The principle that the police service ought to seek the consent of the community and meet public expectations is important in terms of legitimacy and operational effectiveness.

Community policing can be defined in terms of principles, such as a devolution of power and responsibility to the local level, public consultation, and the involvement of citizens.

Other approaches explain community policing in terms of the types of outcome that it produces rather than conceiving of policing primarily in terms of crime control and law. Community policing establishes outcomes relating to the fear of crime, quality of service, and improving life chances for local communities, and so establishes a much broader remit for the police.

Another approach stresses that community policing programmes have developed, in Britain, as a reaction to dissatisfaction that had developed from the late 1960s, as chang­ing police practices had led to a deterioration in community relations. Coupled with concerns about malpractice and rising crime rates, these created deteriorating prospects for the police and community policing was pursued in order to salvage police legitimacy.

In practice, community policing often entails enhanced consultation with local communities. This can be a formal legal requirement or a matter of providing informal contacts for officers to consult local people as part of their routine work.

Community policing has aimed to bridge the reassurance gap, whereby declining levels of crime, noted by successive British Crime Surveys, have not been mirrored in public perceptions, which have held that crime rates continue to rise. In tandem with an increasing deployment of Police Community Support Officers, the Neighbourhood Policing programme intends to promote high-visibility policing as one means of providing for public reassurance.

In addition to providing for high-visibility policing, the NP programme claims to give communities influence over local agendas and opportunities for joint interventions to tackle problems, as well as make police answerable. This is related to the government commitment to the ‘Big Society’ and principles of localism.

Community policing has often been marginalised by a dominant sub-cultural under­standing of what constitutes ‘real police work’, which tends to be defined in narrow crime control, law enforcement terms. Such cultural values reflect a more general organisational tendency to under-resource and under-value community policing.

Community policing projects have been exported from the USA and Britain to many developing countries, but often these have been less than successful as they have been introduced into social, political and economic contexts that are not conducive to developing civil society relations with the police service.

Further challenges relate to the nature of communities, which tend to offer a fragmented, contradictory and imperfect knowledge of local crime problems. It is unlikely that community consultation, no matter how effective, would produce a coherent programme of action.

Community policing programmes cast the role of the police service in broad terms, often relating to enhancing social cohesion or improving the quality of life for local residents. This poses challenges, since the police service, or criminal justice agencies more widely, might not be well-placed to address criminogenic factors.

More fundamentally, the devolution of policing to local levels has been in tension with the growing importance of key national and transnational policing arrangements.