Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

tiUCommon features seemed to connect many of the more successful programs,and these slowly formed the basis for the community policing perspective. Sociolo.b>istGary Cordner .l,'TOUPS the elements of community policing into philosophical,strategic, tactical, and organizational dimensions. Philosophically, communitypolicing is charactetized by the solicitation of citizen input, the broadening of thepolice function, and the attempt to find solutions based on the values of the localcommunity. Organizationally, community policing requires that departments berestructured such as to de-centralize command, flatten hierarchies, reduce specialization,civilianize staff positions, and encourage teamwork. Strategically, communitypolicing efforLq reorient operations away from nmcIom patrols and respondingto 911 calls, towards more directed, proactive, ,md preventive activities. 'nlisreorientation requires a geographic focus, and encourages cops to pay attentionto sources of disorder as well as to the crimes themselves. Tactics that sustaincommunity policing efforts are those that encourage positive citizen interactions,partnerships. and problem solving. 'KA 1994 report written by the Community Policing Consortium (representingthe International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Sheriff's Association,the Police Executive Research Forum, and the Police Foundation) . and publishedby the Department of Justice. identifies the two "core components" of communitypolicing as "community partnership and problem solving."" Sociologists JeromeSkolnick and David Bayley conduded, based on a study of six police departmentsrenowned as innovators and trend-setters, that the governing premise ofcommunity policing was "that the police and the public are co-producers of crinwprevention.")!)By the early 1990s "Community Policing" was the official religion of police nationwide,even if nobody knew exactly what it meant' I Even Daryl Gates, the embattledand abrasive former chief of police in Los Angeles, explicitly advocated communitypo1ic!rg in his 1992 n1cn10ir, C).) -'vvhich only ulldcr:;vrc3 yuC;tivu3 about theterm's use. If the notorious LAPD has, as Gates insists. been practicing communitypolicing since the 1970s, then what doesn't count as community policing? Ifthe term covers everything, then does it mean anything?Perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, the LAPD did invent some of the paradigmaticcommunity policing programs, including DARE (Drug Abuse ResistanceEducation) and the neighborhood watch.s, But the clash between the LAPD'suncivil image and that of the personable neighborhood beat cop gets to the heartof the confusion about what is and is not community policing. There is a differencebetween adopting stand-alone progrmns and taking on community policingas an overall organizational strategy. 'lbe Los Angeles Police Department mayhave recognized early on the need for community partnerships, but it-likemost departments-has pursued these partnerships unevenly, haphazardly, andwithout changing the basic orientation of the police force.On the other hand. community policing is not at all incompatible with the hardnosed,militarized tactics for which Gates's department became famous, or infamous.Of the two major strands of community policing programs-"peace corps policing"and "order maintenance policing" -the latter seems to actually promote just thesort of excess that Gates favored. Peace corps policing "emphasized communityempowerment, cultivating constructive relationships with disenfranchised minor-204