Quality of life policing in broadacre housing estates

The terms “community policing”, “quality of life policing” and “reassurance policing” are commonly used to denote population-based crime prevention strategies, models and programs. Essentially, these are strategies that stress greater interaction with the community regarding crime control and prevention, with the aim to improve residents’ sense of security, reduce anti-social behaviour and offences that affect quality of life, improve confidence in the police, and increase the capacity of communities to ‘co-produce’ law and order (Innes and Roberts, 2008). While community policing (CP) is thought to be a catch-all phrase, there are significant differences between the goals of various community-based strategies. This chapter seeks to highlight that, in some communities, particularly disadvantaged communities, community policing is reduced to “quality of life policing” (QOLP), in part because the wider goals of CP are unattainable without significant prior investment in solutions to non-criminal problems (such as education, health and welfare). In these vulnerable communities, such as broadacre public housing estates, the community-based policing practices most commonly adopted coincide with the limited goals and objectives of QOLP, which require little or no community consultation or engagement.