Four-wheel Drive PolicingI’ve often used the analogy of a four-wheel drive monster truck to describe Coactive Policing. But for this illustration to work, you must first envision your community as a passenger vehicle. It could be a Crown Vic, a Taurus or some other passenger car. It’s a nice vehicle and gets you where you want to go rather well.Now imagine that the current location of the vehicle represents where your community is today. And somewhere down the road you have painted a picture of where you would like it to be in the future. Perhaps you would like to see your community become a little more peaceable, to have a lower crime rate, to be more prosperous, and to feature a better quality of life. One thing we know about passenger vehicles is that they only have one drive wheel… only one wheel is actually connected to the drive-train. All of the other wheels are just along for the ride. That one drive wheel represents you. It represents law enforcement and local government. Law enforcement and local government can drive a community forward very effectively as long as the roadway is nice and smooth and well-maintained. But what happens when the roadbed begins to crumble? What happens when we find our communities bogged down in the muck and the mire of crime and of neighborhood decay and disorder? What happens when the foundational unit of order in our society, which is of course the family, begins to destabilize and often falls apart? What happens now? Well, if we only have one drive wheel, we’re just spinning our wheels. And you can make an argument that we’re just digging ourselves into a deeper and deeper problem.
What happens when I shift a truck into four-wheel drive? Something mechanical takes place within the transfer case. Some gears come together and form a new relationship. And it is the strength of that relationship that allows power from the engine to be transferred to the front wheels of the vehicle so that they can begin to pull their share of the load. That’s what I mean by Coactive Policing.
Return from Four-wheel Drive Policing to Dynamic of Coactivity
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Now is the time to engage the four-wheel drive. We must get the other components of our communities pulling in the same direction. The other wheels represent the business community, the education community, the faith-based community. Even the citizens themselves are represented by the other three wheels.
