Community Policing – How Cooperation with Residents Improves Safety in Poland and Beyond

What benefits does community policing – close cooperation between the police and local residents – actually bring? In this article, we look at how this approach improves everyday safety, with particular attention to the Polish context and the way these ideas are being put into practice.

The security challenges we face today, both offline and online, increasingly overlap. Cyber fraud, hate crime, online radicalisation and cyberbullying are only some of them. These are accompanied by an ageing population, which can find it harder to build resilience to such threats. In these circumstances, simple fixes no longer work. We need solutions based on the real needs of communities, developed in response to specific, identified challenges. Such solutions must be created through dialogue with residents and must assume shared responsibility for safety in the local environment.

Community policing (CP) is a philosophy and a way of working that can help us do just that. Under this approach, the police and the community identify problems together, set priorities together and work together to resolve them. It is built on partnership, continuous diagnosis of the situation and evaluation, as well as on appropriate organisational changes within policing itself. In practice, this means, among other things, a greater role for first-contact officers, inter-agency cooperation, and the use of modern channels of communication with the public, including digital ones.

The origins and evolution of community policing

The roots of CP can be traced back to the nineteenth century and the principles associated with Robert Peel, according to which the police operate “with public approval” and their effectiveness is measured not by the number of arrests, but by their success in preventing crime. After crises of confidence in policing in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1960s–1980s, this intuition returned in practical form. Key elements of the concept included officers working in local areas, foot patrols, regular contact with residents, and local meetings used to set shared priorities. At the same time, a problem-oriented approach developed, in which the causes of threats are diagnosed first—such as noise nuisance, vandalism or dangerous pedestrian crossings—and only then are the appropriate responses selected, not all of them police-led and not all of them punitive.

Over time, the main pillars of CP took shape: partnership with the community, problem-solving based on data, transparency of action, and organisational change within policing. One of its most important practical pillars is social prevention, which includes education and early intervention, environmental measures and modern forms of dialogue with residents, including digital ones. In Poland, this can be seen in initiatives such as seasonal safety campaigns, property-marking schemes and online tools for reporting local concerns.

Community policing in Poland

In Poland, community policing is most often delivered through social prevention measures. These translate diagnosis and partnership with the local community into practical action—from plans prepared by neighbourhood officers to prevention programmes carried out according to shared standards. At the heart of this process is a simple model:

local diagnosis → joint planning → action → evaluation

In practice, this can be seen most clearly in several areas:

• Neighbourhood officers (dzielnicowi) – first-contact police officers who gather signals from residents and translate them into priority action plans.
• The National Safety Threat Map (Krajowa Mapa Zagrożeń Bezpieczeństwa) – an online tool through which residents can report problems. These reports show where nuisance and risk are concentrated and help to plan patrols and environmental responses more effectively.
• Targeted prevention programmes, such as Senior Online, Flying Safely in the Internet Cloud, heritage-marking initiatives, and the Safer Together campaign.

In each case, the same logic applies: identify the problem together with residents, design tailored tools and then assess whether they work.

From today’s challenges to new solutions

Information about local problems is often fragmented across different channels, including telephone calls, text messages and social media, and the quality of that information can vary. At the same time, some residents remain outside the digital sphere, which means that contact with them still depends on physical presence. Trust is also easily damaged: without transparent procedures and clear communication, even efficient police interventions can be met with scepticism. In highly hierarchical organisations, neighbourhood officers may also lack the time for proactive work, while the pressure to respond quickly pushes cooperation with residents into the background. The result is that it becomes harder to identify real priorities and provide effective help. For example, dozens of complaints about night-time noise in one area can disappear into overall statistics if they are not brought together into a coherent picture and treated as a priority issue.

The philosophy of community policing offers a response that begins with the basics:

• trust and the building of a shared language with residents and partners;
• timely exchange of information;
• responsibility and accountability for results;
• community cohesion, including the inclusion of groups that are less often heard;
• engagement and partnership;
• organisational transformation that supports front-line work.

This is precisely where the KOBAN project comes in – a European initiative designed to organise the everyday practice of policing and present it in a clear, practical model.

A step into the future: KOBAN

KOBAN proposes a capability-driven approach. Rather than relying on a single rigid model, it is built around the six key areas listed above, all of which need to function if community policing is to deliver results. These areas form the core pillars of the KOBAN Competence Model for the future of CP.

The project also aims, among other things, to:

• develop coherent community-facing applications through a Factory of Apps, supporting communication and incident reporting;
• use an AI assistant that can complement officers by responding to incoming enquiries;
• create a dashboard for visualisation and more efficient data management.

The project is funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe, and the Polish Platform for Homeland Security (PPHS) is responsible, among other things, for gathering the needs of police forces from across Europe in relation to CP and identifying the capabilities that should be strengthened in response to local challenges identified during the work. PPHS also coordinates pilots in six countries—the Netherlands, Poland, Finland, Spain, Portugal and Belgium—to test the solutions developed within KOBAN in local settings.

The fact that KOBAN is more than a purely research-and-development project is also shown by the events accompanying its implementation. A good example was the international seminar on community policing organised by the Police Training Centre in Legionowo on 24–25 February 2026. Drawing to a large extent on the project’s experience, the seminar demonstrated that the solutions being developed within KOBAN can make a real contribution to the Polish debate on security, police training, and discussion about the future development of community policing in practice.

Fot. Police Training Centre in Legionowo.

In practice, KOBAN is intended to act as a bridge between what is already familiar in Poland—the role of the neighbourhood officer, the National Safety Threat Map, the standardisation of prevention programmes and the SNAPPY database—and a more coherent, digitally supported system of cooperation, in which priorities are shaped by people’s real needs and the quality of action is measured not by the number of meetings held, but by the change felt by residents.

Are you interested in this topic? Visit the KOBAN project website and follow the initiative's LinkedIn profile to stay updated on its progress.

Conclusion

Community policing is not just a slogan; it is a way of working based on partnership with residents, diagnosis grounded in data and accountability for results. In Poland, we already have strong foundations: neighbourhood officers, the National Safety Threat Map and standardised prevention programmes that show this model can work when it is pursued consistently. KOBAN adds to this a shared European model of the future competences needed in CP, together with technological solutions and training designed to give even greater support to police working for and with local communities to improve safety.

This is exactly the combination we need: trust, shared responsibility and technology that strengthens—rather than replaces—the relationship between the police and the community.