Strategy #9
Community Involvement
Become involved in the community to understand and serve it better.
Background
Law enforcement exists to serve the community by preserving the peace, saving lives, protecting property, and improving the quality of life. To effectively accomplish these responsibilities, agencies must interact with the communities they serve. Traffic safety makes a positive contribution towards achieving these goals. While law enforcement agencies generally recognize the importance of community involvement and implement programs such as community policing, barriers continue to exist between some communities and law enforcement.
Although many communities express concern over criminal activity, they may not consider the positive effects traffic safety efforts have on crime or how they save lives and reduce injuries to members of the community. Community liaison provides an excellent opportunity to conduct significant public education about the importance of traffic safety initiatives.
Actions
- Identify the diverse communities within the agency’s jurisdiction on a continuous basis. These communities are more apt to be distinguished by economic status, language, ethnicity, race, or other commonalties, than by older, geographic names or districts.
- Update or develop policy that ensures liaison and involvement with various communities within the agency’s jurisdiction. This involvement will provide the respective communities and the agency the opportunity to discuss local needs from a variety of perspectives.
- Review policies to ensure that they are responsive to the needs and demands of the various communities within the agency’s jurisdiction.
- Ensure full commitment and involvement of the agency by providing leadership and support for all programs, including traffic safety, developed to address community issues.
- Evaluate traffic programs to determine the effectiveness of each one. Enhance if possible those programs that have shown a level of success, and reconfigure or eliminate those programs that have been ineffective.
- Identify key people and organizations within the community who can assist the agency in forming a relationship with the community. See resource list provided below.
- Consider using all avenues of outreach, such as hospitals, pediatricians, trauma centers, safety coalitions, schools, neighborhood watch groups, and churches, to broaden the community outreach approach. Use these contacts to identify problems and implement solutions for effective traffic safety programs.
- Customize solutions to the individual community, and strive for community ownership.
- Share the results of community-oriented programs with the community.
- Establish multidisciplinary task forces to address traffic safety from a variety of perspectives, including: enforcement; judiciary; signing, striping, and engineering; emergency response; and public education and awareness. Encourage the task force members to identify problems, then recommend and implement solutions.
Benefits
- Community members who are recognized as individuals, rather than as an invisible part of the jurisdiction, are apt to be more willing to participate in problem identification and resolution.
- Community participation in policy-making decisions will assist law enforcement agencies in gaining community support, and will help inspire community understanding, acceptance, and compliance.
- Involvement with the community will result in continual refinement of policies and programs to better address their issues.
- Using all available resources will enhance access to the community. People with diverse backgrounds can assist both the community and the agency in understanding various issues.
- Multidisciplinary task forces can accomplish far more by working together than an agency or organization can accomplish on its own.
Other Considerations
- A commitment to the various communities within an agency’s jurisdiction can be time-consuming and may not produce immediate results.
- Officers may need training to recognize and be sensitive to the unique factors and customs of a particular community. They may also need training in coalition building and the dynamics of group leadership
- The agency and its officers may receive criticism and challenges from the community.
- “Territorial” issues may arise when a task force assesses traffic safety from a variety of perspectives. Resistance to one person’s making suggestions about another’s area of expertise can usually be overcome if a cooperative, rather than adversarial, atmosphere can be established.
- When seeking funding for traffic safety programs, agencies should collaborate with their governor’s highway safety office or through other federal, state, and private grant sources.