Abstract
The relationship between police and the communities they serve has shifted from more to less embedded and back again since the inception of formal police forces. Currently, the notion of ‘community policing’ reasserts the importance of embeddedness. Yet, academically, it is recognised that approaches to police–community relations from within the social sciences and criminology have attempted to understand the law and practices of policing, rather than engage with the meanings of policing for communities. This chapter begins to rectify this by asking what it means to think about the meanings of policing as they circulate within Market-Town. By exploring policing in this way, the complex relationalities of community and police being-nesses are revealed.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Of course this is not quite how various criminology texts describe the process (Skogan 1997); however, a close reading of their descriptions of this style of policing shows that from another perspective this is a fair description. One of the issues we have noticed in the criminology texts we have read is that everything is always described from the viewpoint of the police, even if they claim otherwise.
- 2.
Interestingly when the state shifted from this model of local policing, one of the charges brought against it was that such proximity to community encouraged corruption. Precisely the same sort of charge routinely used against community members running their own programmes. Leaving aside that, many states’ activities are riddled with corruption in one way or another: undue influence, for instance, or the current closeness of Anglo-Saxon governments and developers, all we will care to note at this point is that in the majority of cases, these so-called instances of corruption involving local community groups, remain untested in court even though they are excepted as fact and transmitted as such by governementality.
- 3.
The function of boundaries as a form of containment is primarily a discourse which comes from a psychoanalytic literature, but, for example, see Gauttari’s reference to the work of Daniel Stern, to whom repeated rituals in child care provides an ontological security that allows a subject to emerge.
- 4.
This continuation of discursive meanings-in-common, the presence of similar types of examples across an historical period of vast change as outlined in Chap. 6 is a rebuke to those academics who claim that community no longer exists ( Buaman, Rose; Young et al) or that it once existed but has now gone. The truth is community is neither an historical nor a non-historical form. It simply is and while it can be mapped historically in relation to the state primarily, but in any case through their social forms (containment and action in spaces of appearance) and their relation to communal being-ness, nonetheless, communal being-ness is outside modernist conceptions and models of time.
- 5.
By independent here we mean totally outside any state control. Thus this excludes security licenced by the state to protect property or the person of private individuals.
- 6.
Which makes an interesting conundrum for the Lockian state which promises, theoretically at least, to protect the citizen and guarantee their safety in exchange for that same citizen surrounding elements of their power to the state.
Bibliography
Bick, E. (1968). The experience of skin in early object relations. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49, 484–486.
Hughes, G. (2007). The politics of crime and community. London: Palgrave.
Skogan, W. G. (1997). Community policing Chicago style. New York: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Studdert, D., Walkerdine, V. (2016). Community Policing. In: Rethinking Community Research. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51453-0_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51453-0_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-51452-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-51453-0
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)