| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Proactive policing, or police service is also commonly known as ‘community policing’ at Grayville and is understood by Grayville officers to be the reverse of reactive policing principles and techniques. It revolves around the prevention of offence events by addressing the underlying issues connected to the occurrence of crime events. Police officers, together with community members, seek to extend and defend an existing state of community order before it is threatened by criminal disruption by conducting crime prevention programmes and activities before crimes occur or reoccur. If a crime event has already occurred, a law enforcement response is used in conjunction with a response that attempts to identify the underlying reasons for the occurrence. Relevant community groups are involved in the process of identifying the causes of offences and finding ways to prevent their reoccurrence in the future. Community policing is described in the 2000 Grayville mission statement as:
It is widely acknowledged by analysts commenting generally on Australian police departments (Cartner, personal communication, 2000; Bingham, 1996; Palmer, 1999) and by those looking exclusively at particular departments (e.g., Prior, 1997, pp. 76–79) that community or proactive policing is rhetorically supported but practically absent from police departments nationally. All the publicly accessible information about Grayville heavily emphasizes the department’s commitment to community policing, but none of the operational officers with whom I had contact during fieldwork agreed that community policing took place ‘on the street’. Cartner (2000) argues that the primary reason for the absence of community policing practice is structural.