Competing Stories about

Community and Policing

 

From:


Lyons, William. 1999. The Politics of Community Policing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Pp.1-13.

 

The beating; of Rodney King by several officers from the Los Angeles Police Department drew national attention to the urban crime control problem. In an election year response, President George Bush offered the Justice Department's Weed and Seed Program. The mayor of Seat­tle saw this as an opportunity to be more responsive to community con­cerns. Seattle applied for and received a Weed and Seed grant to target gang activity in the Central District, a primarily lower income, black neighborhood. The grant provided more than $1 million in the first year, with the potential for much more in subsequent years, for law enforcement agencies to lead an effort to weed out undesirable ele­ments in the target community and seed for community revitalization to keep them out.

On June 6, 1992, in a small storefront chapel in Seattle's Central District, the Coalition to Stop Weed and Seed met to share information. Speakers told the 5o‑plus attendees that Weed and Seed would turn their communities into concentration camps, subject only their children to stricter federal sentencing requirements, suspend their civil rights, seize their property, and cut off their welfare benefits. The basic mes­sage was "Weed and Seed does not meet o«r needs."

Citing an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report, speakers argued that Weed and Seed would lead to a more powerful, but less accountable, federal policing presence in their communities. "Opera­tion Weed and Seed substitutes federal law enforcement and sentenc­ing for local law. And federal drug sentencing laws are draconian. Under federal law, an offender can be imprisoned for up to three times as long as a similar offender sentenced under Washington state law. Under 'Weed and Seed' Seattle's white neighborhoods would be gov­erned by state law and our black neighborhoods would suffer under harsher federal law."     

The coalition of groups opposed to Weed and Seed had been con­cerned about crime control long before Weed and Seed appeared on the political agenda, and the tactics they discussed reflected their desire to do more than just criticize. They discussed various measures to mobi­lize the community: forming new community councils; informing property owners about potential seizures; and organizing demonstra­tions, phone trees, a clergy coalition, and a legal defense fund. They discussed two electoral strategies: one ballot initiative to abolish the at large election of city council members and return to a city council elected by district, and another to recall Norm Rice, Seattle's first African American mayor. They also heard from a committee planning alternative arrangements for the provision of public safety, including the creation of a community‑based civilian review board.

The Weed and Seed controversy highlights the difficulties inherent in government attempts to be responsive to community needs. Agree­ment on the importance of public safety did not mean agreement on the best way to achieve it. An editorial columnist for the Seattle Times argued that, while state law enforcement agencies viewed Weed and Seed as a responsive solution to the problems of drug use and gang activity in high‑crime neighborhoods, many residents of the target neighborhoods saw such programs as part of the problem. Mayor Rice tried to calm community fears about accountability by pointing out that Weed and Seed would expand Seattle's popular community polic­ing program, but this did not calm the fears expressed by the coalition. The communities most victimized by crime in Seattle remained con­cerned not only about crime but also about the way crime control was provided.

 

Since 1993, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) has been a poster child for community policing. Like the Weed and Seed contro­versy in Seattle, the New York case highlights the competing messages, the fears of crime and official misconduct, constitutive of community policing.  The brutal beating of Abner Louima by officers of the NYPD sent a powerful message, a message one officer involved explained as constitutive of a new style of policing, a political message that we are now living in “Giuliani time.”  According to Andrew Karman,

 

Some officers have gotten the message that they were unleashed, that their handcuffs were taken off.  In the Louima case, when the officer said, "It is Giuliani time," he was saving the rules of the game have changed. He was saying he felt that, Mr. Louima, you don't have any protectors anymore."

