Former Police Chief Rodney Monroe, who implemented community policing in Richmond, is widely credited with bringing down the city’s sky-high crime rate. Can his approach be replicated in suburban Henrico and Chesterfield?
by James A. Bacon
Community policing is key to the war on crime, agreed top law enforcement officials yesterday at a public forum hosted by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Community policing gets police out of their cars so they can patrol neighborhoods on foot, interact with residents and build trust. “I do think the relationship piece … is the critical piece,” said Henrico County Police Chief Doug Middleton.
The reversion from police-by-patrol-car to community policing is credited with much of the downturn in crime in recent years, along with adoption of the “broken windows” theory of crime fighting, which advocates going after smaller crimes, and the use of statistical tools to predict areas where crimes are more likely to occur. In the city of New Haven, Conn., community policing has coincided with a 30% decline in serious crime since 2012, according to a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal today.
Community policing is back in the spotlight since a U.S. Justice Department probe into law enforcement practices in Ferguson, Missouri, where the police killing of a young black man triggered rampant protests. The suburban locality’s community-policing efforts “have dwindled to almost nothing in recent years,” the report said. Police had lost “the little familiarity it had with some African-American neighborhoods.”
This passage in the WSJ article has particular resonance in the Richmond region:
Walking the beat isn’t feasible in spread-out, rural or suburban areas. It is more labor-intensive than assigning officers to police cars that can zip from neighborhood to neighborhood, and officers on foot can’t always respond as quickly to crimes. Budget cuts also have made it harder for some police departments to justify the cost of walking the beat.
Community policing is a fine strategy for the City of Richmond, where urban neighborhoods are reasonably compact. But it’s more problematic in Henrico and Chesterfield County where an increasing number of poor people are living. For two or more decades now, poverty has been leaking across municipal boundaries into old suburban neighborhoods of ’50s- and ’60s-era ranch houses in low-density, cul-de-sac subdivisions that do not lend themselves to walking, biking or community policing.
Cul-de-sac subdivisions worked fine for mostly law-abiding, middle-class people who, if they engaged in criminal activity, it was more likely to be check kiting or embezzling than drug dealing or shoot-outs. As those neighborhoods are increasingly occupied by poor residents experiencing social breakdown and a higher proclivity for crime, Henrico and Chesterfield county police face a real challenge in implementing community policing. While everyone agrees in theory that building strong ties to the community is critical, the experience of Ferguson and other suburban jurisdictions shows that it may be difficult. Let us hope that Richmond-area police are up to the challenge.
