The City of Oakland has an ordinance that directs our police force to implement community policing. The city is broken up into 35 distinct police beats which are further disected into 53 COMMUNITY Police Beats. Each CPB is represented by a Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council.
Community Policing Beats (CPBs) are geographically defined and cover the entire city. A regular Police Beat has a name like Beat 30, while a CPB breaks a regular beat up into smaller (community size?) beat chunks defined as say 30X and 30Y. Dedicated Problem Solving Officers (PSOs) are supposed to serve a CPB on a consistent basis.
Neighborhood Crime Prevention Councils (NCPCs) exist in every CPB in town. They have a chair that coordinates the meetings, a designates PSO attends and tracks activity in the community and repsonds to issues raised and a city funded/employee Neighbodhood Services Cooridnator attends each to try to coordinate these local meetings and outcomes up the chain through the SDI to the city administrator..
The City of Oakland provided the shapefiles of the boundaries.
In some communities these NCPCs act as more like planning councils, in some they are purely focused on crime issues. If you want to get civicly involved in your community, these are great places to start. They often have broad participation in the community and connect residents to local problems and opportunities.
Although we got all the data from the city, we are not an official source for looking up your beat. For that, go here and have fun trying to find your house!
An OpenOakland project by Steve Spiker