Against the Romance of Community Policing

Community policing is a confusing term. It joins together two of the
most ambiguous words in the English language. Despite this ambiguity,
its power resides not in what it purports to mean—a partnership of the
police agencies and the people they protect forged through the fluid
exchange of intelligence from the latter to the former—but in what it
reveals about the purpose and mechanism of the police-led fabrication of
social order. Here are some thoughts about why we should be wary not
simply of community policing but of community itself.

Police is the form of governance, the exercise of coercive power and
authority, defined by its undefinability. The police power concerns a
limitless and ever-growing set of objects because it takes as its task
the prudential identification of threats to public safety in advance of
their occurrence.

In everyday usage, community is taken to be an inert, or perhaps warm
and fuzzy, collection of people gathered together according to some form
of spatial, ethno-racial, or other propinquity. In contrast, I would
define community as a technology of social reconfiguration and
manipulation. How community creates adhesion among people is hidden by
the embedded assumptions of boundedness, cohesiveness, and harmony in
typical usage. The very working of the technology itself erases
politics. It erases the vast inequalities in access to power and
resources that structure and striate this gathered-together
confraternity called community.

Although there is much more to be said on the topic, one chief means of
this gathering together is the police power. Policing leverages social
inequalities to further empower leaders to marshal the apparent
consensus community represents. Dissensus becomes scripted as
crime. Policing links the governance of the past with the governance of
the future: catching offenders to keep them from offending again.
Community is the stake, medium, and outcome of this action. To police is
to define the boundaries of community through exclusion and punishment
and to realize capitalist economic interests within those boundaries.

Community is the terrain of intervention for police, shaped by police.
It does not preexist police and it does not provide a bulwark against
police power. It cannot achieve its apparent cohesiveness without the
police power. It cannot be joined to police to moderate the negative
effects of policing.

In the unending media coverage of policing today, community policing
continues to be held out as an antidote both to the injustice, violence,
and racism of the institutions of US policing and to the supposed
scourge of
crime. Critics
abound, of course. But more popular are the true believers, the voices
who tell us that if the police just get to know the community, crime
will go down and police racism will dwindle.

In response, my argument is simple: community is the terrain of
intervention for police, shaped by police. It does not preexist police
and it does not provide a bulwark against police power. It cannot
achieve its apparent cohesiveness without the police power. It cannot be
joined to police to moderate the negative effects of policing. Nor can
it be joined to police to stimulate the repression of crime that the
community members are otherwise incapable of achieving without enhancing
the power of police. To commit a crime is to evidence one’s
ineligibility for community membership. That is its inherent logic.
Community and police double-back on each other under present social
arrangements, to maintain and reproduce present social arrangements. In
this sense, the term is redundant.

A new Department of Justice
(DOJ) analysis of
the Baltimore police department (BPD) contains what some have found to
be a shocking revelation (shocking only if you live under a rock). The
DOJ, a firm advocate of community
policing, found:
“Finally, BPD’s policies and training do not consistently embrace
community policing principles. BPD’s community policing strategy
involves few training modules on community policing and communication.
We attended one of these in-service trainings, which focused on
community policing and foot patrol. The segment on officers’ role as
‘warriors versus guardians’ focused primarily on the benefits of being a
warrior. Indeed, it seemed that principles of community policing and the
role of a police officer as a ‘guardian’ is not yet well understood by
the instructors, who emphasized the drawbacks of this approach, making
it unlikely that officers will understand how to embrace such principles
in their interactions” (161). The shock is that training in community
policing emphasized acting like warriors. The DOJ believes there is
another way to train police, which is more appropriate.

Warrior training is an increasingly common form of in-service police
training. It is designed to get cops to kill people with alacrity. It
is wrought from pop psychology, machismo, and racism. There is no
evidence behind it other than the power of gut feeling it
self-referentially lauds. A great new documentary
called Do
Not Resist depicts some of this warrior training, led by the quack
cop
guru Dave
Grossman, who tries to convince officers that they are the only
barrier to total chaos, while hyping the sadistic and erotic pleasure of
violence. This way of policing sounds very different from the relatively
benign notion of community policing.

Yet the affinities are far greater than would appear. Both forms use
community in the same way. One of the underlying ideas in warrior
training is the “sheepdog” principle, as enunciated by Grossman and
others. In essence, the principle states that cops should act like
sheepdogs, herding, directing, and controlling the sheeplike masses
while warding off predators. Implicit in this ultra-simplistic metaphor
is the notion that the vast majority of people have no strong loyalty
one way or the other; a smaller percentage of people are always loyal to
police and the forces of order; and an equally small further percentage
of people are always disloyal, predatory, criminal, and so on. The
police as sheepdogs must eliminate the small group that is always
refractory while convincing the vast majority to follow orders, avoid
criminal entanglements, and so on. They can enlist the reliably loyal
and law-abiding in this quest and perhaps even convince some of the
neutral to join the cohort of reliably loyal, if not just moderately and
begrudgingly loyal. To convert the neutral into the loyal, against the
disloyal, is the goal of community policing.

