Vision Statement 

The Grand Rapids Police Department shall lead in developing collaborative working partnerships with all of our community and service providers, so that each and every citizen may enjoy the highest quality of life. Personalized community service shall be provided directly through Neighborhood Police Service Centers. Through our leadership, courage, and relentless pursuit of service excellence, the City of Grand Rapids will lead American cities into the 21st century.

• Unique elements of the Grand Rapids vision include:
• A commitment to community policing - Community policing is a philosophy and an organizational strategy that promotes a new partnership between people and their police, who work together as community-based problem solvers.
• An equal commitment to community-oriented government – Community-oriented government adapts the principles of community policing to the delivery of municipal services to neighborhoods.
• A three-phase plan to provide citywide decentralized and personalized police service within the next two to three years –

  Phase One allows the department to learn from the experience of the South Community Policing Team pilot project, under the leadership of Captain James Farris. He and his team of lieutenants, sergeants, and officers have been given a section of the city as theirs, and every effort was made to ensure that area follows neighborhood and natural boundaries. The pilot requires that the Captain and his management team identify neighborhood beats and assign specific teams of officers to those beats. Each beat team will include one of the department’s new Community Officers, who function as catalysts for neighborhood-based problem solving.

  Phase Two, which launches in April 1999, builds upon this model, so the entire city will be covered by a total of six police service areas, each headed by a Captain and that Captain’s management team. Again, the officers will be assigned as teams to beat areas.

  Phase Three will be launched as soon as two years from now. It will be a cutting-edge effort to integrate community policing and community-oriented government by building six new facilities centralized within each of the six service areas. These Neighborhood Police Service Centers will provide a home for the six teams that have been policing those areas, allowing both the officers, other service providers, and the community greater opportunities to work together to make their neighborhoods better and safer places.

• The creation of new community-oriented job categories - Our vision provides new positions designed to help us meet the needs of the community:

  Community Officers – These line-level officers serve as generalists, who are freed from the constant pressure to answer calls, so that they have the opportunity and continuity to mobilize the fellow officers on their team and others to work with the community on problem solving. The challenge, of course, is to ensure that all personnel, sworn and civilian, find ways to express the community policing philosophy in their jobs. But it is the Community Officer who initially serves as the department’s front-line ombudsman. Many of them will work out of an office in their beat area, in a school or some other suitable community anchor. The long-term goal, however, is for Community Officers to do such a good job of stabilizing their neighborhoods and involving their fellow officers in problem solving that they do themselves out of a job within a decade.

  Community Detectives – The new category of Community Detective is also a community-based generalist. We will always maintain Major Case Detectives who operate out of a centralized facility, but our new Community Detectives will provide investigative follow-up to the beat teams.

  Community Resource Specialists – When the six new Neighborhood Police Service Centers open, each will have this new City/civilian specialist who is an expert on all city services. This person will handle walk-in and telephone requests to access services and solve problems. This individual will also train and update the beat-team members on the full roster of services available and how they can help in problem solving.

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