TRAVELS THROUGH CRIME AND PLACE: COMMUNITY BUILDING AS CRIME CONTROL by William DeLeon-Granados. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999. 179 pp.
Reviewed by William Lyons, Department of Political Science, The University of Akron.
TRAVELS THROUGH CRIME AND PLACE is a refreshingly readable
and thoughtful analysis of the stories Americans tell across the country about community
and policing. DeLeon-Granados provides a rich account of the political
struggles played out when power-poor neighborhoods articulate concerns that
challenge current police practice. The analysis presented in
this volume is based on the authors' conversations with
citizens and officers, observations of police work in different communities,
and survey of relevant social science literature. The central thesis of
the book, that community building is the most pragmatic, cost effective, and
just approach to crime control, emerges as the author successfully weaves these
diverse sources of data together into a compelling and innovative argument
about policing reform and community revitalization. The result is a book
that will almost certainly lead readers to think outside of the conventional
box, and in doing this contribute to raising the level of discourse about
community policing in the United States today.
TRAVELS THROUGH CRIME AND PLACE avoids one common weakness associated
with arguments premised on the importance of community. DeLeon-Granados does
not romanticize community. Analyzing community policing from the perspective of
those communities most victimized by crime remains the most often missing piece
in debates about policing reform. This volume avoids simply assuming community
or asserting a set of shared values constitutive of community
life. DeLeon-Granados recognizes and rejects simply
nostalgic myths about traditional communities. Instead, he focuses on the
concrete resources and interpersonal relations - on the importance of investing
in social capital - critical to using community as an analytical category and
to mobilizing it as a political resource. This volume treats community as a
democratic aspiration with empirical referents. The analytical power of
this standpoint is that is precludes discursive constructions that treat
community as either singular, given, or symbolic. It deconstructs the
official stories about community policing making efforts to reconstruct these
stories without attention to community revitalization more difficult. Traveling
through crime and place inescapably means addressing the paradox that community
policing partnerships continue to exclude the citizens living in those
communities most victimized by crime.
According to DeLeon-Granados, "[p]eople stop crime by forming a community" (p. 6). This statement is meaningful in two important ways. First, any gathering of folks does not necessarily constitute a community in the sense sought after as co-producers of public safety. Since
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it is the capacity to mobilize informal social controls that
contributes to stopping crime, the relevant communities are "coherent and
interdependent" segments of those neighborhoods most victimized by
crime. Second, this statement is important as a clear statement of a
fundamentally pragmatic insight. Communities are formed and shared values
achieved, not assumed or asserted. For DeLeon-Granados this means that to
the degree that those communities most victimized by crime are not coherent and
interdependent, community policing must invest in their social capital.
Under these conditions communities are more likely to have "the potential
to stop a great many crimes, from a street mugging to an industrial manufacturer's
dumping pollutants in the lake.[and] people remain the most efficient and least
noxious method to control crime, reduce fear, and limit disorder" (p.
6). Without this investment, community policing will BECOME public
relations--policing where communities
are absent.
This insight is a frequent refrain in the community policing
literature. Since Wilson and Kelling (1982), advocates of community policing have
repeatedly asserted that the police cannot do it alone and require assistance
from communities. A narrow focus law enforcement (arrest) handcuffs the
police and alienates even law-abiding communities. More innovative policing
tactics (reverse stings, problem solving, decentralization) and a re-orientation
of patrol (foot patrol, bike patrol, beat integrity) are required. The
police, the argument goes, must partner with communities to reduce citizen fear
and revitalize the informal social
controls that are only available in strong communities constituted
by more reciprocal relational networks (Lyons 1999). Policing, like
governance in general, must invest in the social, political, and economic
capital of those communities most victimized by crime if community policing is
to be both innovative and effective.
DeLeon-Granados persuasively identifies three core problems faced
by citizens, officers, and elected officials interested in preventing crime and
reducing violence. First, those communities most victimized by crime lack
the resources needed to prevent crime and community policing to date has amplified
these concentrated disadvantages. "Although community members
often can provide the most appropriate response to problems
in their communities, in this book I show how efforts to exploit citizens'
informal abilities face numerous, perhaps insurmountable obstacles, especially
in low- income communities. Such communities lack the resources and
structures needed to maintain long-term community stability. Official
crime prevention
can swallow up informal community-based responses, can
alienate segments of the population, and can chew up police resources by
focusing on arrest instead of strategies that can potentially stabilize a
community's social ecology" (p. 7). Partnerships are rarely
established with those communities most victimized by crime. Police
tactics rarely change from an arrest-focus to a more integrated and
community-friendly approach to crime control. Instead, "efforts to build
community invariably anoint an arrest-centered criminal justice enterprise
rather than reestablish connections and resources within and across
communities" (p. 151). An example that he uses to illustrate these
points is the Santa Ana, California department. It has a nationally
recognized police department that adheres to a community-policing model that
the department has successfully marketed. Santa Ana also provides a case
study of the
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inherent dilemma posed by current community policing. Its
department produces innovative and aggressive community-based policing strategies,
but it has failed to identify and exploit fully any latent problem-solving
abilities indigenous to the neighborhoods (p. 44).
