Abstract
The purpose of this article is fourfold: (1) to emphasize the role of community policing as an important faction of society, (2) to examine officers’ perceptions of their personal safety while performing their daily job/tasks, (3) to explore how the perceptions of the officers perceivably affect their ability to be effective and efficient while performing their jobs, and (4) to examine the extent of officer tragedy taking place in American society. We propose a model that will assist agencies in providing optimal training that could serve to make officers feel safer while performing commendable work. Community policing is defined by Meese (1994) and Moore & 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. The authors went on to suggest that the risk of a fatal incident for law enforcement personnel and firefighters is three times greater than for all other workers. Although we are intrigued with officer/community interaction(s), this work focuses primarily on police safety.
