Abstract:
The police have always taken fighting fear to be part of their job, but they have always assumed that fear reduction was an inevitable by-product of traditional crime-control techniques like patrol and rapid response to 911 calls. Early in the 1980s, the Baltimore County Police Department decided to fight fear directly.
Learning Objective:
The Citizen Oriented Police Enforcement (COPE) unit would struggle, over the next five years, with the problems of defining and assessing fear, of the failure of traditional police tactics to assuage fear, and with various new techniques such as community organizing, problem-solving, and partnerships with other municipal agencies. In the end, COPE would present a maturing strategy for fighting fear as a plausible new addition to policing.
