Reciprocity, Collective Action, and Community Policing

Abstract

This Article has two goals. The first is to develop a theoretical framework for evaluating different techniques for policing street crime. The second is to highlight the explanatory and prescriptive power of a particular theory of norms and law. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a diverse array of crime-fighting strategies-from order maintenance policing to churchpolice alliances to highly participatory forms of law enforcement. These innovations arguably deserve a significant share of the credit for the remarkable drop in crime during the last decade. They also speak to a dramatic reorientation in the politics of law enforcement: for decades a weapon by which dominant groups safeguarded their preeminence, streetlevel policing is now being recast by traditionally marginalized groups as a tool for revitalizing community life in the inner city.' But the proponents of the Community have so far failed to identify a single theory of crime control that is comparable in parsimony and prescriptive richness to the rational-actor model that animates traditional policing strategies. The absence of such a theory threatens to impede the New Community Policing by making its claims of efficacy less credible and its diverse strategies less amenable to comparison with one another. Almost contemporaneously with the development of the New Community Policing, the legal academy has witnessed the emergence of a sustained challenge to the conventional rational-actor theory that guides law and economics. This program features a diverse array of behavioral phenomena, often referred to generically as social norms, drawn from