Rather than community, which occludes inequalities, we should speak in
terms of solidarity and in terms of specific positionalities in relation
to dominant economic and political structures.

This sheepdog principle is counterinsurgency theory 101. One of its most
prominent advocates in the 1960s
was David
Galula, a semi-legendary French officer and theorist who has
influenced generations of US counterinsurgents. (The most important
component of his forces, it’s worth recalling, were
gendarmes—police.) In Galula’s Algeria or South Vietnam, the axiom was
to apply in exactly the same way: some percentage of citizens (~20%) was
loyal to the government and some percentage (~20%) was disloyal, meaning
revolutionaries. The majority of the population (~60%) was neutral. This
group did not necessarily care who governed, and it could be easily
swayed to the side of the revolutionaries. Bound up in this estimate of
the broad swath of the population that was neutral was a range of racist
notions about mental acuity, capacity for self-governance, laziness,
guile, and so on. Neutrality was inherently suspicious. The job of
counterinsurgents was to help the reliably loyal sway the neutrals’
loyalty to the government and to ensure that this majority remained
loyal and continually demonstrated its loyalty. Coercion was of course
one way to make sure that loyalty was constantly visible: in secured
hamlets in South Vietnam, peasants would be forced to muster, raise a
flag, salute it, and express their support and gratitude. If they did
not do so, a range of penalties awaited, from withholding pay and
rations to incarceration to execution.

With the discretionary despotism of street policing, what precedes so
many killings other than some perceived refusal to acknowledge, respect,
and affirm the authority of police?

In the era of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, these ideas about
fashioning a loyal community were inscribed in counterinsurgency
manuals. Today, even after much of the Galula-influenced catechism of
“population-centric” counterinsurgency has been repudiated, this wannabe
sociology lives on. (Check the counterinsurgency manual FM 3–24
from 2006 and
the revised version
from 2014.
It’s in both.) But its most pernicious afterlife is on the streets of
the United States.

To divide the populace into reliably identifiable groups has pertinent
effects for police. First, it treats loyalty or adherence to incumbent
power (ie, the state) as a preeminent value. Even if people are
“neutral” for a million good reasons, this neutrality is cause for
suspicion because it can so easily transform into disloyalty. Second, it
draws inferences about behavior from perceptions of loyalty. This is the
internal logic of racism. Third, it mistakes cause and effect, by
treating loyalty as what should be rewarded rather than loyalty as the
result of the interests policing serves. While protecting and enshrining
capital, police perceive an interest in the realization of capital as a
form of loyalty and legitimacy for their work. Fourth, it gives police
an endless justification to exist: to police is to sort and classify
according to this system, a perpetually unfinished
task. Order-maintenance
policing, the term I prefer to broken windows policing, is this
sorting. Don’t take my word for it,
take George
Kelling’s: “For me, broken windows was about community policing.”

In recent weeks, critics of police, including many self-identified
abolitionists, have mounted some of the most brilliant and beautiful
protests
and demands we’ve
seen. Many grasp the folly of community policing as a reform goal. Yet
many also remain hitched to the positive evaluation of community. We
must instead critique it, ruthlessly. Community as constituted under
white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism is not the first place to
look for their alternatives.

As abolitionists demand the redirection of police budgets toward more
positive and constructive social goals, I worry when the demands are
framed as: give the money to the community instead of the cops. I return
to the practice of counterinsurgency, which often is little more than an
elaborate way to direct resources in “the community” to buy loyalty.
What is the community? It is the target of social intervention. Who in
the community gets identified as the proper channel for such support?
Those who demonstrate their loyalty and reliability. How do they do so?
By laboring on works that keep the broader population from becoming
refractory to authority…and so on, as I
have written.
In Galula’s words, “It will be up to this minority, selected, tested,
organized by us, to help us, first, to rally the majority, which is
neutral, and eliminate that minority which is hostile, and then to
implement the chosen political formula.”

Rather than community, which occludes inequalities, we should speak in
terms of solidarity and in terms of specific positionalities in relation
to dominant economic and political structures.

Finally, the distinction between so-called militarized policing and
community policing is less tenable than it seems. When we speak of the
so-called militarization of policing, I believe we should be talking
less about the hardware that cops carry and more about our critiques of
policing. If we are unable to step outside the framework that makes
policing counterinsurgent because we cannot dispense with the technology
of community, then we know we have been fully integrated into a social
situation of perpetual war.

[1] My thinking on community (and the title above) has been
influenced by Miranda Joseph’s
book Against
the Romance of Community. My thinking on policing as the fabrication
of social order is influenced
by Mark
Neocleous, and my thinking on many other aspects of the police power
mentioned here is influenced
by Markus
Dirk
Dubber, Mariana
Valverde, and Bryan
Wagner.

[2] Warrior training is increasingly coming
under scrutiny,
particularly after high-profile police killings
have resulted from
it.

[3] A
recent critique of
policing by a Black ex-cop even applied the sheepdog principle to cops
themselves, saying 15% are inherently bad/racist, 15% inherently good,
and 70% willing to take whatever side is easiest to take.