Our Story & Mission
About CommunityPolicing.com
A nonprofit platform dedicated to advancing the philosophy, practice, and profession of community policing in the United States.
Our Mission
Our Mission
To promote a closer synergy between the public and police departments by informing, educating, and promoting the philosophy of community policing amongst the public, students, and police officers — and to create an atmosphere where criminal justice professionals can share their research and community policing success strategies from the classroom and the field.
Our Core Values
Community Commitment
We believe public safety is a shared responsibility between police and the communities they serve.
Education
We are committed to making evidence-based knowledge accessible to practitioners, students, and the public.
Ethical Leadership
We promote leadership grounded in integrity, accountability, and procedural justice.
Mutual Respect
We foster dialogue built on dignity, trust, and a shared commitment to safer communities.
The Philosophy
What Is Community Policing?
Community policing is a philosophy of policing built on a simple but powerful principle: public safety is most effective when law enforcement and the community work together to identify problems, develop solutions, and create safer neighborhoods.
The U.S. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) identifies three fundamental components of community policing:
Community Partnerships
Developing collaborative relationships between law enforcement and the people, organizations, businesses, schools, government agencies, service providers, and other stakeholders that make up a community.
Problem Solving
Moving beyond repeatedly responding to individual incidents and instead identifying, analyzing, and addressing the conditions that contribute to recurring crime, disorder, fear of crime, and other public-safety concerns.
Organizational Transformation
Aligning an agency's leadership, policies, training, supervision, technology, personnel, information systems, and organizational culture with the principles of partnership and problem solving.
Community policing should not be viewed simply as a specialized unit, neighborhood event, public-relations campaign, or assignment given to a small number of officers. It is an organizational philosophy that can influence how an entire law-enforcement agency operates.
Traditional enforcement remains an essential responsibility of the police. Community policing does not replace enforcement, investigations, emergency response, or officer safety. Instead, it expands the mission by asking an additional question: What can police and their partners do to prevent this problem from occurring again?
"Ultimately, community policing represents a transition from the idea that police alone are responsible for public safety to the understanding that public safety is a shared responsibility — replacing 'Police versus the problem' with 'Police and the community versus the problem.'"
Problem-Solving Framework
The SARA Model
One of the most widely used frameworks for community policing problem solving is the SARA Model:
Scanning
Identify and prioritize recurring problems.
Analysis
Determine why the problem is occurring and understand its underlying conditions.
Response
Develop and implement strategies specifically tailored to those conditions.
Assessment
Evaluate whether the response worked and make adjustments when necessary.
Successful community policing also depends heavily on trust and legitimacy. Research on procedural justice has demonstrated the importance of treating people with dignity and respect, allowing them an opportunity to be heard, making decisions in a neutral manner, and demonstrating trustworthy motives.
Historical Context
Three Eras of American Policing
A widely cited framework developed by policing scholars divides the evolution of modern American policing into three broad eras:
Political Era
~1840s – early 1900s
Police were closely connected to local political structures and neighborhoods. Officers generally operated with significant discretion, provided a broad range of services, and maintained close personal relationships with community members. At the same time, political patronage, inconsistent standards, corruption, and limited professional oversight created significant problems.
Reform / Professional Era
~1920s–1970s
Police reformers sought to separate law enforcement from partisan political influence and establish policing as a professional occupation. Agencies increasingly emphasized centralized command, civil-service hiring, formal training, specialization, written procedures, rapid response, motorized patrol, radio communications, and measurable enforcement activity. Professionalization produced major advancements — but could also create greater distance between officers and the communities they served.
Community Policing Era
1970s–present
Police leaders and researchers increasingly questioned whether random patrol, rapid response, and arrests alone could adequately address recurring crime and disorder. Community policing sought to reconnect police with the community while retaining the professionalism, training, technology, investigative capacity, and accountability developed during the Reform Era. The establishment of the U.S. DOJ COPS Office in 1994 significantly expanded national institutional support for community policing.
These dates should not be interpreted as rigid boundaries. American policing did not change everywhere at the same time, and elements of all three eras can still be observed in modern law-enforcement organizations.
Our Audiences
Who We Serve
CommunityPolicing.com serves people who want to make policing, police training, and public safety better.
Police Officers & Investigators
For professionals who want to expand their knowledge beyond mandatory training and continually develop their investigative, communication, leadership, tactical decision-making, problem-solving, and community-engagement skills.
Police Trainers & Field Training Officers
For instructors seeking quality educational material, training concepts, lesson-plan resources, case studies, scenarios, presentations, and ideas that can be adapted to the needs of their agencies.
Police Supervisors & Administrators
For leaders responsible for developing personnel, solving organizational problems, implementing programs, evaluating emerging practices, building community trust, and translating policy into operational performance.
Criminal Justice Students
For students seeking understandable explanations of criminal-justice concepts, exposure to real-world policing, research ideas, professional development, and a connection between academic theory and field practice.
Professors & Researchers
For academics interested in making criminal-justice research accessible to practitioners and learning from the experiences of those responsible for implementing policy in real-world environments.
Community & Public-Safety Partners
For community stakeholders who want to better understand law enforcement, examine successful partnership strategies, and participate constructively in improving public safety and quality of life.
Our long-term objective is to create an educational environment in which these groups do not operate in separate silos. Practitioners should have access to research. Researchers should have access to practitioners. Police leaders should be able to learn from other agencies. Trainers should not have to continually reinvent effective instructional material. And communities should have access to credible information about the profession responsible for serving them.
Share Your Expertise
Who Can Contribute?
CommunityPolicing.com is built on the belief that some of the most valuable lessons in public safety are developed by the people confronting difficult problems every day — and that those lessons become more valuable when they are responsibly shared.
Contributions may include case studies, training articles, instructor resources, research summaries, leadership lessons, innovative police practices, problem-oriented policing projects, community-engagement strategies, investigative lessons learned, legal updates, officer-development material, and analysis of emerging public-safety challenges.
Submitted material should be factually supportable, professionally written, lawfully obtained, appropriately sourced, and suitable for an educational audience. Contributors should not disclose confidential investigative information, protected personal information, law-enforcement-sensitive material, or other information they are not authorized to release.
Who Is Eligible to Contribute
- Police officers, troopers, deputies, detectives, investigators, and supervisors
- Police executives and command personnel
- Police instructors, academy staff, and field-training personnel
- Retired law-enforcement professionals
- Crime and intelligence analysts
- Prosecutors and other criminal-justice professionals
- Researchers and academics
- College and university faculty
- Criminal-justice graduate students and researchers
- Behavioral-health and social-service professionals who partner with law enforcement
- Victim-service professionals
- Emergency-management and public-safety professionals
- Community leaders and organizations with meaningful public-safety experience
- Recognized subject-matter experts
Ready to get involved?
Explore our training programs, contribute your expertise, or contact us to learn more about partnering with CommunityPolicing.com.