Eugenia K. Guilmartin, Colonel, U.S. Army Military Police

ver the past decade, the U.S. military gained significant experience training civilian police in Iraq and Afghanistan; yet, many military professionals still lack a clear operational understanding of how police serve society. Ask military leaders, including those with extensive counterinsurgency and Foreign Internal Defense experience, what it means to police and the most common answers are tactical generalizations (e.g., “Policing is urban dismounted patrolling”) or oversimplifications (e.g., “Policing is what police do”). If pressed to apply an operational term, most equate policing with civil defense or offensive crime fighting; however, neither analogy is complete.

A failure to distinguish between policing and combat leads military trainers of civilian police forces down a path of inefficient efforts with inconsistent results. How does community policing differ from combat? Cincinnati Police Lieutenant Howard Rhatz defines effective community policing as “a commitment to solving community problems.”¹ His definition is remarkably similar to Sir Robert Peel’s, who told London police a century prior, “The police at all times should maintain a relationship with the public... the police are the public and the public are the police.”² The idea of a police officer as a problem solver is the missing operational concept to best support future counterinsurgency and stability operations.

Policing and Combat: Two Different Lenses

Population-centric community policing is often at odds with the military’s enemy-centric mind-set, despite recent advances in counterinsurgency doctrine. The differences are especially apparent in the arenas of terrain, communications, and ethics.

Terrain. Differing views on terrain generate friction between U.S. military and foreign police. For example, a senior U.S. Army commander may be frustrated with a chief of police whose headquarters sits in a densely populated neighborhood of high-rise hotels, surrounded by heavily trafficked roads, with little standoff at the Entry Control Point. In the military commander’s eyes, the headquarters is under constant threat of attack. The chief, however, is not stubborn, ignorant, or fatalistic to remain in his headquarters—his concept of terrain just differs from the military’s.

Military terrain is malleable. Key terrain is identified, secured, and hardened against enemy attacks. Soldiers clear enemy terrain—and, in some cases, destroy it with consent of the host nation—to deny safe haven to the enemy. For police, however, physical terrain is largely unchangeable. Urban and rural terrain serve important residential and economic needs, and, for this reason, police stations often occupy terrain that soldiers would consider undesirable or downright dangerous. Where soldiers see obstructed fields of fire, potential sites for enemy snipers, and parking areas for vehicle-borne IEDs, police officers see rich human terrain and prime locations to meet people, receive complaints, and gather intelligence. For a community-oriented police agency, proximity reinforces security better than cement barriers.

Communications. U.S. military and foreign police have widely different expectations for communications technology. Consider a Marine captain who rates the local police partner’s station “unprepared” in secure communications on a readiness report because local police talk on cellphones rather than coalition-provided handheld radios; batteries have been sold at the local market; and the solar panel on the station roof is caked with dirt and serves as a police uniform drying rack instead of powering the base station.

The Marine considers secure communications a top priority for combat operations, so this type of situation might be understandably frustrating. The local police captain, however, knows this network is excessive given a lack of close air support, artillery, surveillance, and medevac. The police may assume the enemy will intimidate cellular network providers to disrupt the communications network, and they will mitigate this vulnerability by burning shoe leather and visiting the public face-to-face. In any case, the expensive system is often not sustainable for local police forces once their military partners depart, and they have to operate independently.

Ethics. Ethical differences can drive a wedge between U.S. military trainers and their civilian police partners. Ethical tensions are difficult to reconcile, and the U.S. military applies “no tolerance” policy to its personnel and has a deep reserve of ethics advisors, including attorneys, inspectors general, contracting officers, and equal opportunity advisors. The U.S. military’s all-or-nothing approach to ethics, however, is incompatible with many cultures outside the United States where leaders accept small bribes and gifts as part of normal business, police carry sticks to hit unruly kids, and drug addicts are shaved bald to shame them sober. Some ethical standards are culturally relative; the people define unacceptable behavior. Social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling offer this observation: “It may be their greater sensitivity to communal as opposed to individual needs that helps explain why the residents of small communities are more satisfied with their police than are the residents of similar neighborhoods in big cities.”³ When working with non-U.S. police, policies need to be deliberately thought out and designed to uphold high standards without alienating the public and, therefore, becoming counterproductive.

