Building trust-based relationships is a complicated process and it’s easy to get lost in it if you don’t appreciate the underlying dynamics.

Filmed from my balcony at the Continental Hotel in Oradea, Romania, overlooking the Repide River, I use the Relationship Diamond as a model for understanding the process of building community relationships.

Relationship Diamond

The Relationship Diamond

There are essentially four steps in building a working community relationship and you must progress through them in order, just like running the bases in a baseball game. First base is to become an Acquaintance. This is a bit common sensical but it is a necessary first step.

To get to second base, the citizen must become a Stakeholder. That is, they must see themselves as having a vested interest in the crime-fighting process. As Sir Robert Peel said, “The police are the public and the public are the police.” But the citizens don’t often think of themselves in that way. They tend to see crime as exclusively a police problem, not a community problem.

Third base is Partnership. This is a working relationship where the police and the community team up to coactively solve problems that are manifesting themselves as crime, fear of crime, and neighborhood decay. After reaching the partnership level, the group is now ready to head to home by accomplishing some of their coactive policing goals; two of which are establishing safe and peaceful neighborhoods; and stable and successful families.

If you found this lesson helpful, please Share the Knowledge…


About the Author


5 Responses to The Relationship Diamond

  1. Audrey Jacob says:

    Good morning.

    Your short videos are really great fun and I wrote a post about your training method to make it known in France.

    You could read my article on my blog an leave a comment if you want :

    http://jacobaudrey.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/1677/

    Sincerely

    Audrey

  2. […] we have identified the “bases” on the Relationship Diamond, the next question becomes “How do I get around the bases?” I think the answer is found […]

  3. […] at the beautiful Aventura Spa Palace in Riviera Maya, Mexico, we look at the next step in the Relationship Diamond – building a stakeholder […]

  4. […] Base in the Relationship Diamond is establishing a Partnership. But it requires mutual […]

  5. […] phases in the formulation of a working group. Interestingly, the phases fit very nicely in our Relationship Diamond model as we superimpose them over the dynagram. The Four Phases of Group Dynamics and the Relationship […]

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