Abstract
The purpose of this article is threefold: (1) to emphasize the role of community policing as an important faction of society; (2) to examine officers’ perceptions of their experiences of working with citizens who have Alzheimer’s disease and/or severe memory loss; and (3) to explore how the perceptions of the officers perceivably affect the officers’ ability to be effective, efficient, and safe while performing their jobs. In an effort to pull all of the author’s intentions together, a model will be proposed, the MEMORY Model, that will assist agencies in providing optimal training that would serve to make officers feel safer while performing commendable work. Community policing is defined by Meese (1993) and Moore and Trojanowicz (1988) as the use of sophisticated investigative problem-solving techniques while interacting cooperatively with community institutions such as families, schools, neighborhood associations, merchant groups, and social service agencies to create safe, secure communities. Although the primary responsibility of officers is to serve, protect, and create a safe community, Clarke and Zak (1999) suggested that in every community in the United States, law enforcement personnel and firefighters regularly put their lives in harm’s way to protect the public. One segment of the community that creates a potential risk is citizens with Alzheimer’s disease. Gillick (1998) defines Alzheimer’s disease as a disease of the nervous system characterized by loss of certain mental capacities. The Florida Gulf Coast Alzheimer’s Association (2006) suggested that a person with Alzheimer’s disease usually has a gradual decline in mental functions in which the first stages include a slight loss in memory such as the inability to remember the names of people or objects. The Association went on to imply that as the disease develops, a person loses the ability to carry out familiar tasks, to reason, and to exercise judgment (p. 2). With the impairment of judgment and deterioration in the ability to reason, one can see the potential for serious misunderstandings when this population has encounters with law enforcement officers. With the increased potential for negative encounters, Price (2000) noted an alarming fact in that the vast majority of these people live in the community, not at a care-giving facility. With the above being noted, this author would contend that as the elderly population is the fastest growing U.S. age group, the number of people with Alzheimer’s disease is increasing as is the likelihood that law enforcement officers will encounter citizens who have this disability.