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Tallahassee Commissioners Encourage Community Policing

Tallahassee Police Department website

The Tallahassee City Commission is setting its agenda for the year and that includes increasing community policing in high crime areas. City Commissioner Curtis Richardson says neighborhoods have to take policing into their own hands.

“The message has to go out to the criminal element, ‘Not this neighborhood. You know, you go somewhere else, we’re policing ourselves, we’re taking back our neighborhood and making it a better place, a place where people want to be and want to live.'" He said.

Richardson says Wilson Green is a neighborhood finding success with community policing. Community members have partnered with police, acting as their eyes and ears. The city has also hired more officers.

The commission's conversation on the issue comes after a spate of violent and gun-related crimes hit the city last summer.

Ashley Tressel is a senior Communication and English student at Florida State University. Before WFSU, she interned at the Executive Office of the Governor and The Borgen Project, a national nonprofit for global poverty. She also wrote freelance for Carbonated.tv, a multimedia news site and served as managing editor for the FSU International Programs magazine, Nomadic Noles, in Valencia, Spain. After graduation, Ashley plans to embark on her journalism career somewhere in Colorado.