Norristown police: Engaging community works
Pottstown and Norristown are the two largest urban areas in Montgomery County and share many of the same challenges, particularly when it comes to crime.
In the wake of the wave of violence in Pottstown which culminated in last month’s arrests of more than 30 people involved in an apparent gang war, a community meeting about crime focused on what police and authorities are doing now, and how citizens can help.
Norristown Police Chief Mark Talbot Sr. has been asking that question since he took over leadership of that department two years ago, and he’s starting to see answers get results.
In the last two years, major crimes in Norristown have dropped by 20 percent.
In a recent interview with
The Mercury, Talbot talked about his department’s approach to crime and how the community plays a crucial part in reducing crime.
Taking a different path
The “war on crime” doesn’t work, Talbot says.
That’s the conclusion he’s reached after 23 years in law enforcement and nearly two years heading the police force in Montgomery County’s largest borough.
Talbot said he is no longer interested in pursuing the same old course — “locking up bad guys” — and hoping that this time it works.
Instead, he has embarked on a different path — one aimed at bringing the community into the policing process to an unprecedented extent.
Perhaps the most remarkable example of this new approach is opening his weekly strategy and status meetings with his commanders to the public four times a year and inviting community members not only to attend, but also to participate.
“The public meeting is the same as the one I have with staff. I ask where we are with big cases, ‘Did you follow up with that witness, how many times?’” Talbot told The Mercury.
“You can’t shut people out of the conversation. If they feel like you’re not listening to them, they will find another way to be heard, whether in a letter to the editor, or they will use social media,” said Talbot. “We would rather they come to us first.”
Talbot says his department uses social media as a supplement, not a substitute for getting to know neighborhoods.
“We use social media, but if information is transferring back and forth without having that personal connection, it is going to be of limited usefulness,” he said.
“You can’t fight crime by remote control,” Talbot said. “Social media is useful as a branch of the tree, but it’s not the trunk. The trunk has to be real connections in community.”
Those connections are built slowly, steadily and in uncounted small ways, he said.
“If someone breaks into your house in Norristown, several officers will conduct a neighborhood canvas in a very big way,” Talbot explained. “They will knock on every door in that block and maybe the next one, and the one after that. And they will tell you why they’re there, what’s going on and ask if you have seen anything, whether you know anyone in the neighborhood who would do such a thing.”
The investment in this kind of boots-on-theground approach pays dividends in the long run, Talbot says.
“If you talk to people in the neighborhood and tell them what’s going on, they will talk to you and tell you what they know,” said Talbot.
Changing perception of police
Talbot is hoping to make that fundamental change by changing how both his officers and the community perceive the role of policing.
“Conceptually, we need to accept that our job is not just to lock everyone up. We’ve been doing that for years and we’ve seen it doesn’t work,” Talbot said. “We incarcerate people at an absurd rate in this town and we’re still facing the same problems.”
What the majority of people in the community need, says Talbot, is to be engaged with their community and with their police department, with all of them working toward a common goal of a safer community.
“Tactically, you have to answer the question what part of the community
Norristown Police Department Chief Mark Talbot speaks at the start of the department’s quarterly COMPSTAT meeting with area residents at the Montgomery CountyNorristown Public Library in March.
needs our focus first and most,” he explained. “What are the crime hot spots? Every town has them and crime is not evenly spread out through any community, so why should your police resources be deployed that way?”
Those resources are not just police resources.
As an example, he said “we can help social services by helping to prioritize the work they do. If one of my officers have been to an address six times and each time it’s a domestic disturbance, there’s a real good chance they’re going to need children and youth there. So why not refer the situation to the agency that offers advice I’m not qualified to give?”
And sure, there may be push-back, but in the long run, police are often the first to recognize a problem developing — if they are connected to their community.
“Everyone is busy. Everyone is overworked, so we have to examine how we go about developing our priorities,” Talbot said.
‘First do no harm’
It’s part of a philosophy any doctor who has taken the Hippocratic oath would recognize — “first do no harm.”
“I mean who is more powerful than the police? We can do a lot of damage,” Talbot said. “We have badges and guns and we can legally take someone’s life.”
“So our philosophy is we take a ‘least harm’ approach,” Talbot explained. “I believe in the broken windows theory, that you address problems when they’re small, but that does not mean you arrest people for every little thing.”
So what does that mean on a practical day-to-day basis?
“If we can address a problem with a warning, we issue a warning. If we need to write a ticket, we write a ticket. If we can address it by asking nicely, we ask nicely,” Talbot explained.
“Understand, least harm goes all the way up to using deadly force. I am not a pacifist and I don’t think you can be and be in policing today,” said Talbot.
“You have to meet chaos with effectiveness,” Talbot said. “If you’re going to wait until things calm down before you start asking these questions, then you had better pack a lunch. You’re going to be waiting a long time.”
Talbot said success starts with a basic philosophy of accepting full responsibility for results.
“That means that myself and the Norristown Police Department at the end of the year, or even at the end of the day, accepts the fact that we’re responsible for crime and the quality of life in our community,” he said. “We don’t point to bad people doing bad things, or citizens not helping us enough. We own it. It starts with that.”
Talbot said he has explained this to his department in no uncertain terms.
“I don’t like the phrase ‘buy-in,’ because that suggests the possibility that you can say ‘no,’” Talbot said of the philosophy he has implemented in his department.
“We’re not volunteers and this is what everyone here will do. If you don’t like that, I’m sure there are plenty of places you can go where they will do things the way they’ve always done them,” Talbot said.
“Once you embrace that foundation, that we’re responsible, we can move on to asking ourselves what do we need to do to make this a safer community,” he said.
Understanding the community
The place to start is by understanding the reality with which that community lives, a lesson he said he learned as a police office in Reading. “You always start with community engagement and asking people in the community what their expectations are.”
Hopefully, those expectations are not that big drug busts will be undertaken to make things better, because, said Talbot, that’s one of the things that hasn’t been proven to work.
“So when you have a big drug bust and you take a million dollars worth of crack off the street, how come the price never goes up? Have what you’ve done really been effective?” he asked. “How come the price of a packet of heroin has never changed for my entire career?”
Instead, Talbot said, “our primary job is to change behaviors in ways that don’t destroy the neighborhood, to collaborate with other agencies in a systematic way, to know how to identify risky behaviors and situations before they spin out of control.”
He said “the neighborhoods are made safer when you decrease risky behaviors, you have to deal with harmful behaviors no matter who is engaged in them.”
“Everyone points to drugs and I’m not saying it’s not a problem, but really everyone is taking some sort of drug, but not all of them involve behaviors which are visible and can cause harm to others. Not all of them involve people shooting at each other with guns,” Talbot said.
Although Talbot says he wants to see another year of reduced crime and reduced complaints before he is willing to say his approach is working, he is already hearing from people who have made up their minds.
“The feedback I am getting is overwhelming,” Talbot said. “They feel something different is happening and they’re happy about it. They are much more likely to have contact with us when they haven’t done anything wrong.”
“People are telling us they feel safer now in Norristown than they have in a long time,” Talbot said.
“And not only do they feel safer, they feel a connection to the police department that they have never felt before,” he said.
“You can’t shut people out of the conversation. If they feel like you’re not listening to them, they will find another way to be heard. We would rather they come to us first.” Mark Talbot Sr., Norristown Police Chief