Fear of crime can lead to increased anxiety, social withdrawal, and many other outcomes. One of the goals of community policing is to reduce the fear of crime by building positive relationships with the people in an officer’s neighborhood and town. Distrust of law enforcement is one area that we covered in this Module, and studies have found that the level of trust relates to many factors, but race appears to be one of them. Community policing also hopes to tackle the issue of distrust by the strong relationships it seeks to make between officers and community members.
Your goal for this blog is to come up with real, actionable solutions that can address fear of crime and distrust of law enforcement that can appear in communities of color. Community policing is a theory – so don’t cite this – but you can find specific things that have been done under the umbrella of community policing, broken windows policing, evidence-based policing, etc, that target these very real issues.
How can people who fear law enforcement and crime have these anxieties eased? How can law enforcement help?