On the beat: community policing in developing countries

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Do you know your local police officer? Do you often see police patrolling your neighbourhood? If the answer is yes, then you are possibly the beneficiary of community policing strategies.

Community policing focuses on improving communication and collaboration between police and citizens, often using tactics such as increased frequency of beat patrols, decentralised decision-making, acting on public intelligence around crime, and community engagement programmes. The policy is used in many parts of the world including the UK, the US and across the European Union.

But how does community policing work in countries with higher crime rates and steeper levels of economic deprivation? Graeme Blair, assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, led a project examining how community policing strategies could work in less affluent nations, running six coordinated field experiments in Brazil, Colombia, Liberia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Uganda.

“We have very little evidence about whether community policing works in the wide variety of places using it now,” Blair explains. “We were motivated by this evidence gap, and the fact that community policing is one of the main policy solutions to the current situation, in many countries, where citizens are demanding both a reduction in crime and accountability for police abuses. We wanted to know if it could meet the moment.

“We identified six police agencies in the global south that shared our interest in learning about whether and how community policing could reduce crime and rebuild trust in the police.”

The team collaborated with the six police agencies to implement locally appropriate community policing practices, carefully choosing the agencies and the areas covered to address any risks in encountering police abuse and poor practice. A randomised control trial was created, with areas assigned to be either a control group or have community policing practices implemented. The interventions covered 516 areas with a combined population of around nine million. A further 18,382 citizens and 874 police officers were surveyed, and crime data was examined.

Community policing is widely recognised as a successful strategy in many of the countries in which it has been adopted, particularly the UK and US. It is often cited as an effective way to build or rebuild trust in the police, especially in those communities where there is historical mistrust. When applied to the six countries in the study, however, there were no discernible improvements in levels of trust in the police.

“We think it sounds a note of caution for police agencies and citizens: community policing, as implemented in the global south, cannot, on its own, resolve the twin problems of crime and mistrust between citizens and police,” Blair says. “Broader structural reforms may be required for it to be effective.”

The study identified that, despite a strong commitment from leadership in each of the six countries at the outset of the experiment, the police implemented the interventions unevenly and incompletely. There was no greater citizen cooperation with the police and, even more telling, no reduction in crime in any of the six countries during the experiment. The report says that “although citizens reported more frequent and robust exposure to the police in places where community policing was implemented, we have limited evidence of police action in response to citizen reports”.

The researchers highlighted three challenges that could have affected the success of community policing in the six nations: a lack of sustained buy-in from police leadership; the frequency at which police officers and leaders were rotated, undermining their ability to get to know the communities they policed; and a lack of resources to respond to citizens’ concerns.

The problem, as the research suggests, is seeing community policing as a ‘silver bullet’ – a cure, in and of itself, to the twin problems of police corruption and dwindling trust between citizens and the police. The study concluded that community policing neither leads to major improvements in the relationship between the public and police forces, nor reduces crime when used in isolation. The researchers muse that structural reforms could, instead, be needed to reduce crime and increase accountability. This is particularly an issue where constraints on resources are evident, as was the case in Liberia, Pakistan and Uganda. In study areas in Uganda, only 10% of police stations received a monthly fuel allowance, with an average of a single motorbike for transportation.

Forces also often struggled to prioritise tasks outside of officers’ usual remit, for a host of nation-specific reasons. In the Philippines, officers were instructed by senior leaders to focus on major crimes, such as murder, drugs and insurgency, rather than local issues raised by the public, while, in Pakistan, police could not legally respond to issues raised by citizens in discussions involving offences such as domestic abuse, harassment and financial misconduct.

Blair says that much of the problem is seeing community policing as a single solution, and taking what is essentially a US and UK-specific tactic outside of its intended context, with the hope of having the same impact.

“Future research – and experimentation by police and citizens – should explore whether better police accountability tools, and changes to officer incentives to respond to citizen concerns, can contribute to the effectiveness of incremental reforms such as community policing,” says Blair.

“We think police agencies should start to look beyond community policing in efforts to improve police-citizen relations. We should be sceptical of policy practices coming out of the US and the UK, as they are being exported to places that are located at some considerable distance from where they were initially tested.”

Blair et al, Community policing does not build citizen trust in police or reduce crime in the Global South, Science 374, 1098 ( 2021)