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

1'5olire (Berkeley, CA: Center for Research on CriminalJustice, 1975); Daniel Nina, "Popular Justice and the 'Appropriation' of the State Monopoly onthe Definition of Justice and Order: The Case of the Anti-Crime Committees in Port Elizaheth,"in The Othrr Law: Non-Stale Ordering in South Africa, cd. \X'ilfi'ied Sch:irf and DanielNina (Lundsdowne: JUTA Law. 200 1); and Dennis R. Longmire, "A Popular Justice System: ARadical Alternative to the Traditional Criminal Justice System," Contemporary Crises 5 (1981).Longmire proposes pragmatic alternatives to police, courts, and prisons. His recommendarionsare as remarkable for their Simplicity as for their radicalism.6 For more on this point, see: George Orwell, "Thoughts on James Burnham," in Shooting anElepbant and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 19 50), 122- 14H.7 "The repressive police institution, so necessary for the maintenance of capitalism, simply could notperform any social funcrions at all without its legitimating crime-fighting role." Sidney L. Harflng,Foltcmg a Llass "ociety: j he Hxperience of American Cities, 1865-1915 (New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Press, 1983),246. Put differently-"The threat of crime, as evidenced by themyriad constructed images and narratives projected ... serves only as the pretext tor the installationof a growing and increasingly complex enterprise of social control." Victor E. Kappeler andPeter B. Kr:lska, "A. Textual Critique of Comrrlunity Policing: Police Adaptioi1 to High v1odelnlLy,))PoliCing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management 21:2 (1998): 293,8 My criticisms of community policing appear in chapter 9.9 Nikolas Rose, "Government and Control," British Journal of Criminology 40:2 (20DD): 329.David E. Pearson argues along similar lines: "To earn the appellation 'community.' it seemsto me, groups must be able to exert moral suasion and extract a measure of compliance fromtheir members. That is, communities are necessarily-indeed, by definition-coercive as wellas moral, threatening their members with the stick of sanctions if they stray, offering them thecarrot of certainty and stabilitv if they don't." David E, Pearsoll, "Community and Sociology,"Society 32:5 (July-August 1995) [database: Academic Search Elite, accessed March 26, 2003].10 Amatai Etioni, The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society (NewYork: Basic Books, 1996), 127.11 Carl Klockars puts the point more forcefully: "Sociologically, the concept of community impliesa group of people with a common history, common beliefs and understandings, a sense of themselvesas 'us' and outsiders as 'them,' and often. but not always, a shared territory. Relationshipsof community are different from relationships of society. Community relationships are basedupon status not contract, manners not morals, norms not laws, understandings not regulations.Nothing, in fact, is more different from community than those relationships that characterize12 Ibid,most of modern urban life." K1ockars, "Rhetoric," 435.13 For a discussion of gang suppression activities and their impacr on communities of color, see:Felix M. Padilla, Gangs as an American Enterprise (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,296