Community-Oriented Policing in Contemporary Democratic Societies

Contemporary democratic societies are struggling to change the public perception of public order institutions and models, in the context of a significant gap between the decrease in crime rates, on the one hand, and the inexplicable increase in the feeling of insecurity in public opinion, on the other. Efforts in this direction have been stimulated, in recent decades, by events with a huge media impact, with a dominant pattern: excessive force actions by police officers directed against alleged criminals were followed by riots of minority groups and by socio-political movements such as Black Lives Matter; all these events are questioning not only the manner of police action, but also the critical accumulation of cleavages in the democratic world. A solution for a more efficient and at the same time more democratic management of public order problems seems to be the adoption of the community-oriented policing model.