지역사회경찰활동 활성화를 위한 지역치안협의회 발전방안에 관한 연구

Abstract

The police have traditionally played a role of preventing crime through patrol and maintaining public safety and order in society. However, many studies since 1970's indicated that the mere efforts of police cannot completely prevent crimes and the police started to cope with crimes and chaos in cooperation with community. An approach to prevent crimes in cooperation with community to overcome the limitations of policing is called community policing, which is recently presented as nation-wide community-based local security activities in Korea supported by multiple agencies. In this respect, 'Community Safety Committee' launched to establish law and order as well as infrastructure of public order with the participation of local council, educational institution, press, and private organizations, led by the police and local autonomous entities, with the advent of Lee Myung-Bak's administration in 2008. For community safety committee, an integrated security network of Korean societies, to be in international step with community policing, it is recommended to improve the followings within the framework of essential elements of community policing, including strategy-oriented policing, neighborhood-oriented policing, problem-oriented policing, and ecentralization of policing. Firstly, most of the people concerned with community safety committee consider this meeting as a regular social gathering hosted by chief or head of local communities, and are not serving to integrated and systematic community policing to control crimes and disorder. Regular check up on the progress of community public safety plan by each participating agency is required to work on an improvement to the above issues. Meanwhile, it is imperative to dispatch police with professional knowledge in community crime and order to local governments, offer counseling service for establishment of community safety plan, train related public officials, and found central strategy team in charge of information sharing for successful cooperation between the police and community. Secondly, neighborhood-oriented policing is not in full operation due, in large part, to the little interest in communication between the police and local residents as well as the failure of local residents to participate in policing. Then the present consultative committee, mainly comprised of heads of aided organizations from government, is supposed to hire those who represent local residents such as town foreman, so that they could directly listen to the opinions of local residents at the community safety committee to share the problems of the community. Thirdly, community safety committee pays more attention to show off tangible results of chief of organization rather than to understand the problems of community crime and disorder, which leads to another failure to perform problem-oriented policing. Members of consultative committee will have to find out the loopholes of community safety in regular series to substantialize the meeting. Fourthly, community safety committee takes paramilitary form of organization led by official commands for internal employees, mainly focusing on networking local community for organization. However, it is indispensable to perform policing activities suited to local situations by delegating decision-making system of the police to middle management for revitalization of community policing through community safety committee, and then take internal police's level of job satisfaction into consideration. Provided that the above issues are settled down successfully, community safety committee will be able to promise local residents a high level of safety from crimes and accidents, serving to core roles of community policing based on cooperation between the police and community.