Community Policing Internationally

In this podcast, David Alpher, Washington Representative for Saferworld, discusses community policing in an international context.

Podcast Transcript

Voiceover: Beat Intro
00:00
This is the Beat—a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing
topics facing our nation.

Kimberly Brummett
00:08
Hello and welcome. My name is Kimberly Brummett, and on behalf of the COPS Office, I would like to
introduce you to David Alpher. David is the Washington representative for Saferworld, an
independent, international, non-governmental organization working to prevent violent conflict and
build safer lives. Saferworld runs conflict resolution programs in 18 countries worldwide. These
programs work with local people affected by conflict to improve their safety and sense of security, as
well as producing wider research analysis on the root causes of conflict and the most effective ways of
addressing it both in practice and in policy to produce lasting peace.

Good morning, David. Can you tell us a little bit more about your organization?

David Alpher
00:51
Thank you very much for having me and certainly. Saferworld is actually coming into its 25th year of
service. We began within the U.K. We are now an international organization with offices in 18 different
countries, as you mentioned, programmatically and advocacy and policy offices in three others. So we
run programs in the field. We have local staff. We implement and operate programs designed to
increase safety and security, designed to prevent violent conflict. But we also have a strong research
capability that allows us to take the lessons from those programs beyond the parameters of the
programs and to speak to policy with those. So that’s our role here in the U.S. as it is in London with
the U.K., in Brussels with the E.U. We also do a lot of work with China. And that’s a brief overview.

Kimberly
01:48
In what ways do you work to promote trust in communities?

David
01:52
Trust is built for credibility, reliability, and contact between people. It’s a matter of contact. Really
specifically, being present, having a relationship, not simply an event, not simply an interaction, but
being present and over time building a connection with people. They know you. They understand you.
They understand your role. They see you as someone who is able to create that sense of intimacy,
who can be trusted. It is a long process. It takes time. And when you can do it, it’s very powerful. It’s
something we protect very heavily. We are extraordinarily careful with how we interact, with whom
we interact. And we work towards that trust overall.

So with community policing in mind, trust is all the more important. It’s not easy internationally or
domestically. We’re seeing a lot in the news right now in both areas. In many areas, there’s a lot of
both historical and current mistrust and anger between police services and communities. We know
that in areas of violent conflict, in particular, the police are often negatively implicated, and getting that
trust requires a demonstration by parties that they’re willing to think not just about themselves but
about the wider good. Ultimately, it also requires, from the community point of view particularly, that
the sense is built that the police are of us and from us not over us. That’s critical. International
organizations can have a strong role to play in helping to produce the circumstances within which that
trust can be built. But that is something that has to come from the communities and the services
themselves.

The common starting point for building that is we know that if a community is going to experience
adequate levels of safety for its present and its future, police service is imperative. And that’s a
common starting point that everybody, both the police and the communities, can get on board with
and will. It’s a necessary point of negotiation. It’s not something forced or artificial. That sense of
safety is critical.

So to build this, we, Saferworld, we provide spaces for ongoing reflection and dialogue between the
public and their security providers so that they can jointly identify security concerns and put the
resources in play to meet common needs. That is done through dialogue. It’s done through good
offices. We provide the communication. We help to build the relationships. We help to provide the
connections. But it’s ultimately the communities themselves that do this. It’s the police services
themselves that do it. So we encourage all sections of the community to input into the process and to
use that to build, what probably we’d describe as, social capital among the varied participants.
That also requires being highly specific in our use of language. This is something that both as a
philosophy and as part of the instrumental work, if you ask for examples, I would tell you about this.
We’ve learned for example through experience that the word stability may sound good but to a
community’s ears can actually hide all manner of sins. It smells of suppression. It can smell of
repression. It can smell of violence.

While community safety on the other hand is kind of a forward-looking goal that everybody can get on
board with. It’s hard to argue with community safety. What does that mean? It invites you into
conversation. And that’s a term that both police services and communities will communicate over.
You’re hearing me say police services a lot rather than police forces. That’s another one. Police
services, the nature of that relationship that the term implies, is very different from the one implied
by police forces. And the caution, of course, is that this kind of language has to reflect real change in
organizational philosophy, and it can’t simply be camouflage for the same old practices. But when it’s
real, it’s very powerful, and that’s a big part of how we build the trust. [It] is by using the language very
specifically in order to connote the right ideas.

Kimberly
06:14
Great. How do you implement community policing, and how do you help police and communities
understand the concepts of community policing?

David
06:22
So first and foremost, community policing—we look at that as an ethos rather than a thing or an event
or a definition of an org. chart. It’s a way of describing how the police services and communities
interact with each other, how they define that relationship, and how they define what the purpose of
the relationship is. That’s really the primary starting point.

So what is community policing? One of the best illustrations I’ve ever seen of that was from a high
ranking member of the police services in Northern Ireland who said, “I can’t describe to you what
community policing means. For that description, you’re going to have to talk to my counterpart over
here from the community.” It’s the community’s job to define what that relationship is. What does the
community need? How do they define insecurity? How do they think of themselves, and how they
want the police to interact with them? Then it’s their job to tell the police services that, and it’s the
police services job at that point to listen well and help that to happen. That’s a really interesting
description of what community policing is.

