The Politics of Community Policing: Rearranging the Power to Punish

2. Community (Policing)

Chapter 2 Community (Policing) Community hasfurnished adiscursiveframework within which social policies have been conceived, designed, implemented, and legitimated. Nowhere has this been more prominently so than within the realm ofcriminal justice. . . . Ideas ofcommunity have been invoked explicitly or evoked implicitly as explanationsfor and as means ofcuring social disorder. -Lacey and Zedner (1995: 301) 1. Introduction There are two reasons to take a closer look at the stories about community in community policing. First, community revitalization is central to the logic of stories about community policing. Advocates assume that a more proactive policing of disorder, including fear reduction and problem solving partnerships, will revitalize communities and enable citizens to contribute their informal forms of social control to the provision of public safety. Community-level informal social controls are central to what advocates claim will be innovative, efficient, and effective about community policing. Police-community partnerships to address neighborhood problems are expected to empower citizens in communities to overcome their fears and contribute to the coproduction of social order.! A second reason to make explicit the stories about community implicit in stories about community policing is the dominance of statecentered stories about policing. Prevailing stories about policing and community obscure the power relations manifest in these stories and the practices they justify. This includes power imbalances between community groups and police departments, as well as across and within communities. "Appeals to 'community' thus appear to represent ," according to Crawford, "the site at which shifts in the legitimate responsibilities of individuals, organizations, and the state are cur- THE POLITICS OF COMMUNITY POLICING rently being played out and contested [and] the absence of any theory of power relations between communities is deafening by its silence."2 While Crawford is critiquing a communitarian approach to community , this failure to account for power imbalances characterizes prevailing stories about community policing. With power relations made less visible, the intersection of stories about police and community form a "discursive alliance" around a concept of community whose political utility to the state can be found in its cultivated ambiguities, nostalgia, and romance) Stories about community revitalization and policing reform intersect in ways that affect both community life and the possibility of a more democratic social order. This intersection is most commonly treated from the perspective of the police bureaucracy under the heading police-community relations, where stories about community focus on how police departments can use or appease communities.4 This work attempts to treat this same intersection from the perspective of communities. For both of these reasons-the logic of community policing and the privileging of state-centered stories-understanding community policing requires a close examination of stories about community . The logic of community policing assumes communities to be a form of association capable of informal social control. But the meaning of this claim has not been explicitly worked out by advocates.5 This failure is apparent when stories celebrating community exceed practices enabling communities with the desired capacities. Prevailing stories praise communities capable of coproducing public order through their unique capacities for informal social control. Neither these stories nor the practices of community policing, however, focus on what it is about communities that makes informal social controls possible or on the resources needed to revitalize communities with these capacities. Making these implicit stories explicit has four implications for how we understand the emerging relationship between communities and police departments. First, without a sense of the concrete social relationships that constitute communities with these capacities, calls for a return to community are significantly less constrained and become merely rhetorical. That is, the range of potential meanings for such calls would then be much less related to anything we would associate with a collective aspiration for democratic community or a form of association with specific informal social control capacities and much more COMMUNITY (POLICING) likely to reflect a "collective rhetoric that encourages and supports an essentially individualizing practice."6 With communities as a free-floating signifier, community-based policing brings persuasive stories and coercive practices into partnerships that reinforce state agency and (further) fragment competing forms of collective identity, such as communities .7 Second, the forms of association that constitute communities may be the social foundation for the type of political culture essential to the possibility of more democratic forms of social contro1.8 Following the republican visions of our founders, where virtuous citizens were seen as the foundation of good government, citizens become virtuous living in...