This September, Joseph Smith became Georgetown’s first Crime Prevention Coordinator. Before DPS Director Jeffrey Van Slyke hired him to bring his community policing experience to the University, Smith played a major role in rebuilding Kosovo and Macedonia’s national police forces. The Voice talked to him about his experiences and his plans for Georgetown’s security.
I hear you did some work with security forces in Kosovo after the war.
I was head of the community policing for the [U.N.] Kosovo mission in 2000 and 2002. It was a little bit frightening to go to overseas for the first time to a war-torn country. We abolished the previous police presence and created a brand new police force. We wanted to move away from the previous regime that was known for its brutality and lack of integrity to a true democratic police force that was not abusive. You don’t want the police to pull into a neighborhood and have everybody go run and hide out of fear. I was also the community police advisor in Macedonia. Both of them were very rewarding experiences. To build a country from the ground up is really exciting.
What are your plans for implementing so-called community policing at Georgetown?
The idea is moving from traditional policing where officers are results-driven—they get a call, they handle it, they close it, they move on. Community policing is more about, “How do we solve the problem?” and thinking outside the traditional box, not just, “Can we write a citation? Can we make an arrest and file a report?” It’s about, “What is the deeper problem here?” Community policing seeks to find the underlying problem and target that—and in most cases that has nothing to do with punishment.
Can you give me an example of trying to tackle the roots of a crime?
We’re going to begin registering bikes … There’s [also] the Rape Aggression Defense program. We’re looking at sexual assault awareness and trying to give people the tools they need to deal with the situation as effectively as they can. So with that we’re training instructors for RAD, and we plan to launch that in the fall of this year. We’re going to begin it as a pilot program in which faculty, staff, and students can enroll. Theoretically, we would not want more than a class size of 30. Conceivably, we could expand from that. We hope to do some pretty robust outreach so all the students, the faculty, and staff know it’s there.