 

Despite the fact that this case exploded in the media more than a year after a highly critical Amnesty International report was dismissed by Mayor Giuliani, he still maintained that there was no connection between police brutality and New York's much‑publicized policy of "zero tolerance" for minor crimes‑a policy some believe accounts for a substantial portion of the decline in crime and most were certain would make Giuliani virtually unbeatable in the upcoming elections. The Washington Post reported, just prior to the Louima beating, that crimes reported in the city had dropped from more than 700,000 in 1990 to less than 400,000 in 1996 and murders had dropped from 2,005 in 1992 to 985 in 1993. At the same time, misdemeanor arrests increased from just over 120,000 in 1990 to almost 200,000 in 1996 and complaints of police mis­conduct rose from more than 3,000 in 1990 to just under 6,ooo in 1995." While Mayor Giuliani's public approval ratings were over 8o percent at the beginning of 1997, levels of police brutality, according to the 1996 Amnesty report, had "reached an extremely worrying level."

Mayor Giuliani's rush to take credit for the dramatic drop in crime was not matched by a rush to accept responsibility for Abner Louima's tragedy. The fear‑inducing message announced to Abner Louima and other similarly power‑poor members of New York communities screamed what is generally whispered: the disciplinary harmonies that accompany the democratic melodies in stories about community polic­ing. "This is Giuliani time" conveys a simple, painfully clear message: you are not part of the community we are partnering with when we tell our stories about community policing. This officer's succinct message also recognizes that there are competing stories associated with former New York Mayor Dinkins, perhaps contrasting stories told at commu­nity meeting time and press conference time with stories screaming through toilet bowl plungers at ass‑kicking time. With the recent publi­cation of Kelling and Coles's celebration of the NYPD as the vanguard of community policing, it is difficult not to also hear a message about "rearranging the power to punish," further privileging the "illegalities" of powerful public and private leaders and punishing the "illegalities" characteristic of the least advantaged in the stories and practices con­stitutive of community policing in New York.

Mayor Giuliani is, no doubt, correct to point out that there is no necessary connection between more aggressive policing of minor disor­ders and police brutality. But the mayor built powerful electoral alliances by zealously (fanning and) responding to the fears of middle­class voters with stories about the virtues of anticipatory policing prac­tices. And he failed to anticipate with an equivalent zeal the entirely foreseeable consequences of his "zero tolerance" stories on police prac­tice, media coverage, and the city's least advantaged residents. This sent a political message about who was invited to join the community being constructed in stories about community policing. Failing to anticipate the foreseeable consequences with an equally zealous, antic­ipatory "zero tolerance" of unaccountable police power links aggres­sive crime control policies to the beating of Abner Louima and reveals an important reason to deconstruct prevailing stories about community and policing in community policing. While "Getting Back to Mayberry" may be an unambiguously positive image for some, it is also an image of a community that has never had a safe place for people like Abner Louima or Rodney King.

 

Through my analysis of community policing in Seattle, I have come to see the politics of community policing as constituted‑in large part ­by discursive struggles to define community and policing. This study, therefore, is an analysis of the politics of community policing as the construction of competing stories, in environments characterized by power imbalances, requiring attention to the political utility of prevail­ing stories, including how particular stories impact agency, resources, and legitimation. Stories about community policing turn out to be both disciplinary and democratizing, but not in an undifferentiated way. Community policing colonized community life, increasing the capacity of the Seattle Police Department to shield itself from critical public scrutiny. It also manifested the potential for more democratic forms of social control in police attention to individual rights and impartial law enforcement, a brief episode of reciprocity in the police‑community partnership, community police teams, and the resilience of stories about community revitalization in the struggle to define community policing. The meaning of community policing, then, has remained con­tingent on struggles to control political, economic, and social resources for the power to say what policing is and who communities are.

The City. Seattle is located on a long north‑south peninsula with Puget Sound on its west and Lake Washington

on its cast. Incorporated as a city in 1869, Seattle is governed under a mayor‑council form of government. A city of more than half a million residents, Seattle occu­pies 143 square miles of land, including 3,000 acres of parks. The Seat­tle Police Department (SPD), with some ups and downs, has been a reli­able player in Seattle politics since it was first organized in 1886. In 1994, the final year of this study, the Seattle Police Department employed 1,266 sworn officers and 633 civilians. The ratio of police offi­cers to population was 1 to 420, compared to a national average of 1 to 454. The number of police officers per 1,000 population was 2.38, com­pared to 2.20 nationally. And the ratio of sworn to civilian employees was 2 to 1, compared to 3.46 to 1 nationally.

