Equity and Community Policing: A New View of Community Partnerships

Introduction These days police reformers regard the community with more ambivalence than first impressions might suggest. Community policing, like so many popular government reforms, certainly celebrates the role of citizens in helping police to improve neighborhood safety. The trouble is that the ideal of being responsive to individual community groups often conflicts with the equally-important ideal of equity, which directs police to provide fair service to all segments of the public. The source of this dilemma is simple: The whole community never shows up at police-community meetings, and it is often especially difficult to find neighborhood groups and other willing partners in poor neighborhoods compared with wealthier ones. As a result, if police are responsive to the community groups that do organize, they run the risk of winding up with skewed priorities that benefit the better-off at the expense of the poor. (1) Whether there is any way to mitigate this dilemma is a centrally important question for community policing. In a world in which community demands are obviously skewed--in which some communities do not articulate their interests and no group articulates the full range of interests in the community it purports to represent--do the police inevitably damage the notion of equity by forming partnerships with the communities that do mobilize? (2) In a place with ten communities, is it an improvement or a retrogression when police develop partnerships with five? The view of community partnerships that underlies most scholarship on policing usually answers these questions pessimistically because it imagines that police decisions result from the pressures their partners bring to bear on them: if the pressures are skewed, so too will be the decisions. In that respect, this view of partnerships reflects what James March and Johan Olsen call the "exchange view" of politics, which has long been influential in both political science and popular thinking. A close look at police practice, however, reveals more reason for optimism. Police-community dialogues can arrive at just outcomes in a real world of unequal demands. But for that to happen, police must accomplish three difficult tasks: They must focus the attention of their partnerships on the question of what is in the public good, they must investigate the needs and wants of social groups that are absent from these dialogues, and they must attend to what John Dewey calls the "methods and conditions of debate." In this article I will develop this position by drawing on three case studies that illustrate a different vision of community partnerships from the one that dominates much of the research on the subject. This vision has much in common with what March and Olsen call the "institutional view" of democratic governance, but it also extends that view in important ways. Two Logics of Community Partnerships The Exchange View The exchange view of politics that underlies much scholarship about police-community partnerships rests on two assumptions: first, that public agencies should try to satisfy the preferences that citizens already hold and, second, that community groups are vehicles for making those preferences known. (3) On the exchange view, police are neutral arbiters of the many demands that different interest groups raise, and they aim primarily to ensure that each segment of the public can mobilize and be heard. (4) When they succeed, the chorus of demands that government hears will give an accurate reading of citizen preferences, and it will give public agencies the information they need to make decisions that best satisfy the public interest--which is seen simply as the sum of all private interests. But when they fail, the voice of the community will emphasize some interests at the expense of others, and for that reason police must reject the ideal of responsiveness. If some interests are never articulated at all, then the community groups that do organize are no longer "partners" but "squeaky wheels" demanding more grease, "vocal groups" that drown out the legitimate concerns of others, or even "chronic pains in the neck" that will not moderate their selfish demands. …