Effective police / community relations are the cornerstone of the prevention and detection of crime

Abstract

The title of this essay certainly invites us first to understand mainly what is really meant by effective police, and community relations and how these together can work in harmony to achieve the best results in the prevention and detection of crime in today's society. There are certainly various ways how police effectiveness can be measured and one of them is by comparing the actual achievements of a force with the results it was seeking to achieve. In very simple terms, police effectiveness is a comparison between the results that the Chief Constable (Police Commissioner) hoped to achieve during the year and the results that were actually achieved by his officers. Therefore one can deduce a definition of effective police as the progress of the police which has been achieved towards a given objective. Now if the results are good then there is no point of trying to discuss this essay, however it is today quite true in many police departments that the results of the measurement of police effectiveness are invariably not particularly satisfactory.