The Neighborhoods.  Southeast Seattle is a set of neighborhoods running from Skid Road to the southern edge of the city and was the target area for the South Seattle Crime Prevention Council (SSCPC) (see fig. 1). This study focuses on the activities of the SSCPC from its cre­ation in 1988 to 1994, when Police Chief Patrick Fitzsimons retired. Southeast Seattle is a largely residential area with the highest concen­tration of people of color in the city (see appendix). After World War II, decisions by public and private leaders in the city contributed to eco­nomic decline and rising crime in the southeast. Beginning in the 1970s, loose coalitions of community activists fought the city in an attempt to preserve their communities, including efforts to improve public safety. The pressure they applied to a reluctant police administration led to the formation of the SSCPC, an association that the National Institute of Justice called a "model partnership between citizens and police."

Because the pressure to experiment with new forms of policing came from within the community and overcame strong opposition from Chief Fitzsimons, the emergence of community policing in Seattle offers a unique opportunity to examine the "hidden transcripts" con­stitutive of community policing.  Unlike nearly all other cities, where community policing initiatives began with the chief or the mayor, in this case they began in the neighborhoods and provide a picture of what more decentered stories about community and policing look like and how they integrate the competing stories of various communities around a shared interest in enhancing their capacity to subject unac­countable power in their neighborhoods to critical public scrutiny. This case is also illustrative of voluntary cooperation at the community level that succeeded in pressuring a notoriously stubborn city bureaucracy to form a partnership, succeeded in linking crime prevention efforts to other ongoing struggles to revitalize the southeast, succeeded in ensur­ing that the new chief has seriously committed to community policing, and succeeded in cooperating with other citizen groups and the police to impact crime rates in their neighborhoods.

The Approach. I focus on competing stories for several reasons. First, this analytical strategy serves as a way of hearing many different voices in the text without granting immediate credibility to any one of them. Second, I use stories as interchangeable with narratives, both meaning temporally ordered tales about history with a plot, a moral or vision with political utility in the present, and closure.  Stories are the small arms of neighborhood struggle, the heavy artillery deployed in city newspapers, and the building blocks of discourses. My focus on stories is an attempt to explicate the political messages and power­knowledge nexus at the heart of an emerging discourse on social control: community policing. Third, I prefer to use the term stories (rather than narratives, messages, or discourses) because its common language meaning is consistent with my more analytical usage, thereby increas­ing the accessibility of this text to a broader audience without compro­mising the clarity of my argument. Finally, those police officers and community activists I studied did in fact tell stories about community and policing; and their stories mattered to them both as tales with a moral relevant to current political conflicts and as resources to draw upon in their ongoing struggles over the power to say what policing is and who the community will be. One Seattle police officer, recognizing the importance of discursive struggle, noted that "if we don't tell our story, the community will make up their own stories."

Further, my analysis distinguishes between prevailing and com­peting stories about community and policing. The critical distinction here is empirical. Competing stories were more decentered, focusing on what can be done, by any of a variety of state and nonstate actors, to reduce crime and violence in a way that is consistent with resilient com­munities. Prevailing stories were state centered, focusing on policing as an activity of law enforcement professionals and the community as a resource to be more effectively tapped by these state agents. There was no single prevailing story about policing or community. Stories about policing, for instance, ranged from nostalgic visions to managerial strategies. But there are identifiable themes common to prevailing sto­ries, which highlight the boundaries of an emerging discourse on social control. First, prevailing stories construct history and the present to support state‑centered stories about professional policing. Second, pre­vailing stories draw discursive resources from references to empower­ing communities with specified capacities while narrowing the possi­bility of more empowered communities by ignoring the relational basis of these capacities, that is, social capital and reciprocity (discussed below). And, third, prevailing stories integrate more decentered stories about community and policing only to the extent that these normalize deference to state agency and strengthen state capacities to surveil pub­lic and private space.

