Conflicting Values in Community Policing

Police reformers in the early 21st century place great importance on the development of police-community partnerships, but they have not recognized the deep obstacles that these relationships face. This study argues that the central problems of working in partnership involve conflict over values: Different organizations advance different social values, and when the partners who cling to them try to collaborate, conflict flares up at the point of contact. I draw on several case studies to describe how these conflicts surface and potentially undermine partnerships, and I analyze the strategies that police agencies have developed to respond to them. This analysis reveals that community policing has fundamental (and probably desirable) implications for police practice because it forces police to attend to many neglected dimensions of their mandate. The article thereby offers a new interpretation of community policing's implications for practice and a new interpretation of its value as a reform movement. Community policing is the order of the day. Having become official federal policy with the passage of the 1994 Crime Bill, it remains the dominant model of police reform today (Hickman & Reaves 2001). One of this movement's boldest and most difficult aims-arguably its core ideal-is to build meaningful partnerships for improving public safety. Conventional wisdom holds that most police departments work autonomously, trying to isolate themselves from "politics" and monopolize the task of crime control. But community policing exhorts city police departments to forswear their autonomy and collaborate with practically everyone: community groups and institutions, property owners, agencies of city government, other police and security forces, elected officials, businesses, and so on (e.g., Eck 1990:9; Friedman 1994). Community policing is hardly alone in this aim. It is an instance of a broad trend in public policy that criticizes autonomous government agencies, calling on them to work closely with civil society, forge public/private partnerships, and work more intimately with each other (Kettl 1996). Reforms of this kind must contend with an important feature of modern society. Any complex society involves differentiation in terms of roles and values (Durkheim 1960; Walzer 1984), so every social institution pursues priorities separate from and potentially in conflict with the others. Consequently, interorganizational partnerships bring together institutions committed to potentially incompatible priorities. The practitioners who manage these relationships will find themselves in contested normative terrain, pressured by conflicting social aims that had formerly been institutionally segregated. To be responsive to each institution, they must be centrally concerned with resolving the tensions among those conflicting values. Understanding the nature of that challenge and articulating the ways in which it can be legitimately managed is a central issue facing scholarship and practice in community policing, as well as in interorganizational relations more generally. In this article, I draw on eleven case studies of community policing to show that some police-community partnerships do confront significant value conflicts of the sort just described. In the process, I offer a more concrete portrait of the practical challenge raised by conflicting values, and I describe and analyze strategies that practitioners have devised to respond to it. Such research is a necessary first step toward understanding how practitioners can properly manage this central challenge of community policing and toward fully identifying the implications that community policing will have. Partnerships and Value Pluralism Police and their would-be partners do not always value the same, or even compatible, things, and there are often good (though not immutable) reasons for this. Neighborhood groups bespeak a commitment to quality-of-life in specific residential areas; landlords to the exchange and (perhaps) improvement of residential properties; service agencies to the welfare of their clients; and the courts to doing justice and the protection of individual rights. …