Rebuilding the Metropolitan Police Department
In July 1997, the Metropolitan Police Department took an important first step in making community policing a reality in the District of Columbia. The Police Service Area (or PSA) model refocused the Department's patrol efforts on the city's neighborhoods. It gave teams of PSA officers and supervisors greater responsibility for fighting crime. And it established new ways for police and community to work together to solve neighborhood problems.
While the PSA model represented a good start, the resources devoted to it were inadequate. A major problem was that the rest of the Police Department remained locked in a rigid bureaucratic structure that not only failed to embrace the new operating model; it actually got in the way of how basic police work gets done.
Now, the Metropolitan Police Department is taking the critical next step to more effectively police our Nation's Capital. We are restructuring the entire Department to (1) place more resources in the community, (2) focus our resources on reducing crime and solving problems in the city's 83 PSAs, and (3) hold managers at every level of the organization accountable for the quality of policing services within their geographic commands. In short, we are putting the Police Department in a much stronger position to take back the city's neighborhoods—block by block, community by community—in partnership with our residents and other agencies.
