Let’s target safe community

Wasilla’s new police chief says he wants to strengthen the department’s ties to the community.

Mike Hughes is planning to set up programs to bring the community into the downtown police station and share some insight into how and why police do what they do. He’s talking about Neighborhood Watch programs and a formalized system for addressing quality-of-life issues in the city.

All of these ideas can be summed up with something that has been around for decades and has become almost a buzzword in law enforcement circles — community policing. It even has its own Wikipedia page.

The idea is that getting the public involved makes police more effective. Who better, after all, to point out trouble spots in a city than people who live there? And if there is no trust in the community and nobody talks to police, it’s not hard to see how law enforcement breaks down. Crimes go unsolved or criminals go free because witnesses won’t step forward.

The community policing model, Hughes said, has proved so effective that even the nation’s largest police departments, responsible for huge metropolitan areas, have adopted it. The idea there involves breaking a big city into smaller neighborhoods and having smaller units functioning almost like small-town departments in the middle of the big city.

But Hughes also said there is a danger here. It’s trendy for departments to wear the community policing label. The police forces want to be seen as adhering to its philosophies, but many often don’t back up that lip service with action.

Wasilla presents its own set of challenges. Any regular reader of the police blotter already knows that probably the top-reported crime coming from WPD is shoplifting, followed by traffic infractions. This makes sense. Wasilla is the Valley’s retail hub, hence more attractive for shoplifters. That commerce draws motorists to the area, few of whom actually live inside city limits, hence more traffic infractions.

While sometimes Wasilla is described more as a retail destination than a community, we know it is a community of people who care about the quality of life there. The police department is part of that equation.

Hughes isn’t the first Wasilla chief to recognize the value of courting support from the public. Nor, as far as we know, did his predecessors fail in that regard.

Still, when your job is to hold people accountable for breaking the law, making enemies is not difficult. Keeping the community on your side seems like a challenging task, to say the least.

Here’s hoping Hughes will back his ideas up with action and that community policing in Wasilla will be much more than a politically correct slogan. That will take the police and members of the community working together to make Wasilla an even better place to live.