I begin my analysis with a central assumption in stories about community policing. A core assumption in the logic of community policing is that innovative police practices can mobilize now latent informal mechanisms of social control embedded within communi­ties. These mechanisms, like social capital, inhere within the recipro­cal relational networks that constitute communities. Advocates expect police‑community partnerships to empower citizens by reducing fear‑thereby making policing more efficient and effective to the degree that it revitalizes communities with specified capacities‑that is, it invests in the social capital of those communities most victimized by crime and violence.

Social capital provides a way of thinking about the relational basis of communities capable of mobilizing informal social controls and how to invest in these capacities. Social capital, like financial capital, is a resource that can be mobilized as a form of collective power. Unlike financial capital, however, social capital cannot be separated from the collective activities (relational networks) that created it; it inheres within reciprocal relationships and can be mobilized by members of these networks as a resource. SSCPC success in pressuring the Seattle Police Department to form a partnership and change the way policing works in the southeast can be attributed, in part, to their long‑term investment in social capital. Their initial success in reducing crime can also be attributed to the relatively reciprocal relationships they estab­lished with other communities in the southeast, police officers, and police leaders in the South Precinct just prior to and including the first year of their partnership. And the eventual atrophy of the SSCPC can be traced to their failure to preserve this horizontal and vertical reci­procity and ensure that the way crime was controlled continued to con­tribute to the social capital required to enable communities with the capacity to subject unaccountable forms of power in their neighbor­hoods to critical public scrutiny. For these reasons, I focus oil social cap­ital and reciprocity as the key contextualizing factors for understanding when the more democratic face of community policing is more likely to prevail over its disciplinary face.

A Dialectic of Democratic and Disciplinary Mechanisms of Social Control. Stories about stronger communities and more democratic polic­ing turn out to be inseparably linked to a widening of the web and thin­ning of the mesh of disciplinary mechanisms of social control. When stories about community policing recognize, as most do, that the police cannot do it alone, that police‑community partnerships call contribute to a community's capacity to mobilize informal social controls, and that partnerships will be able to tailor police practices to the particular problem solving efforts appropriate for different times and places, this can­dor manifests a democratic impulse. This is the part of the story that focuses on dramatic drops in crime rates, attributing a portion of this success to the political will to invest in social capital by experimenting with more reciprocal forms of police‑community partnerships and rec­ognizing that the way we fight crime also impacts the distribution of agency, resources, and the power to punish.

These more conventional measures of crime‑control success, and the democratic triumph manifest in reducing the disorders and vio­lence that plague our least advantaged communities "cannot be decon­structed away," according to Stanley Cohen. "If anything, these criteria need extension by seeing freedom from fear as a universal human right." In more decentered stories about community policing, this extension emerges as a right to be free from the fear of unaccountable power that undermines the resilience of communities, including fear of gangsters and unaccountable state agents. While these and other more democratic aspects of community policing are real, they are not the entire story.

As police departments and other powerful public and private agents work to place their stories about community and policing in the forefront of public debate, the disciplinary potential within these sto­ries becomes more salient. As Cohen notes about accountability, so is the case with the democratic impulses in community policing more generally. "Democratic notions such as accountability are easily trans­ferred by the old bureaucracies into self‑protecting ideologies.” In Seattle from 1988 to 1994, this linking of democratic and disciplinary stories supported police colonization of the model partnership, trans­forming an active and reciprocal partner into a docile and dependent client, displacing more democratic forms of moderation into normal­ization, and replacing more critical forms of public scrutiny with citi­zen surveillance plugged directly into state information systems. I see this as a dialectic of discipline and democracy because the same capac­ities supported either form of power, depending on the degree to which these were embedded within more or less reciprocal relational con­texts. The more democratic forces (subjecting unaccountable forms of power to critical public scrutiny or moderating competing demands) and the more disciplinary powers (to surveil or normalize) both require a degree of transparency and a linked capacity to gather information and construct more or less persuasive stories. When this transparency directs power and information in panoptic fashion, only in the direc­tion of the state, it encourages docility and dependence; when it directs power and information more reciprocally, to support multiple forms of agency, the same capacities can enable strong and active resistance to prevailing stories and strengthen more decentered stories about com­munity and policing in the discursive struggle to define community policing.

