The Politics of Community Policing: Rearranging the Power to Punish

7. Reciprocity in Police-Community Partnerships

Chapter 7 Reciprocity in PoliceCommunity Partnerships Community policing is just a word. It has different meanings to different people. -President of a Seattle District Community Council 1. Introduction State-centered stories about community policing can be traced through police failures in managing urban unrest in the 1960s, leading to a series of presidential commissions, each suggesting that poor policecommunity relations contributed to ineffective policing. The federally funded policing research that followed the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, taken together, challenged several basic assumptions of the twentieth-century professional policing model. Random preventative patrol, rapid response, and political insulation sought at the expense of beat integrity were found to be less efficient and less effective than had been presumed by law enforcement experts. As a consequence, departments began to redesign the way that they respond to calls for service, tinker with police management, and consider reorienting patrol to improve police-community relations. Political pressure, research, and experimentation intersected with demands from citizens for government agencies to become more responsive to community concerns. The hodgepodge of reform ideas came to find an uneasy unity within a moving target: community policing , an intersection of two sets of overlapping, sometimes coherent, competing stories about policing and community. The stories about community policing told by Fleissner, Fedan, and Stotland; Skolnick and Bayley; and the Seattle police chief have four things in common.1 Because these also highlight the discursive 135 THE POLITICS OF COMMUNITY POLICING overlap of competing stories, I use them to organize this section, which examines the emergence of a prevailing story about community policing in Southeast Seattle: (1) community-based crime prevention, (2) decentralization, (3) reorientation of patrol, and (4) accountability. II. Community-Based Crime Prevention: The SSCPC This section shows that in the most participatory component of community policing, the SSCPC, membership was restricted, outreach was weak, and their capacity and willingness to criticize the police department was constrained. But despite these limitations council activities, especially as they were manifested in early targeting practices and legal mobilization, can be seen to have both reaffirmed and challenged existing power relations. The most significant failure was that, while council activities both reaffirmed and challenged, the combined effect was more to empower the SPD than to encourage the reciprocity needed to revitalize community life. This is because the form of association established responded more vigorously to concerns about targeting street crime to protect commercial property than to equally salient concerns about reciprocity, that is, horizontal social capital (representativeness of the SSCPC) and vertical social capital (police misconduct and information sharing). These aspects of the partnership are examined under three headings: "Community Activities," "Legal Mobilization," and "Patrol Activities." Community Activities. "The South Seattle CPC was designed as a council of organizations and community representatives, not as an open membership organization. Membership was by invitation only, and the regular meetings were not widely publicized."2 Of the 17 original SSCPC members, three were black and two were Asian. About two months after the police-community partnership was institutionalized, following a meeting of black community leaders on racism and the police, a black member and an Asian member left the council) This left the council, in an area of Seattle that was 60 percent minority, with a minority representation of only 18 percent. Not surprisingly, other community activists and even police officers expressed reservations about a perceived white business bias on the SSCPC.4 This concern was also apparent when, in 1994, the mayor formed a blue ribbon panel in response to a city Human Rights Commission RECIPROCITY IN POLICE-COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS 137 finding of great hostility between the SPD and minority communities in the wake of conilict surrounding renewal of the Drug Traffic Loitering Ordinance (discussed below). This task force issued a report calling on the city to create a civilian review board. A central controversy in the work of the task force revolved around the composition of the city's Crime Prevention Councils, including the SSCPC. The task force report charged that these councils were dominated by business interests and thus were unwilling to push the department to address community concerns about police accountability.5 No recognized leader of any African American community in Southeast Seattle joined the SSCpc. When I asked one of the city's two most prominent black ministers about this, I was told that the African American community is reluctant to talk about increasing policing because...