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| What Have You Learned About Collaboration? | |||
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Like anything else, whether it's business or teaching school or whatever you happen to be doing, part of being successful, part of getting to where you think something ought to end up, involves a certain amount of personal trust and personal chemistry. Anybody who thinks that what happens in Boston is an off-the-shelf strategy which then can be adopted for any community, without the human capital investment, is wrong. That is a critical component. And it's time-consuming, and you make mistakes. And sometimes the honesty and trust that is needed to make this work means you hear things at time you don't like to hear. Such as "Why are you doing this?" or "Why aren't you listening?" or "Why aren't you doing this better?" And unless you're prepared to hear that, and not just hear it but pay attention to it and maybe adjust your activities accordingly, then it just isn't going to work. |
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| What Was The Role Of The Leadership? | |||
| The leaders of the organizations agreed to partner and then they stayed out of the way of the people that were closest to the problem and let them do some creative problem-solving. It's the people at the ground level who are really getting the work done. If we've done anything as the leaders, it's to create a climate where people are encouraged to develop those relationships. They don't have to look upstairs, or look over their shoulder, wondering whether this is OK. We've sent a message to all of them; not only is it OK, but we expect that's the way the business is going to be. |
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| How Do You Begin In The Community? | |||
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Go talk to them, seek them out where they are, find out where they hang around. Half of what a policeman does is prevention by presence. Then, while you're out being present, stick your hand out and say, "Hi, my name is ____. I'm from ____. I'm here to ____, and what is your name? What is your role in this community?"
We all get caught up in the idea that people don't do that, people don't talk. We have to wait for the community to come and see us, we have to be desk-bound. At some point we metamorphosed ourselves out of human contact, which is vital, and just started analyzing statistics and numbers, rather than working closely with human beings. So to get the human aspect back into it, you have to have people who are proactive and personable and committed, and who like people. Go out and find out what's going on in the neighborhood. Don't try to effectuate change if you haven't seen what the kids are trying to change, what they're trying to change from, or what they have to change in the neighborhood they have to survive in. Ultimately, part of the prescription for our success was that the community was willing to give us time to show success. They didn't demand overnight success. They didn't demand the turnabout in a week or a month or even 6 months. So many of the strategies that we've used have really shown success after a year or more. And once you have success, then it's easier to get other people to buy into it. [ top ] |
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| How Do You Begin With The Kids? | |||
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Face to face, eyeball to eyeball, in the community, on the street corner, under the streetlight, in the house, in the living room, in the bedroom, on the beach -- wherever they are, we have to be. We have to be following up what we say. If we tell a kid not to be there on the corner of Walk and Don't Walk, you have to be at that corner to make sure he's not there, or else you're nothing but a suit. You're an empty suit.
Kids are kids. What they'd say on the street and what they'd say in the office were two different things. Peer pressure talks for them out on the street, so they have to live up to that image that they set for themselves because there's really nothing else at home. So they come out on the streets. Where the real kid is, he's in his house, with you there, where he can't hide. Talking to a kid in his house, in his setting, where you've removed him from all the street trappings is where you see the true kid. |
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| How Did You Create Interest In Community Policing? | |||
| Looking back at the way we tried to sell community policing was by asking: "What type of job satisfaction do you get going from Point A to Point B just answering radio calls?" Now when you're assigned to a neighborhood, you're about solving problems and there's a lot of tremendous satisfaction in going home at the end of the day or week, and knowing that you're making a difference in the life of a neighborhood. When you talk to cops, they become cops because they want to make a difference in people's lives. What happens is that along the way, we destroy that idealism by the way we manage our police officers. So you get back to basics. Why do most people go into police work? To help people. That's what cops want to be about–helping people. [ top ] |
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| Download the entire FAQ |  FAQ 1-6 | FAQ 7-11 | FAQ 12-17  |
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