The dialectical relationship between democratic and disciplinary mechanisms of social control is what Foucault and Cohen highlight when they note that within each disciplinary discourse there are also resources for resistance to it." While prevailing stories about commu­nity policing privilege state agency, they also highlight the contingency and indeterminacy of effective social control efforts. While problem solving partnerships inject a still more "preservationist" slant to police­-community relations, they also mobilize a potentially "insurgent" lan­guage that can be applied to a variety of substantive problems beyond its utility as a procedural device to enhance the power and privilege the agency of police departments. It can be powerfully mobilized by citi­zens and officers to contest department stories about problems and solutions, crime and crime control. When state agents present disorder as the most policy‑relevant root cause of crime, this can justify harsh, proactive, and disciplinary attacks on disorderly individuals formerly known as homeless persons. However, as the Kelling and Coles's book ironically demonstrates, this requires the state to engage in a discursive struggle over the naming of these individuals and the chronic social problems and political cowardice their plight represents.

Here we can see the interweaving of democratic and disciplinary impulses. While Kelling and Coles seek to highlight the importance of fighting disorder through a much thinner mesh of discursive power more widely cast, they also highlight the inherently relational nature of social control. In the Seattle case, for instance, the focus on disorder did not remain limited to supporting aggressive order maintenance by pro­fessional law enforcement agencies; it also contributed to seeing disor­der as a visible consequence of a cascade of activities that only became visible within precommunity policing stories in the form of street crime. While prevailing stories construct disorder as an activity of the poor, the discursive focus on disorder also expanded the scope of the conflict to include physical disorder (pressuring property owners to maintain their properties), social disorder (pressuring both the supply and demand side of the drug and vice markets), and political disorder (pressuring city and police officials to address a broad array of com­munity concerns in an integrated fashion).

At the same time, aggressive order maintenance supported dis­placing culpability and reparations from the powerful original sinners responsible for the decline of Southeast Seattle onto the victims of neighborhood blight. A democratic impulse to more aggressively address the problems that victimize the least advantaged strengthened the capacity of state agents to, as Kelling and Coles recommend, rede­fine chronic social and political problems as police problems. The polic­ing of disorder mobilized disciplinary mechanisms of social control ­quickly removing "disorderly" individuals from public view in a spectacle reminiscent of public floggings. The publicity of this specta­cle, however, also makes "the uninterrupted play of calculated gazes" available to citizens seeking to hold now more visible and exposed state agents accountable for their exercise of power, a task made mod­erately more feasible by the state's justification of these practices as consistent with our democratic traditions. In this sense, the gaze is not so much uninterrupted as fragmented; the spectacle is not replaced with a single web of surveillance, but efforts to construct a spectacle out of the routine work practices of police officers also subjects police lead­ers (including mayors, like Rice and Giuliani) to critical public scrutiny. They are expected to justify their failure to balance their official zeal by responding with equivalent force and foresight to the fears of all city residents.

Seeing the presence of the sovereign is an important nondiscipli­nary characteristic of community policing, since, as Foucault notes, "[t]he scarcely sustainable visibility of the monarch is turned into the unavoidable visibility of the subjects. And it is this inversion of visibil­ity in the functioning of the disciplines that was to assure the exercise of power even in its lowest manifestations." In this case, the state remains visible, both the seeker of information and a subject in com­munication. "Visibility is [indeed] a trap." It is a paradox facing state agents seeking to tap into the resources constitutive of communities. In community policing, the legitimation of state power becomes more anonymous, but the exercise of this power by the state becomes more visible.

