Solution Oriented Policing (SOP) is the Rancho Cucamonga Police Departments name for the philosophy better known as Community Oriented Policing and Problems Solving or COPPS. This is a management style and organizational design that promotes proactive problem solving and police-community partnerships to address the causes of crime and fear as well as other community issues. Community Policing is the continuous practice of problem solving by use of Solution Oriented Policing. It has activated a proactive form of policing to augment the traditional reactive police practice. It is not soft on crime as believed by some, but actually tougher because police build on already existing methods.

DEFINITION: Community Policing is a philosophy, management style, and organizational design that promotes proactive problem-solving and police-community partnerships to address the causes of crime and fear as well as other community issues.

Problem-solving refers to a process of identifying problems and priorities through coordinated community/police needs assessments; collecting and analyzing information concerning the problem in a thorough, though not necessarily complicated, manner; developing or facilitating responses that are innovative and tailor-made with the best potential for eliminating or reducing the problem and, finally, evaluating the response to determine its effectiveness and modifying it as necessary.

Community partnership is a flexible term referring to any given combination of neighborhood residents, schools, churches, businesses, community-based organizations and government agencies who are working cooperatively with the police to resolve identified problems that impact or interest them.

The COPPS Philosophy:

• Reassesses who is responsible for public safety and redefines the roles and relationships between the police and the community to require shared ownership, shared decision making and shared accountability.

• COPPS redefines the roles and relationships between the community and the police by recognizing that the community shares responsibility with the police for social order. Both must work cooperatively to identify problems and develop proactive community-wide solutions.

• Strengthens and empowers community-based efforts.

• A new view of community is emerging in society - a view that advances the importance of using an asset or strength based model. This asset-based model recognizes that communities are naturally resilient and have the ability to identify and solve their own problems. Community policing challenges police and civic officials to provide the leadership and develop the partnerships necessary to empower communities to be healthy and safe.

• Increases understanding and trust between police and community members.

• Inherent in any successful partnership is a sense of equality, mutual respect and trust. Assigning officers to one beat for extended time periods (beat integrity) and promoting ongoing daily, direct and positive contact - including partnership efforts - between the police and the community fosters understanding and trust. These actions also develop mutual ownership and support. Residents become more willing to cooperate with the police and provide the information necessary to resolve crime and other community problems.

• Shifts the focus of police work from responding to individual incidents to addressing problems identified by the community as well as the police, emphasizing the use of proactive problem-solving approaches to supplement traditional law-enforcement methods.

• Responding to calls for service - individual incidents - has become the primary work of police with the over-riding goal being to respond with increased speed and efficiency. Public expectations of police and the 911 system have perpetuated this posture, which has also largely prevented officers from dealing with more than the surface manifestations of crime. Shifting from an incident orientation to a problem orientation requires looking for underlying conditions, as well as patterns and relationships among incidents, that might identify common causal factors. These underlying problems, rather than individual incidents, become the main units of police work.

The COPPS Management Style:

• Requires the buy-in of top management of the police and other local government agencies, as well as a new leadership style that makes the most effective use of human resources within a department and community.

• Police and civic leaders must make more effective use of the human resources within agencies and the community by encouraging creativity and risk taking. This requires value-driven leadership rather than a rule-driven management approach. Adapted from the private sector, the "Quality Leadership /Management" model focuses on actively modifying and improving the systems that serve us.

• Requires constant flexibility to respond to all emerging issues.

• By most estimates, only 25% of the work of police officers actually involves enforcing the law or arresting people. Yet, traditional law enforcement equips the police with very few tools, other than the authority to arrest and incarcerate, to deal with the broad scope of police business.

• Requires knowledge of available community resources and how to access and mobilize them, as well as the ability to develop new resources within the community.

• Successful community policing and problem solving efforts require awareness and mobilization of all available and untapped resources within the department, other local agencies and the community at large.

The COPPS Organizational Design:

• Decentralizes and de-specializes police services/ operations/management, where possible; relaxes the traditional "chain of command" and encourages innovation and creative problem solving by all.

• To ensure that there is an understanding and responsiveness to neighborhood issues and concerns, police services should be decentralized wherever possible to provide community-based services, driven from the bottom-up, with a customer orientation. In addition, community officers should be triage-type generalists who take ownership of their particular community beat. While specialization is necessary in some instances (e.g., child sexual abuse, gangs), de-specialization can often free up personnel for community beats and improve officer communication, innovation and ownership of beat areas.

• This approach makes full use of the knowledge, skill and expertise throughout the police organization (with-out regard to rank) and the community at large. Beat officers, as the front-line service providers, must be empowered and authorized to manage their areas—answer calls, know the people and facilitate problem solving and crime prevention strategies

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