Police Adopt-a-Cop "Beats"

There are two key components to successful community-oriented-policing: community partnership and problem-solving. As the saying goes, safety and security are "everybody's business", and OUPD works with groups across campus to deliver informative presentations, publications and programming to promote crime prevention and safety awareness. We work together with students, faculty, and staff — at all levels of the University community — to cooperatively identify and isolate specific problems/concerns and create/implement partnership-based problem-solving strategies.

Community-Oriented Policing (COP) is an approach to policing wherein the law enforcement agency invites the active participation of representatives of the community being served in the decision-making process that determines the type and scope of services delivered.

Efforts in the 1950s to professionalize law enforcement led to development of a highly-trained police command structure which made all management decisions regarding police services. Belatedly recognized as unintentionally isolating the law enforcement agency from the community it served, this traditional approach was efficient, but often resulted in applying the limited resources available to efforts other than those which the citizens believed to be the most important.

COP seeks to re-connect the law enforcement agency with its constituency, and to ensure that the community's perception of the most serious law enforcement problems is made a component of police planning and operation. COP necessitates regular interaction between police personnel and citizens, and cannot be successful without citizen participants who are willing to present the true thoughts of the community about crime, perpetrators, and police actions in a public forum nor without police willingness to openly discuss, critique and amend their own performance based on this input.

Properly implemented and enthusiastically conducted, Community-Oriented Policing has the potential to strengthen the relationship between the community served and its law enforcement agency while enabling citizens to directly affect the quality of their lives and leaving the police in control of and responsible for their own activities.

Adopt-a-Cop

Beginning in the fall of 2010 OUPD teamed with OU Housing & Food Services to create the “Adopt-a-Cop” program. OUPD officers were “adopted” by specific housing units and apartment complexes with these goals:

• To create a direct link with the residents and staff members to provide a very high level of interaction, service, education and communications.

• Increase student and staff comfort level and confidence with OUPD staff.

• Increase student and staff comfort level with calling police immediately to report suspicious or criminal activity.

• Increase reporting of crimes across the board.

• Reduction of property crimes through education, awareness and crime prevention.

Adopted Officers are the liaison with the Housing staff in each housing center. They attend selected Housing functions to promote open communications between residents and OUPD, they provide information and educational programs to their centers and most importantly, they provide a known officer to the residents and staff who is approachable and accessible.

If you have general questions concerning OU community-oriented policing, activity/function-based beats, Adopt-a-Cop program and/or campus crime prevention programs, please contact our Crime Prevention and Community Relations Officer by phone (325-2864) or email (mail-crimeprev@ou.edu).