The
Politics of Community Policing
Author: William
Lyons
ISBN: Cloth
0-472-10953-7 $50.00, Paper 0-472-08901-3 $21.95
Publishers
University of Michigan Press
Price:
Cloth $50.00, Paper $21.95
Publication Date: 2002
paperback edition.
Community policing, the author argues,
does not necessarily empower the community but often increases the power of the
police.
In this in-depth examination of community
policing in Seattle, William T Lyons explores the complex issues associated
with the establishment and operation of community policing, an increasingly
popular method for organizing law enforcement in the USA.
Stories about community policing appeal to
a nostalgic vision of traditional community life. Community policing carries
with it the image of a safe community in which individual citizens and
businesses are protected by police they know and who know them and their needs.
However, it also carries an image of community based in partnerships that
exclude the least advantaged, strengthen the police, and are limited to
targeting
those disorders feared by more powerful
parts of the community and most amenable to intervention by professional law
enforcement agencies.
The author argues that the politics of
community policing are found in the construction of competing and deeply
contested stories about community and the police in environments characterized
by power inbalances. Community policing, according to the author, colonizes
community life, increasing
the capacity of the police department to
shield itself from criticism, while manifesting the potential for more
democratic forms of social control as evidenced by police attention to
individual rights and to impartial law enforcement.
This book will be of interest to
sociologists and political scientists interested in the study of community
power and local politics as well as criminologists interested in the study of
police.
William Lyons is an Associate Professor of
Political Science and the Director of the Centre for Conflict Management at the
University of Akron.
He previously worked for the Seattle
Police Department.