The topic
Community policing itself is not a fundamentally new strategy. It emerged in North America in the 1980s and arrived in Switzerland at the start of the 2000s. Nevertheless, this transcontinental journey was not all smooth sailing. Indeed, although the concept of community policing arrived easily enough, applying and implementing it have been and remain far more difficult.
In Switzerland today, community policing struggles to be seen as a legitimate innovative policing process, and it sometimes remains trapped in the municipal police practices of the past. Occasionally, it seems that community policing lacks credibility in the eyes of the police as well as those of the public. Nevertheless, at both the research level and in the field, experiences abroad have shown that community policing is the contemporary policing strategy which best responds to managing incivilities, antisocial behaviour, delinquency, social and cultural cohesion, and, as a consequence, the general feelings of insecurity that these problems engender.
Thus, although the basic concept of community policing seems to be known in Switzerland, its effective implementation and use (requiring the decisive involvement of other stakeholders) are still not occurring. For this reason, in order to increase efficiency (internally) and effectiveness (externally), community policing must become the main actor and coordinator of a public security partnership adapted to the Swiss context.
