On Fontana; Or, What is the difference between law and ethics?; Or, On the death of community based policing

If you have been following the saga of the Fontana Police Department over the past month, you know that there has been a dispute, but all the facts are not perfectly clear. It does revolve around differences between the police chief of Fontana and the village on the role of community based policing. Because the Village has been unable to manage the dispute, or maybe manage the police chief, they have decided it might be just easier to completely dissolve the police department.

Click on the post for the full article in the Janesville Gazette.

To mediate the dispute, and resolve it, the parties have called on the Department of Justice, specifically the Institute for Public Safety Partnerships, IPSP, which offers at no cost to the parties, several seminars or "curricula" one of which is on ethics, the one they are using.

It might appear to the casual observer that this is really an extreme case. I would suggest that it is not. Many times in cases where there is a dispute between a professional and a village, where there are union contract issues involved, the legal resolution of the dispute is always narrow in scope, and does not resolve the larger public safety issues, which is what the public wants resolved. In Fontana, thus, since the community based policing system cannot be managed, the village is inclined to go to simply an incident responder mode, the Walworth Co Sheriffs Dept.

Two things about this case are interesting--First the Department of Justice offers these resources at no cost to police departments and cities of Southern Wisconsin. The web site that goes over the seminars and services is www.ipsp.us/c4cici.cfm

Secondly, at the very core of these services is the assumption that without ethics and trust, community based policing cannot work. That just jumps right out at you in the Fontana case. A thought to remember.