The experience of policing shows that it is effective only with the support and trust of the society and the creation of partnerships between the police and the population. In developed countries, there is a process of improving the interaction between the people and the police so that the rights and freedoms of people could be ensured by creating a system of their protection from criminal encroachments, which results in the growth of public confidence in the police (Kwak, Dierenfeldt, & McNeeley, 2019).
The above means that the main task of a police officer should be to establish a partnership between the police and society, in which all state structures and the population actively cooperate in solving problems of ensuring public peace and law and order. Hence, the first crucial aspect of the instruction is to convey to Curaçao citizens the idea that the police protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual, especially human life, preventing and solving crimes, providing assistance and services to society in order to reduce the level of fear of crime, the possibility of bodily harm and the emergence of social unrest (Papp et al., 2019).
Given the fact that social networks are tight and everyone knows each other in Curaçao, people should clearly understand the goals that the police aim to achieve. To that end, public dialogue is to be established – the official police website should contain elaborated profiles of the employees with links to their pages on social media. Citizens should feel free to reach a police representative and to use modern, convenient, and easy-to-use tools.
Then, the main prerequisite for partnership between police officers and civilians is the apparent necessity to improve the extent of public involvement in ensuring security and public order. The quality of citizens’ trust in the police is the basis of the partnership model when the police serve people (Jackson & Bradford, 2019; Pickett & Ryon, 2017). The effectiveness of power in a democratic state depends on the quality of its interaction with this civil society.
With the partnership model, the population not only directly participates in the protection of law and order but also timely informs the police about all situations that may threaten them, which, in turn, increases the efficiency of the police (Hamm, Trinker, & Carr, 2017). The latter must be accessible to the population, know the people in the territory under its jurisdiction and be known to it, respond to the needs of the people, listen to the problems of citizens, attract and mobilize the population, and report on their actions and the results achieved. In this regard, police representatives should provide monthly reports on their cooperation with citizens, which will contain the highlights of the previous month and goals for the following one.
The qualitative solution by the police to the tasks facing it depends on the personal qualities of the employees, their general and legal culture, the level of legal awareness and professional skill, and the ability to establish relationships with the population (Nanes, 2018). These characteristics serve as factors not only for adherence to law but also for the effective work of the police in ensuring the protection of people. The police are obliged to carry out this activity both on their own initiative and at the request of citizens who are entitled to independently protect their violated rights and freedoms.
Among the crucial aspects of a police officer’s activities, openness and publicity should be consolidated (Tengpongsthorn, 2017). It might be stated that the former is a public authority that is embodied in the capability of an interested person to see and understand the essence of solutions and documentation within the given scope – that is, to clearly understand the content of police work. Publicity, on the other hand, implies respect for fundamental rights. It is manifested in citizens’ possibility to take part in a dialogue with society, and the media and to cooperate with them. Such a state of affairs may be established due to the mentioned public dialogue and contacts of the police with citizens; in this case, people will inevitably report on the illegal drug traffic and strikes, which are severe issues for Curaçao.
One of the directions for the implementation of the above principle is the creation of public councils to jointly defend common interests in the law enforcement sphere. By carrying out the function of mediation between the state and civil society, public councils are called upon to ensure the coordination of socially significant interests of citizens and public authorities in order to maintain law and order and public safety (Sestoft, Hansen, & Christensen, 2017).
The tasks of public control over the actions of police officers include the process of assessing the work of the police, a positive impact on its activities, increasing the level of public confidence in the police actions, as well as ensuring close interaction of the police with people; maintaining transparency and openness; the formation of intolerance in society towards the corrupt behavior of police officers; strengthening the confidence of the police itself in the initiatives of the public, mechanisms of public control.
References
Hamm, J., Trinker, R., & Carr, D. (2017). Fair process, trust, and cooperation: moving toward an integrated framework of police legitimacy. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 44(9), 1183–1212.
Jackson, J., & Bradford, B. (2019). Blurring the distinction between empirical and normative legitimacy? A methodological commentary on ‘police legitimacy and citizen cooperation in China’. Asian Journal of Criminology, 14, 265–289.
Kwak, H., Dierenfeldt, R., & McNeeley, S. (2019). The code of the street and cooperation with the police: Do codes of violence, procedural injustice, and police ineffectiveness discourage reporting violent victimization to the police? Journal of Criminal Justice, 60, 25–34.
Nanes, M. (2018). Policing in divided societies: Officer inclusion, citizen cooperation, and crime prevention. Conflict Management and Peace Science, 37(5), 580–604.
Papp, J., Smith, B., Wareham, J., & Wu, Y. (2019). Fear of retaliation and citizen willingness to cooperate with police. Policing and society, 29(6), 623–639.
Pickett, J., & Ryon, S. (2017). Procedurally just cooperation: Explaining support for due process reforms in policing. Journal of Criminal Justice, 48, 9–20.
Sestoft, D., Hansen, S., & Christensen, A. (2017). The police, social services, and psychiatry (PSP) cooperation as a platform for dealing with concerns of radicalization. International Review of Psychiatry, 29(4), 350–354.
Tengpongsthorn, W. (2017). Factors affecting the effectiveness of police performance in Metropolitan Police Bureau. Kasetsart Journal of Social Sciences, 38(1), 38–44.