Misunderstanding Broken Windows and Foot Patrols

Some military misconceptions of appropriate police mentoring may originate with Wilson and Kelling’s Broken Windows theory. In a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article, the authors contrasted the police officer on foot with one in a squad car to underscore the importance of community relations: “The [car] door and the window exclude the approaching citizen; they are a barrier. Some officers take advantage of this barrier, perhaps unconsciously, by acting differently in the car than they would on foot.”⁴ Senior military leaders embraced this principle in Iraq and Afghanistan as an endorsement of similar counter-insurgency (COIN) maxims.⁵ The Broken Windows theory, however, is not a tactical to-do list. It posits that small indicators of lawlessness (such as graffiti and broken windows) lead to widespread disorder, and people fear disorder even more than being victims of crime. Police are encouraged to partner with the public, enforce community standards, and restore order to assist high-crime neighborhoods with limited resources. Wilson and Kelling conclude:

The essence of the police role in maintaining order is to reinforce the informal control mechanisms of the community itself. The police cannot, without committing extraordinary resources, provide a substitute for that informal control.⁶

This is nothing less than a paradigm shift from fighting crime to maintaining order. Conducting dismounted patrols to combat insurgents without bringing community leaders on board or considering community norms truly falls short of “walking the walk” for local police forces.

Small Towns and Military Police: A New Operational Concept of Policing

Instead of leveraging combat or crime-fighting models for training international police forces, perhaps military leaders should look at policing in small towns and rural areas on and off military installations for examples. Criminal justice scholars have reconsidered rural policing models as effective alternatives to costly, high-tech specialized options. Professors David Falcone, Edward Wells, and Ralph Weisheit note in a 2002 study:

When one examines typical small-town police departments, he or she is struck by the lack of technical resources directly available to them, yet astonished by their clearance rates [cases solved] when juxtaposed against large professional-style police departments with their tremendous technological advantages.⁷

The researchers found that rural police succeed through adversity by mastering “problem-solving, administrative, public service and law enforcement tasks, as opposed to the big-city department where specialization is highly valued.”⁸ Generalization pays off in close relationships, public trust, and investigative leads, which results in higher solve rates for violent and property crimes.⁹

While rural policing models may offer promise for underdeveloped communities abroad, one should not reject military policing models. That would be a mistake. David Falcone and fellow criminal justice professor Beverly Smith studied military law enforcement and sheriffs’ offices, noting the following:

Both military police and sheriffs’ deputies are perceived as amateurs. Traditional or mainstream urban police officers deem sheriffs’ deputies as belonging more to a militia model than a paramilitary model... Yet, as this study shows, sheriffs’ offices and the MPC [Military Police Corps] have a great deal in common. Paradoxically, sheriffs’ offices, small-town police agencies, and military police have led the way in what is considered today to be state-of-the-art policing.10

The joint military policing model excels at community policing. While the U.S. Department of Defense is merely a supporting agency for civilian police development where permitted by U.S. Congress, history suggests that large-scale conflicts will demand military police mentors. A police officer in a failing country or state needs the interpersonal dexterity of a rural sheriff or an MP officer rather than the equipment and specialized skills of a metropolitan police officer. Joint military law enforcement officials in the U.S. military ranks—active and reserve military police, security forces, and masters-at-arms—have the community-oriented mind-set that is not only expedient, but optimal for training community policing outside the United States. To succeed, one must embrace the paradox of police development: high-threat environments may benefit most from low-tech, population-centric policing models. By conceptualizing policing as problem solving, U.S. military police mentors can best develop skills in international local police partners to defeat adversaries and support their communities. ♦

The contents of this article reflect the author’s personal views and are not endorsed by the U.S. Army or the U.S. Department of Defense.

Notes:
¹Howard Rhatz, Community Policing: A Handbook for Beat Cops and Supervisors (Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 2001), 33.
²W.L. Melville Lee, A History of Police in England (London: Methuen, 1901), Chapter 12, quoted in Kenneth J. Peak and Ronald W. Glensor, eds., Community Policing & Problem Solving: Strategies and Practices, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), 3.
³James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” in Community Policing: Classical Readings, ed. Willard M. Oliver (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000), 12.
⁴Ibid., 9.
⁵Jim Garamone, “Petraeus Puts Protecting People at Strategy’s Center,” American Forces Press Service, August 2, 2010, http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=60280 (accessed June 30, 2015).
⁶Wilson and Kelling, “Broken Windows,” 10.
⁷David N. Falcone, Edward Wells, and Ralph A. Weisheit, “The Small-Town Police Department,” Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management 25, no. 2 (2002): 382.
⁸Ibid., 374.
⁹Ibid., 374–377.
¹⁰David N. Falcone and Beverly A. Smith, “The Army Military Police: A Neglected Policing Model,” Police Quarterly 3 (September 2000): 259–260. Falcone and Smith use the Army Military Police Corps as their case study, but acknowledge in the introductory paragraph that this model is shared by “Air Force Security Police (AFSP [now Security Forces]... Navy Shore Patrol (SP) and Master at Arms (MAA); and Marine Corps Military Police (MCMP),” 247.

Please cite as

Eugenia K. Guilmartin, “The Paradox of Police Development: Community Policing for High-Threat Environments,” The Police Chief 82 (August 2015): 40–43.

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