The policing method employed at Storm Lake City in rural Northwest Iowa has experienced significant changes in its demographics making it necessary for the city’s police to make significant changes in the way they handle policing functions. The city has risen to become home to many agriculture-based businesses and has sprouted due to a strong public school system including the vibrant parochial school systems, and Buena Vista University College. It is also a commercial and business hub for northwest Iowa due to the national companies that are hosted in this city. Meatpacking plants are some of the town’s major employers among others. The city’s population has changed from 8,000 to 12,000 due to its proximity to other urban centers and big cities (Prosser, 2007). These changes made the area to attract people from new cultures and languages. The police had to adapt to the growing need of a diverse city.
The new policing method that has been adopted has a number of strengths. These include the recent hiring of multilingual community service officers. The multilingual community service officers are able to connect with the different people from diverse ethnic backgrounds. They are able to intercept and communicate with suspected criminals with their ability to speak different languages. Secondly, the new police strategy has advantages in terms of the creation of multilingual forms and street signs that include the use of languages such as Spanish and Lao. This strategy has been a strength that has minimized offending, especially offenses related to traffic laws and trespass laws (Grabosky, 2009). The people who cannot understand English are catered for. The other strength of the strategy that has been used by the police is increased investment in training in the diverse cultures of residents through attending community meetings. The last strength of the SLPD is the establishment of local and statewide diversity committees and task forces, as well as, the employment of a list of volunteer interpreters for a variety of dialects is now available to police officers.
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On the contrary, the policing methods that have been employed come with a number of weaknesses. The first one is that the police have had to work with people who do not have policing skills such as volunteer interpreters. This gets to affect the quality of handling investigations. The second weakness is that the methods employed by the police are expensive in the sense that the department has had to employ new people and staff to fill the gaps. Conclusively, a keen look at the strategy that has been undertaken by the police at Storm Lake city police department reveals that the strategy greatly compares with the ones used in other multilingual cities in the US. For instance, the police in New Mexico have also employed a similar strategy to handle the diverse community and language groups that are located in the area. In the end, the focus of the police has been to ensure that there is effectiveness in the way policing is managed in the area. Changing demographics at times demands the police to take on different strategies to deal with offending. The focus of the police is to ensure that the policing needs of the different people who are present within the department’s jurisdiction are fulfilled (Prosser, 2007). Through taking on measures such as working with translators, and community groups, the police are able to get in touch with the communities and facilitate the enforcement of laws in the area.
References
Grabosky, P. (2009). Community Policing and Peacekeeping. New York: CRC Press.
Prosser, M. (2007). Policing a Diverse Community, Police Chief Journal, 74 (1), pp, 27-30.
