The Politics of Community Policing: Rearranging the Power to Punish (Law, Meaning, and Violence)

In Lyon's study, it was community groups that first mobilized to pressure the police to do things differently. These communities wanted geographic integrity, police-community partnerships to jointly target criminal activity, and more attention to order maintenance and police accountability. These citizens, for reasons that are thoroughly documented in this marvelous study, succeeded in pressuring a reluctant police department to create partnerships and experiment with innovative patrol strategies. They persuaded the city to hire a new police chief, known nationally for his leadership in community policing. These efforts initially paid off: crime declined.

Lyons skillfully explains the interactions among the loose coalitions of citizen groups and between these groups and police officers or administrators. He then draws valuable lessons about effective policing from the kinds of reciprocal partnerships that community mobilization created. This book is a must read for anyone, citizen or officer, interested in the promise of community policing and the political forces that can undermine this promise. At the same time, the failures documented in this study are the most impressive and insightful contributions of this book. While citizens did succeed in the ways noted, their success was short lived and, Lyons argues, the atrophy of their initial partnerships and patrol innovations now stand as significant obstacles to the advancement of community policing. Instead of reciprocal partnerships that improve the effectiveness and accountability of policing these partnerships have evolved into organizations dominated by the police department that serve to make it more difficult for communities, especially those critical of police practices, to be heard. The marginalization of those communities already most victimized by crime is the most important finding in this study.