Police Commissioner Bratton has said that bringing the police and the community together requires seeing each other and hearing each other. The Neighborhood Policing model is about giving cops the time and flexibility to do just that.
“One of the major things with policing is making people feel like what they’re saying isn’t falling on deaf ears,” says Officer Robert Bramble. Officer Bramble and his partner, Officer John Buchanan, are Neighborhood Coordination Officers, or NCOs, in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
The NCOs are “part patrol officer, part community officer, part detective, and part intelligence officer,” says Assistant Chief Terry Monahan, who worked closely on the design of the new model.
The program began in Washington Heights in Manhattan and the Rockaways in Queens, and has since expended to commands around the city. More are coming this fall. By assigning NCOs and patrol officers to the same sectors every day, Neighborhood Policing encourages cops to invest in a neighborhood’s people, its problems, and its potential. As Officer Buchanan says, “whatever their issue is, is now my issue, and I’m going to own it.”
Neighborhood Policing’s strength is clear in the relationships the NCOs and steady sector cops develop with the people they serve. In Bedford Stuyvesant, as the partners became permanent fixtures in the community, “they began to call us salt and pepper,” says Officer Bramble. The program’s constancy means “we’ll be able to work a little bit more to solve the problems that we all know exist.”
Негізгі бет Salt & Pepper: Neighborhood Policing in the 79 Precinct
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