Cop Culture & Community Outreach Policing

The police sub-culture is adversarial and paramilitary, I believe as a defensive mechanism that permits police to stay alive on "the mean streets", but seems to definitely be at odds with community policing.  From my understanding, you could best classify the police sub-culture as distrustful of outsiders, clannish, secretive and one that isolates police from outsiders.  (This is plain, as a biker, that cops close ranks, and want to create LEO-only motorcycle clubs and riding clubs as extensions of the police sub-culture into the bike sub-culture... non police need not apply.)  

From personal experience and from friends who are police in very rough areas of town, I understand why the police sub-culture thrives - my cousin is not happy with who he has become as a cop, and laments the fact that he is now suspicious, racist and thinks of the public he serves in very cynical terms.  However, he serves in a very rough area of West Dayton with rampant drugs and crime, where he saw little to no community support and widespread hostility from the public he served.  While not universal, there was a definite distrust.  I think this would be a difficult environment in which to make progress with community policing, but they are making progress and starting to turn the tide.

To be successful at community policing, law enforcement will need to bond with the community rather than seeing the loyalty to each other as the predominant relationship.  The police subculture is distrustful of the community, but community policing requires the opposite, to work collaboratively with the community to achieve the goals of the community.  Where the police sub-culture reinforces the belief that only police fight crimes, police will need to provide for broad solutions to crime that see crime prevention and accountability to community needs as paramount.  Community policing will create changes in the police sub-culture that I think are healthy, to provide for a more well-rounded perspective that I think will reduce stress in the lives of law enforcement officers, and provide for a more diverse and open environment.

As InfoSec professionals what lessons might we learn from this?

• Do we also suffer from an adversarial and distrustful culture?
• Might we gain more advantage with outreach programs that engage the community in working towards solutions, rather than thinking it's our job to patrol and stop crime?