Admittedly, that's courageous, since if the initiative fails, the department only has more bills to show for the effort. Yet critics often point to community policing's popularity as if that were an indication average people don't understand police work. The reality is that community policing's widespread appeal may be the key to expanding the public police budget overall. A controversial issue underlying the debate relates to the fact many community policing efforts at least initially target areas with the highest crime rates, typically neighborhoods dominated by the poor, many of whom are minorities. This can breed resentment among taxpayers who feel a disproportionate share of the dollars they pay will flow to those who they feel make little or not contribution.
Racism can also play a role.
Tensions can rise even higher if those residents and business owners see services they value cut back to fund community policing for those they consider a drain on the system. Though it might seem to defy logic, the solution could be to make community policing a total city wide effort, so everyone benefits equally, even though that automatically makes the program more expensive. While society may never completely eliminate racism and elitism, perhaps the biggest educational challenge we face in making sure community policing survives is to persuade everyone both inside and outside policing that until we are all safe, no one is truly safe. It requires courage to defend this approach and to find the resources necessary, but if we fail on either count, this could signal the end of public policing as we know it. Robert Trojanowicz is director of the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University.