North Macedonia: ICITAP Supports Implementation of Community Policing Strategy

On June 6, the ICITAP-North Macedonia mission provided an update on its efforts to advance a community policing strategy in partnership with the National Police. The Communicating with Communities (CwC) initiative was designed by ICITAP as a supporting component of the overarching Ministry of Interior Strategic Plan and focuses on changing the culture of operational policing, improved quality of police service to communities, greater understanding of police decision making by citizens and an improved flow of community-based criminal and violent extremist intelligence. Earlier in 2021, ICITAP drafted the ‘CwC Police Leaders Guide,’ which was approved by the MoI Bureau for Public Security, and this paved the way for the design of a CwC leaders’ course for delivery to operational front-line Junior Inspectors to Chief Inspectors. Eighteen police officers were selected CwC trainers and attended the CwC train-the-trainer course from November 15 to 26, 2021. Following this course delivery, from May 30 to June 3, 2022, ICITAP hosted additional course on presentation skills for 16 CwC trainers to help them benefit from further development and support in the design and delivery of CwC training material. The course took place at the Police Training Centre, and it was divided into two components 1) ICITAP facilitated sessions in the principles of adult learning, training design, training methods and trainer skills and 2) Practice training session which were designed and delivered by the Cw2C trainers. To ensure sustainable Macedonian capability, ICITAP supported and coached two CwC trainers working aa PTC instructors to assess the trainer performance of each session delivery. This approach worked extremely well and was highly regarded by the two assessors and CwC course participants. ICITAP will follow up this training with a half day Sector Chief workshop that identifies any leadership concerns on their part that could impact the implementation of the initiative on a national level and report this to the Minister of Interior, Director of Public Security Bureau, and potentially the U.S. Ambassador. ICITAP is implementing the Communicating with Communities (CWC) program with the support of and in coordination with the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL).