Findings from the study into the impact of the first year of the community policing dialogue and cooperation (CPDC) initiative in [where?] between May and July 2019 make an important contribution to broader discussion on police reform in the Somali context. It shows that the initiative has become institutionalised in local governance structure and provides insights into future thinking about police policy and law-making. New police legislation needs to be developed to provide for community–police dialogue at both FGS and FMS levels, and to provide people with the confidence to progress and develop CPDC-type mechanisms.
The study considers the views of CPDC committee members (including police officers) regarding the initiative’s impact on community–police relations, reporting of crime, fear of crime, the rights-based approach to policing, and the involvement of women and youths in local security decision-making. Members highlighted how it has helped to raise awareness concerning the potential role of the police, build a common appreciation for rights and responsibilities, articulate local safety needs, among other things.
Learning from the initiative includes:
- Regular and structured engagement and dialogue among the police, the community and other key stakeholders is likely to remain a critical aspect of the broader police reform.
- CPDC committees should consciously avoid usurping police functions, such as being the intermediary in reporting/solving crimes and should encourage complainants to access the police directly.
- Any intervention of this nature must guard against becoming a form of preferential gatekeeper. It is important to avoid unintentionally establishing differentiations between places where initiatives are implemented and those where they are not; or within communities where initiatives exist or differentiating between individuals who are actively involved and those who are not.
- CPDC outreach should transition from awareness raising and encouragement to participate into building public confidence in the police itself while retaining the openness to receive complaints.
A broader analysis of community perceptions of the CPDC initiative (and not just among active CPDC users) and any impact it has on security provision and the broader justice landscape could be particularly instructive. Consideration should be given to how CPDC itself might inform the assessment of relevant attitudes within the community, potentially allowing more sophisticated understandings of complex concepts such as trust, accessibility, responsiveness, and familiarity than appear to have been possible during the earlier baseline survey.
