Having learned all about community policing as an undergraduate with a Criminal Justice degree – I have lots of opinions. Madison was always held up as the model police department – but when I got on the council and watched us erode our community policing efforts, it was horribly sad to me. Now, you all have the opportunity to let the police department know what you think about their “community policing”. You can probably guess what I’m thinking!
Message from Chief Noble Wray:
“Dear Community Partner,
On behalf of the Madison Police Department, I invite you to help assess our community policing efforts and improve our efforts to better serve the community.
The Department recently received a COPS Hiring grant from the U.S. Department of Justice and is now using the Community Policing Self-Assessment Tool (online survey) to assess how community partners view the Department and our trust-based, community policing efforts.
Community policing is a philosophy that promotes organizational strategies, which support the systematic use of partnerships and problem–solving techniques, to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues such as crime, social disorder, and fear of crime.
The Community Policing Self-Assessment Tool online survey is designed to assess three key areas in community policing: community partnerships, problem solving, and organizational transformation.
COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS
Collaborative partnerships between the law enforcement agency and the individuals and organizations they serve to develop solutions to problems and increase trust in police.PROBLEM SOLVING
The process of engaging in the proactive and systematic examination of identified problems to develop effective responses.ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSFORMATION
The alignment of organizational management, structure, personnel, and information systems to support community partnerships and proactive problem solving.Your responses to this survey will be kept confidential to the extent provided by law. There are no individual identifiers in the data that the Department will receive, and the Department will not be able to link an individual’s data to their email address. This is not a test and there are no right or wrong answers. Please answer each question honestly.
Survey URL: https://survey.icfsurveys.com/se.ashx?s=04BD76CC552D21AD
Passcode: WI01301-C1(You will be prompted to enter the passcode when you click the above URL. Please copy and paste the above passcode to ensure accuracy).
Please complete the assessment by May 22, 2012. If you have any questions, please contact Jim Powell, Grants Administrator at 261-9635 or jpowell@cityofmadison.com.
Thank you.
Noble Wray
Chief of Police
Madison Police Department”
Obviously, my recent attempts to “partner” with the police department went horribly awry. They sure don’t make it easy! On the other hand, Captain Gloede was a rock star with the Occupy folks. I was seriously impressed.
What really concerned me over the years is the Neighborhood Police Officer program where they have fewer and fewer and they change them so often that once they establish relationships and engage with the neighborhood, then they get yanked out of the neighborhood. And of course, when we tried to redirect funding to these efforts, the Chief basically told us to go to hell, its his department and he decides. Very unfortunate, and a very poor example of community poicing when he can’t even try to work with council members, sets a bad example.
Anyways, I don’t know if you consider yourself a “community partner” – I sure don’t feel like one, but I filled out the survey, but I”m not sure my concerns were even addressed in the survey.