Foucault had great expectations for the police capacity to fill in the microphvs1cs of power constitutive of a disciplinary society. But the expected role may not be attainable because the legitimation efforts examined here depend in part on a police capacity to enable both demo­cratic and disciplinary forms of social control. If the police are to be "an apparatus that must be coextensive with the entire social body and not only to the extreme limits that it embraces, but by the minuteness of the details it is concerned with," it seems unlikely that it can do this with­out also inviting the additional constraints inherent in efforts to mobi­lize informal social controls within an indeterminate and contingent network of social relationship. The police, according to Foucault, "had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long as it could remain itself invisible." The degree to which this is a persuasive vision of our collective future remains an empirical question, but in this study of community policing the police remain visible, and their capacity to sur­veil remains impermanent, partial, and continuously mixed with the linked capacities of citizens to see the police and (sometimes) subject the police department to critical public scrutiny.

The Power to Say What Policing Is and Who Communities Are. The meaning of law and order in Southeast Seattle is being worked out in the interactions between and among police and citizens. The historical context in which these meaning struggles take place is prefigured by anger, violence, distrust, racism, and accountability concerns. Each of these represents a discursive and relational constraint on police control over the rearranging of the power to punish. If the "exercise of power consists of guiding the possibility of conduct," as Foucault argues, then the disruptive subjects opposed to Weed and Seed or enraged by the beating of Abner Louima are voicing concerns from their lifeworlds in the form of demands to participate in the power to guard against the possibility of police misconduct. Their voices tell stories about sub­jecting the unaccountable power of gangsters and agents of the state in their neighborhoods to critical public scrutiny.

The data and analysis presented here are based on a case study of one police‑community partnership: the South Seattle Crime Prevention Council. This data was compiled from three primary sources: in‑depth interviews with community activists, police officers, elected officials, and police administrators; observations of SSCPC meetings (and analy­sis of their meeting minutes), Seattle City Council meetings, and other related meetings for the period 1988‑94; and extensive research into materials published by the Seattle Police Department, neighborhood and city newspapers, and archival materials can the history of Southeast Seattle.

My approach starts with a focus on the core assumptions among police reformers about the role of community in community policing because embedded within these assumptions are key resources for competing stories about community and policing. If community polic­ing is effective and efficient because it involves policing in a way that enables communities with specific and identifiable capacities, then my first level of inquiry asks how effective the Seattle Police Department has been in developing new policing strategies that can be expected to enable communities to reclaim these capacities (informal mechanisms of social control). If the practice of community policing has not enabled communities with these capacities‑and I argue that it has not‑then my second level of inquiry investigates the system of urban social con­trol that is emerging Linder the label "community policing."

In Southeast Seattle, competing stories about policing and commu­nity were interwoven within the relationships that created and were created by a formal police‑community partnership: the South Seattle Crime Prevention Council. In this relational context, police power was both constrained and manifest as a "capacity to secure outcomes where the realization of these outcomes depends upon the agency of oth­ers." Throughout the period of this study, the prevailing stories about policing remained state centered, expanding the department's mandate to fight the fear of crime as well as crime itself. More decentered stories were a part of these prevailing stories only to the extent that they rein­forced this state agency.

The police chief in this period (1988‑94) showed little interest in policing in a way that would bring officers closer to the people they served or in stories about policing that might have enabled communi­ties to use the police department as a resource to build their own capac­ities to mobilize informal social controls. The discursive power of com­munity revitalization withered within prevailing stories as it was interwoven into the larger, ongoing political struggles in the city and within the police bureaucracy. This meant that even in a National Insti­tute of Justice model of community policing (Seattle) there was nearly no change in police organization, patrol orientation, community‑based crime prevention, or accountability six years after the first police‑com­munity partnership was established.