Citizens, Cops, and Power: Recognizing the Limits of Community. by Steve Herbert. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. 180. $40.00 cloth; $16.00 paper.

Abstract

Citizens, Cops, and Power: Recognizing the Limits of Community. By Steve Herbert. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. 180. $40.00 cloth; $16.00 paper. Reviewed by Mathieu Deflem, University of South Carolina Everybody knows about community policing, but nobody really knows what it is, let alone what it accomplishes. As Herbert reveals in this short book, even those directly involved-the police and their citizens-hold conflicting ideas about community policing and its constituent elements. The general narrative is simple: community policing involves improved relations between police departments and citizens in order to fight more effectively the crime problems that affect localized communities. Through community policing, informal and formal controls join hands through a partnership between the citizens in a community and the professional agents of crime control. Yet underneath the facade of the community policing rhetoric lies a complex normative and sociological realty, the basic contours of which are usefully examined in this work. Herbert's book is based on qualitative research involving interviews and observations of police officers and community participants in three police beat regions in West Seattle (Washington State). The regional police beats are diverse in terms of their demographic and socioeconomic structure and crime rates. The research is theoretically framed around the discourse on community in political philosophy and, in confrontation therewith, the reality of community perceptions held by citizens. The main thesis of Herbert's study is that the notion of community is unbearably light in that it cannot effectively hold the policy responsibilities it is meant to fulfill and because the police apparatus remains unresponsive to the community, even when a partnership is formed. At least two central problems are revealed in the police-community partnership: citizen involvement comes disproportionately from upper-middle-class strata, and the police are generally reluctant to take the wishes of the community into account. In this sense, this work shows that there is little if any community in community policing. On a conceptual level, Herbert argues, community is not only difficult to grasp but also differently understood in political philosophy, on the one hand, and among citizens, on the other. Political thinkers conceive of community in either liberal or collectivist terms, but always assign to it an unquestionably desirable quality, typically from the viewpoint of a decentralized conception of governance. Therefore, community policing has become the definitive strategy to reduce distance between the police and the citizenry by devolving authority from central power to localized self-determination. Herbert's research, however, shows that citizens do not conceive of community in such idealized terms. …