Police Work; Ending Expensive, Bloated, Inefficiency And Failure

     The bread and butter of police work, the core mission, is to serve and protect by patrol. In high crime areas, and in densely populated urban areas, this is best accomplished by cops patrolling on foot, combined with police in vehicles and at times on bicycles. Cops driving around in vehicles, although necessary, can never become an integral part of a community and neighborhood as can cops that walk beats.
     Cops used to walk beats. That was true community policing. Not the convoluted nonsense that community policing later became, which is nothing more than academic cover for new ways to employ a patronage army of useless bureaucrats.
      Police assigned to the same walking beats day in and day out is the best way to reconnect police to neighborhoods and communities, while providing a high level of police presence and service.
      Paramilitary models are completely dysfunctional when used to protect systems of clout, cronyism and patronage.
       Layers upon layers of supervisors and chains of command have provided nothing but an army of expensive to maintain bosses, many of whom do little to nothing.
       Cops and their supervisors need to be on the streets. No one, from the cops walking beats or driving police vehicles to the highest supervisors, should be exempt from this responsibility. Unfortunately, we live in an entitlement culture in which often the higher people move up in life, the more they get paid, the more they demand, and the less work they want to do or are expected to do.
      The public should be paying for cops patrolling, on foot, in cars, and at times on bicycles. Other divisions, including detectives, youth officers, evidence technicians and so forth, are there to supplement the bread and butter of patrol. Technology can aid the patrol mission, but overreliance on technology is counterproductive. Patrol must be seen as the core of police work, not its armpit.
      Streamlining police departments will save money, reduce crime, and must start with returning police and police supervisors to the streets. Police departments must stop serving as sanctuaries for clout and cronyism. The many expensive and unnecessary layers of supervisors, bureaucrats and paper pushers - of which there are plenty- and all personal unrelated to serving the basic police mission of serve and protect by patrol, must be eliminated.