Violence and hyperviolence: The rhetoric and practice of community policing

Abstract

The postmodernism perspective, used here to illuminate the rhetoric and practice of community policing, draws attention to the role of violence in sustaining social order and the increasing role of symbolic or representational violence in shaping interpersonal relations. When societies valorize violence in some public contexts, it can be suppressed or effaced in others. The media‐driven spectacle of violence uses representations of violence as a means to increase ratings, sell goods and services, and maintain its salience by diminishing it to cartoon‐parody status. Focus on symbolic violence distracts public attention from the grinding everyday violence and the infrequent excesses of governmental social control. The rhetoric of community policing is “postmodern” and displays “hyperviolence” (rhetoric that denies the role of violence, yet indicates its presence in practice) in that it suppresses the centrality of violence to the police mandate and displaces attention to a notional “community.” A case study of community policing in one western city, based on interviews, observations, and focus groups, reveals that although community policing rhetoric is used as public discourse, the practice of patrol officers is little changed, and the absence of a crime control emphasis creates ambiguity in the police role, raises morale questions, and alters public expectations. A quite different future is imagined, depending on the scenario one adopts: the spread of community policing, increasing punitive crime control and a rising prison population, multiple modes of “soft control” partially obscuring the dramatic rise in the incarcerated population, and the use of the death penalty or some dialectic between representational and hyperviolence and rising violence on the part of the excluded lower classes.