Former mayor to speak on King
The man known as the “father of community policing” says Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have been a proponent because his philosophies were in line with the concept.
Lee Patrick Brown, a criminologist, former police officer, police commissioner, college teacher, author and the first black mayor of Houston, said, “Dr. King was an apostle of nonviolence, which is the philosophy of community policing.”
Further, he said, community policing relies on “the role of the police in protecting the constitutional rights of all citizens and the community’s interest in controlling crime.” Brown will be the keynote speaker at the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Luncheon, sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of New Mexico. The event will be held in the Rio Rancho High School cafeteria on Monday.
Community policing is far more than just having officers walk a beat in a specific neighborhood, where they get to know the residents on a personal basis.
“Community policing is a partnership between the police and the community, in which they identify problems in the neighborhoods, and design solutions to those problems and then implement those solutions,” Brown said. “And, if those solutions don’t work, you go back to the drawing board and find ones that do.”
King, he said, “stood for bringing together people of all races to make life better” and he accomplished this using the principles of nonviolence modeled by India’s Mahatma Ghandi during the independence movement in British-ruled India.
Community policing, Brown said, has the same objective of bringing people together, and improving the lives of those people and those communities.
Brown said his luncheon address will focus on King’s life and on community policing as “a means of addressing not just crime, but other problems in the community.” He said he also will share some of his experiences as the first AfricanAmerican police chief in Houston, the first African-American police commissioner in Atlanta and New York, and the first African-American mayor of Houston.
As mayor of Houston, Brown said he took community policing a step further with “neighborhood-oriented government,” in which the city was divided into 88 neighborhoods, each with a neighborhood council that was charged with “identifying problems in those neighborhoods which it wanted the city to address.”
Brown subsequently gathered the appropriate city officials and department heads to meet with the neighborhood councils “and find solutions to address the problems.”
Had community policing been used in communities where police shootings of black residents led to protests and riots, Brown said, those shootings might have been avoided in the first place. “You’re less likely to shoot someone who you know,” he said.