An Assessment of the Practices and Challenges to Community Policing:The case of Oromia Regional State

Community policing is a philosophy of policing that seeks creative ways to fight crime and maintain of order in neighborhoods though a number of challenges are affecting it. Besides, the practices of community policing in Oromia Regional State have not been so fararticulated, and these challenges are also inadequate in the scientific literatures. The objective of this study is to assess the practices and challenges of community policing in Oromia Regional State based on primary and secondary data. Both qualitative and quantitative research approaches were employed.

Abstract

Community policing is a philosophy of policing that seeks creative ways to fight crime and maintain of order in neighborhoods though a number of challenges are affecting it. Besides, the practices of community policing in Oromia Regional State have not been so fararticulated, and these challenges are also inadequate in the scientific literatures. The objective of this study is to assess the practices and challenges of community policing in Oromia Regional State based on primary and secondary data. Both qualitative and quantitative research approaches were employed. The study used both an exploratory and descriptive research designs. The data collected from key informants, focus group discussions and surveys have been collected from five clustered zones were critically analyzed. All questionnaires from the 389 respondents were found eligible for analysis. The findings show that there are various practices of community policing in various study areas. These include low periodic evaluation and consultation culture with the communities, infrequent problem solving, poor mobilization of communities and weak  response to the communities request. Besides, due to lack of clear structure and holistic integration towards community policing, the practices of police and public partnership have not been deeply rooted. Moreover, the cultures of stake pooling were poor, community policing procedure and mandates are not clear and lack of necessary focus by local government and community policing in Oromia Regional State. Appropriate community policing strategy must be in a place that will facilitate and enforce police public 
partnership, bottom-up, decentralized, and democratic structure and citizen-focused that community policing should be taken into account.