News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Retired police administrator Wayne Inman calls himself a "champion" of community policing.
Inman, who now lives in the Sisters area, is the former assistant Chief of the Portland Police Bureau and retired as
chief of police in Billings, Montana. In those cities, he saw community policing pay big dividends both for police and for citizens.
On Monday, May 19, Inman shared his vision of community policing with officers from the Sisters Police Department and other local agencies in a training session set up last month by former Sisters Police Chief David Haynes.
Inman's definition of community policing is simple: the police and the community form a partnership to solve problems within the community. Police departments promote strategies to reduce crime and the fear of crime among citizens.
The philosophy may be simple, but it represents a big step beyond the role of traditional police departments, who see their job as making arrests and putting criminals behind bars.
That's an important part of police work, Inman told the officers, but it's not enough.
"We could never, ever have enough police officers on the street," Inman asserted, "we could never have eno
ugh jail space to solve our crime problems by locking more people up."
That means officers must work on creative solutions to get at the root cause of problems.
A new family moves into the neighborhood and problems crop up - noise, junk cars in the yard, a rash of burglaries. What can officers do?
They can mobilize the neighbors both to provide information on the situation and to create a united front to preserve the livability of the neighborhood.
A chronic domestic abuse situation? Bring available social resources into the picture to get at the root of the problem. Get a battered woman into the COBRA program; get a batterer into a drug/alcohol treatment program or an anger management program. Keep communication open so that problems can be defused before they explode.
Inman posed these and other scenarios to local officers, asking them for creative solutions. The officers' responses made it clear that, whether it has an official name or not, the philosophy of community policing is already at work in Sis
ters, Black Butte Ranch, Camp Sherman, and throughout the region.
"I've always believed that we're doing community policing. It just hasn't been called community policing," said Lieutenant Rich Shawver, acting Sisters police chief. "I think we have officers that are willing to go that extra mile."
Going the extra mile is the key to successful community policing.
"The last thing I want to hear is 'there's nothing we can do,' " Inman said. "I don't accept that.
"Your job as police officers is to work for the livability of your community. Your job is done when the problem is solved."
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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