The Politics of Community Policing: Rearranging the Power to Punish

5. The Emergence of the South Seattle Crime Prevention Council

Chapter 5 The Emergence of the South Seattle Crime Prevention Council We said we know what the problems are. We've proven we can solve some of them ourselves. You have to work with us. It was a real gunfight. And we stared 'em down. And they finally said, okay we will work with you. We actually hammered out a contract, an agreement to work in partnershipfor 1988, and now the police department is takingfull creditfor doing this wonderful thingfor the community. -SSCPC activist 1. Introduction The challenge to the possibility of community in modem society is posed starkly around questions of social order. The logic of community policing assumes that contemporary communities can still contribute to the provision of social order. But it is precisely on issues like social order that these modem community organizations have proven most difficult to sustain. As Skogan has shown, citizen crime prevention organizations have difficulties expanding their agendas and resources to maintain their organizations.1 Skogan distinguishes between preservationist (mobilized in defense of the status quo) and insurgent (mobilized to change the status quo) crime prevention groups, highlighting the importance of a group's relationship to state agencies.2 Given the atrophy of communities, growth of state agencies, and related power imbalances , this relationship proves critical to understanding the discursive struggles to define community policing, and the possibility of community -friendly forms of social order in modem (or postmodem) society. Long-term, multifaceted, reciprocal citizen activism accounted for the emergence of community policing in Rainier Valley. The character 77 THE POLITICS OF COMMUNITY POLICING of this activism indicates the resilience of stories about self-governing communities and decentered policing. In this chapter, I argue that the relatively reciprocal character of citizen activism in Rainier Valley contributed to the emergence of three different crime prevention organizations , which were able to cooperate despite differences in background, tactics, and resources. Their cooperation centered on efforts to coordinate formal and informal resources and direct these toward addressing neighborhood concerns. The resilience of competing stories about community and policing contributed to strengthening the capacity of communities to subject unaccountable forms of power in their neighborhoods to critical public scrutiny. In the previous chapter, we saw that SEED and SESCO coordinated resources like public meetings, demonstrations, building bus stops, and monitoring judges with resources like state and federal funding, Seattle Housing Authority policy, zoning changes, and private investment patterns. Crime prevention organizations coordinated a similarly diverse set of resources for community revitalization and social control. They collected crime-related information, cleaned up vacant lots, painted out graffiti, planted trees, provided schools with metal detectors, pressured property owners to clean up blighted areas, pressured the police and other city agencies to be more proactive, pursued civil abatements, demonstrated on neighbors' front lawns, photographed crack houses, testified at city council meetings, and lobbied for new crime control legislation. The efforts of citizens' groups to coordinate formal and informal resources indicated that the distinction between formal and informal organizations obscured the importance of both to democratic politics by drawing attention away from who was empowered by particular forms of association. Thus, by focusing on relationships and resources-such as reciprocity-I argue that this analysis provides a useful standpoint for evaluating the costs and benefits of both more and less formal organizations. Those that provide resources that empower communities ought to be preferred over those that provide services that encourage fragmentation and dependence on state agency. In Southeast Seattle, the mixture of formal and informal resources evolved from citizens subjecting unaccountable power to critical public scrutiny into a state-dominated, but more decentered, partnership. By the end of the second year of the partnership, power was mobilized less by citizens as scrutiny and more by citizens and state officials as surveillance. THE SOUTH SEATTLE CRIME PREVENTION COUNCIL 79 The crime prevention organizations in Rainier Valley were able to combine formal and informal resources because they grew out of a long tradition of multifaceted community activism. Their success required the moderation of conflicting demands made among various community groups. Scheingold argues that our political culture privileges punitive approaches to crime control but that moderating urban political forces tend to balance radical law and order demands against other city interests, muting the potential impact of law and order politics) The early cooperation among the three crime control groups discussed here was consistent with this punitive yet moderated thesis. What this work can...