Second, what began as a wide variety of only loosely
connected reforms designed to improve public safety by focusing on neighborhood
problems (rather than responding to incidents) and enabling those communities
most victimized by crime to emerge as co-producers of public safety has
narrowed into police-dominated partnerships that justify more aggressive law
enforcement. "[T]he original community-policing
concept seems missing from most policies" (p. 13). Citizens are
often left out or included only to the degree that they provide additional
resources for the police. Rather than the police as one player in an
integrated approach to revitalizing communities and achieving the shared
meanings central to strong communities, citizen participation is
"discouraged by a predefined notion of what crime control should
mean" (p. 67). Here DeLeon-Granados readily acknowledges that community
building as crime control is not the path of least resistance, made even less
so when community building is treated as merely an instrumental by-product of
formal law enforcement. Community building is the most effective and
least toxic approach, but it "can develop into a messy project, made more so
by relying too much on formal, top-down ideas about what it takes to control
crime, and not enough on the long, sometimes uneasy road built on stories and
narrative, dialogue and communication, trial and error, give and take" (p.
11). This messiness is, however, assiduously avoided in current police
practice.
The ease with which the community-policing model operates,
the activist reasons, shows the police in a positive light and wins the backing
of some local residents, but that is not what all the residents want or what
can bring long-term change to the neighborhoods. There is a central
dilemma for policing, illustrated by the community-policing stories in this
chapter. Despite much ballyhoo about community policing being more proactive,
the policing culture tends toward a stranded position of reactive crime
fighting and short-term rewards. The activist outlines the dilemma thus:
Suppose the new seed programs don't take, then the process will just
repeat. The chief says he polices based on a policy of community
wellness, but all he's doing
is wiping our the youth of our community (p. 46).
Police and city inattention to community building and social
capital is one obstacle to effective community policing. Police
preferences for practices that define community policing as simply more
aggressive and less accountable professional policing are another set of
obstacles. Taken together these suggest a third obstacle: these
foreseeable failures amplify existing geographically concentrated
disadvantages--disadvantages that correlate with crime and victimization.
Although official stories highlight community building, prevailing practice
undermines the coherence and interdependence of those communities most
victimized by crime. He states,
"The policies I
examine are all strategies intended to evoke community
power. The
stories I present suggest that the strategies not only poorly
serve those aims but
also perpetuate dangerous, unhealthy divisions and
tensions between
race and class groups in communities.
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That they do so is
my alternative hypothesis. I argue that ongoing
conceptual ruts that value programmatic inventions over community
stability in the prevention of crime [sic] limit the ability of actors such
as the police to exploit
community problem-solving capabilities" (pp. 11-12).
DeLeon-Granados traces these "conceptual ruts"
back to the police-centered reading of policing reform found in the broken
windows thesis (Wilson and Kelling, 1982). According to DeLeon-Granados,
Wilson and Kelling correctly note that policing must address more than simply
crime and law enforcement, but they retain an exclusive focus on police agency
and bureaucratic imperatives. Community agency and the social capital
needed to build communities capable of preventing crime are systematically
excluded from community policing efforts that, instead, seek to tap into
communities as an additional resource for the police. DeLeon-Granados
argues that a more sober and pragmatic approach recognizes that participation
from citizens in those communities most victimized by crime will not be
forthcoming without genuinely innovative police practices and more reciprocal
partnerships that manifestly invest in the social capital of their communities.
DeLeon-Granados highlights the importance of police
leadership, concurring that innovative policing ought to focus on incivilities
and environmental design, but that the essential criteria must be to do this in
a way that "encourages interdependent behavior" not just to control
deviance (p. 104). The objective is not to simply re-assert Wilson's (1985)
imaginary middle-class values. There is plenty of evidence pointing to
violence even in neighborhoods with porches (p. 108). Also, the fear that
DeLeon-Granados found in American neighborhoods reflects the "political
nature of space" (p. 105) and is better understood as "a proxy for
the loss of control" most apparent in our least advantaged neighborhoods
(p. 114).
As DeLeon-Granados concludes, then, effective community
policing will be a strategy that "values community and liberty, control
and benevolence, and fashions relations that connect us rather than drive us
further apart" (p. 145). And this requires that authority be
negotiated (p. 151), fears be confronted candidly (p. 155), and that efforts to
reduce fear include efforts
to name and reduce fear of the police (p. 157). And
all of these practices must be conducted in ways that invest in community
building as crime control. Current state-centered efforts "miss the real
importance of connecting because they never articulate strategies to increase a
variety of neighborhood and community resources that will establish informal
social control in communities" (p. 152).
REFERENCES:
Lyons, William.
1999. THE POLITICS OF COMMUNITY POLICING: REARRANGING THE
POWER TO PUNISH.
University of Michigan Press, 1999.
Wilson, James Q.
1985. THINKING ABOUT CRIME, revised edition. New York:
Vintage Books..
Wilson, James Q. and
George Kelling. 1982. "Broken Windows" THE ATLANTIC
MONTHLY.
Copyright 2000 by the
author, William Lyons.