Physically, we can say it means impartiality—impartiality from government politics, from regime
politics. It means impartiality from ethnic or religious affiliation. It means accountability to the
communities. It means transparency. It means respect for human rights and a philosophy of service,
not force. The police services are there to be a service to the community in order to produce
community safety. They are not there to control or suppress the community. So getting that definition
and hearing the language again and the terminology—we are getting the organizational strategy
together. That allows the police and community to work together in new ways to solve problems of
insecurity and improve the quality of life for everyone in that community. It sounds very simple. Given
the baggage that goes along between those relationships, it’s often not.

But the philosophy is built on the belief that the solutions to community problems demand allowing
the police and the public to examine innovative ways and come to a conclusion on their own of how to
address those concerns beyond a narrow focus on one idea of threat or one idea of security. But the
community will have unique ideas about what insecurity means to them, what the sources of
problems are. And they have to be empowered to communicate those and to make those the focus of
the relationship.

How do we implement that? We look at it from both the supply and the demand sides rather than
taking a top- down approach only, which looks at building institutions, building a judicial system,
building well-equipped and trained police forces. And there, “forces” is purposely used. That term
often goes along with the sole top-down model.

The solution to that kind of problematic model is not to change direction entirely and say all work has
to be done within the community, that it’s a bottom-up approach that works, but rather to look at the
two as intimately linked and sharing a common objective and that it’s the interface between them that
is most critical. You can build all the institutions you want to, but if the community doesn’t trust them
and the community isn’t willing to work with them or worse, sees them as a threat, then the
institutions will come to no good.

If the community work is beautifully done, communities are communicating with each other, they’re
working together, their interacting with each other. But there is no institution to help them achieve
the goal that needs to be achieved throughout, across the region. So this is not so fine ingrained that it
can’t be duplicated. If there are no institutions there, then all that work will come to naught. So it’s the
interface between the two. It’s how those two communicate with each other that’s really key and
there’s where we tend to focus.

Communities are very, by and large, they’re very receptive to the concept that the people are the
police, and the police are the public. They want the more responsive, accountable, and approachable
police service. This not something that’s alien to anyone worldwide. It’s the implementation of it. It’s
not difficult to convey. Although, building the trust to talk freely with security providers—it takes time,
and it takes sustained effort over a long period of time. That language is very important. Being very
cautious with that, having the international parties who are able to, in many places, we are the only
party who is removable from the politics of the situation enough that we can communicate with both
sides, and we can provide those good offices back and forth. That’s critical but, again, can never
replace, should never replace, the community as the center focus of this. That’s the pivot point around
which everything revolves.

Changing police practice takes longer. We do also train police, and this is critical. We train them in the
principles and approaches, make sure this is an ethos that’s integrated into the organizational
philosophy, make sure it comes from the top down. How do we implement it is a lot of work on the
ground, building those dialogues, holding the dialogues, helping to create the space within which both
communities and police services feel comfortable and safe talking with each other in order to build
that relationship. That’s the kernel of it, and everything grows from there.

Kimberly
12:00
How do you promote partnerships in policing?

David
12:04
At all times, that partnership is critical. One of the ways we focus on that is by looking at organizations
rather than individuals. It is through individuals that a lot of this work begins. You have to identify a
strong leader, a trusted leader, someone who is respected. However, if you focus over much on the
individuals, sooner or later someone gets transferred, someone dies or is killed if it’s a violent
situation, and a great deal of work can be lost overnight.

So how do we promote the partnerships? We look at the structures themselves, and we look at
helping communicate how those structures are different. Now when you talk about police services,
for example, usually you’re talking about highly hierarchical, very centralized structures. There’s
command and control.

Communities don’t look like that. They are very diffuse. They have many leaders. They have no
leaders. And they’re all different, and they are very unique kind of structures. And the differences
between those often don’t translate well to each other. Police will go into a neighborhood, looking for
the centralized leader, and will tend to assume that action stems from order. Where from the
community side of things, it’s a failure to understand that command structure and who do I talk with
about what problem. Not to oversimplify, that’s one example.

There’s any number of ways that can work. But helping to translate to a community, here is how you
interact with the police service while helping the police service understand this is not an equivalent
kind of an organization to the one that you come from. You will have to interact with them differently.
Building the language again, it’s hard to overstate how important this is. We help each side understand
how they are coming across and where the better language may be to institute—suggest how they
might better want to think about interacting with the other side, making sure that the changes get
instituted from the top all the way to the most fine-grained levels of the police services, making sure
that there’s that accountability, making sure that there’s control and impartiality especially. So helping
to build that again with the training, with the work through the organizations and the philosophy—
helping to build that is vital.

Kimberly
14:35
Where can listeners go for additional information?

David
14:38
Best place to go is Saferworld’s website, www.saferworld.org.uk. Again, it’s centrally a British
organization. We have a great deal of information on the website, both thematically on police reform
and how we view that overall and geographically with examples and research, especially lessons
learned and stories from the various different locations we do this programming in on the ground. All
of that is present on the website along with the contact information for all the various experts we
have on hand who can help understand this better and tell you more about it if you’re interested.

Kimberly
15:19
Great. David, thank you for your time and expertise today.

David
15:22
Thank you so much for having me.

Voiceover: Beat Exit
15:24
The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice, COPS Office. The COPS
Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies,
developing community policing publications, developing partnerships, and solving problems.

Voiceover: Disclaimer
15:41
The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official
position or polices of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies,
products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S.
Department of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.