One day after D.C. Police Chief Robert Contee announced he’d be moving on to a new job at the FBI, he also unveiled a new community policing initiative aimed at reducing crime through deeper neighborhood involvement.
The department is calling it the Focused Patrol and Community Engagement Strategy, and Contee said he’s confident the program will produce results.
“This isn’t just putting someone on a corner to deter crime, or handing out tickets and making arrests,” Contee said during a news conference Thursday afternoon. “This is about officers getting out of their vehicles and engaging with the community.”
The program is designed to foster deeper, more trusting relationships in neighborhoods. Officers will be assigned a regular beat to patrol, often on bikes or on foot — in a much more visible fashion.
Contee said the department will rely on data gathered by officers with boots on the ground, who will “track the impact they’re making” to inform future policing.
“Beyond holding people accountable, our officers are problem solvers,” Contee said, adding he wants officers to become those trusted community figureheads who people can turn to with more than just crime problems.
Contee said people should trust officers to be doing things such as “checking in with businesses and apartment complexes, reporting quality of life issues to 311.”
This program is also different from previous strategies, such as the Summer Crime Initiative, which only saw officers deployed to certain neighborhoods to increase presence in problem areas.
“This is intentional, community-focused policing in all quadrants of the city,” he said.
D.C. police said this focused patrol program will also be a better use of its workforce, and could even enable officers to respond more quickly to incidents happening in their individualized areas.
“This is a new look of policing where we are constantly evolving, making tweaks,” Contee said.
Overseeing the launch of the Focused Patrol and Community Engagement Strategy will be one of Contee’s biggest final acts before his last day in office June 3.
