Planning community policing together! Police-community partnerships planning and co-constructing safer neighborhoods.

One of the main challenges in local policing relates to the need to build safer neighbourhoods through the establishment of effective and trustful relationships between police and citizens. Community policing in Lisbon, developed by the Lisbon Municipal Police in 2009, has been built from the involvement of local partners and citizens in safety partnerships with the police and their participation in the process of putting in place community policing projects in different neighbourhoods of the city. This policing model is challenging to both the partnership, as well as to the police, since it requires an intensive participatory planning process, to jointly identify problems and resources, define the profile of the community policing teams and the training program to prepare them to foot patrol the designated neighbourhoods. Thus, police-community participatory planning also allows a transformation of the vision of the police towards the community, and moreover the police organization self-understanding of the value of adopting preventive and participatory policing models, contributing to its sustainable long-term support. In the neighbourhoods where this methodological path was forged, the exchange of visions and knowledge between police and partners enabled community policing teams to work more efficiently and closer to citizens, building safer neighbourhoods together.