed imbalance would be the movement of the most talented and promising personnel into the newly defined jobs; making it clear that the route to promotion lies within such jobs. Those jobs will have set criteria; disbanding those squads like MET that embody traditional policing, re -categorizing the crime statistics according to their effect on the community, redesigning the staff evaluation system to take account of contributions to the nature and quality of community life. Providing in service training in problem solving skills to all employees both sworn and non -sworn, new officers, veteran officers, managers and supervisors establishing new communication channels with all city departments and public services; and conducting annual community surveys for a period of years to get feed back to make improvements.