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<h1>The Problem With “Community Policing” Reforms</h1>
<div>Maya Schenwar, Victoria Law - July 30, 2020<br>
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<h2>Police still get to define who counts as a community
member.</h2>
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<p><img alt="People from the community watch the NYPD arrest
protesters for breaking the citywide 8:00PM curfew on
June 4, 2020 in the Bronx borough of New York City.
Widespread protests continue around the country and
other parts of the world over the death of George Floyd
while in Minneapolis, Minnesota police custody on May
25. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)"
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<p> </p>
<span>David Dee Delgado/Getty Images</span>
<p><em>This excerpt is adapted from </em><a
href="https://thenewpress.com/books/prison-by-any-other-name"
target="_blank"
data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://thenewpress.com/books/prison-by-any-other-name&source=gmail&ust=1596231418417000&usg=AFQjCNFIIcuhof4yLdaXKe4rW6ywZnVeEg"><em>Prison
by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms</em></a><em>,
published by The New Press and reprinted here with permission.
Copyright © 2020 by Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law.</em></p>
<p>The NYPD billboards that adorn the city’s subways read, “We’re
all neighbors making up our communities—straphangers, business
owners, teachers, retirees and cops—so let’s reach out, speak out,
and look out for each other.” It’s worth noting that aside from
“straphangers” (simply a word for people who ride public transit),
the people mentioned in conjunction with cops are predominantly
middle-class, including older people who are able to retire.</p>
<p>For Malik, a Black twenty-five-year-old community organizer born
and raised in East New York, an almost entirely Black and Latinx
neighborhood in Brooklyn, the police definition of “community”
doesn’t include people like him. The police make an effort to pull
older residents, not people his age, into their neighborhood
meetings. The police stoke older residents’ fears about gangs,
violence, and crime, worsening the neighborhood’s generation gap
and pushing them to align with the cops. At the same time, despite
increasing media coverage of racial profiling and police violence,
many people believe that if police are harassing a person, it’s
because that person is doing something illegal. “When you keep
telling people the same thing, they start believing it after a
while,” Malik says.</p>
<p>In a community policing model, the police always decide which
members constitute the “community.” In Los Angeles, says Brooklyn
College law professor Alex Vitale<strong>,</strong> police
determine which community members are chosen as the community
leaders that the department interacts with when developing its
community policing plans. These leaders are nearly always people
who tend to be sympathetic to police—such as homeowners, religious
leaders, and business owners—while homeless people, youth, and
formerly incarcerated people are nowhere to be found. Similar
police selection of community participants takes place in cities
throughout the country. In 2015, following the rise of the Black
Lives Matter movement, Chicago police conducted a “listening
tour,” with the stated intention of reconnecting with communities
and repairing distrust. However, the meetings were only open to
invited guests and the meeting results were not publicized.</p>
<p>The “listening tour” was not atypical of Chicago’s community
policing efforts. Meetings organized by the city’s community
policing program, Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS),
are “places where a self-selecting group of residents are
mobilized by police to surveil their communities, report
information to CPD … and volunteer their time to ‘take back the
streets’ in CPD-organized ‘positive loitering events,’” according
to a report by We Charge Genocide, a Chicago grassroots
organization focused on ending police violence. These meetings
don’t strengthen communities; they often harm them. By selecting
certain residents to surveil and report on their neighborhoods
under the banner of safety, the police department is turning
communities into surveillance states. We Charge Genocide calls
these initiatives “anticommunity policing,” noting that in
reality, “these initiatives sharpen divisions within communities
along lines of race and class and fracture social bonds.”</p>
<p>The dynamics of gentrification also play a role in defining who
is part of “the community”—and who isn’t. Chicago
anti-displacement organizer Lynda Lopez has seen complaints in
local Facebook groups about her own neighborhood, Hermosa, a
working-class, mostly Latinx community that is quickly
gentrifying. Often, when someone posts a notification about a
dangerous presence who warrants police attention, “dangerous”
equals “young, Latino males.”<br>
It goes beyond social media threats. Chicago’s “Albany Park
Neighbors” group, located in one of the most ethnically diverse
neighborhoods in the United States, often focuses on businesses
that are accused of bringing in “outsiders,” particularly people
of color, homeless people, and people who appear to have substance
addictions. For example, the group has targeted the local blood
bank, saying that the people gathering around the building, many
of them low-income and Black, were endangering the neighborhood’s
safety. The group also singled out a small, family-owned
convenience store, where residents said people exhibiting “drunken
behavior” were gathering. After pressure from the group, the store
committed to restricting its sales of alcohol and to hiring
security guards (both steps that could exact a financial toll from
this local business). The group encouraged people to call the
police and the local alderman’s office if they observed “drunken
behavior.” These residents frame their complaints as a problem of
outsiders infiltrating the neighborhood, even when the targets are
actually longtime residents who, sometimes, are in the process of
being pushed out by gentrification.</p>
<p>K, a young man born and raised in Red Hook, Brooklyn, says that
the constant police presence and targeting of Black youth make him
feel like an outsider in his home. K’s concern comes at a time
when gentrification runs thick in Red Hook as more actual
outsiders are moving in. “We have IDs that show our address. It’s
obvious we live here,” he says. “It’s like they’re trying to kick
us off of where we grew up at.”</p>
<p>Community policing takes advantage of the fact that many white
people already assume the “eyes and ears of the police” role in
society, calling the police on perceived—usually Black or
Brown—“outsiders.” This dynamic is evident in well-publicized
events, such as white people calling police on Harvard professor
Henry Louis Gates Jr. for breaking into his own house and police
swarming musician Bob Marley’s granddaughter as she exited an
Airbnb, and in the less-publicized moment-to-moment experiences of
many millions of people in this country every day.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, some groups are simply left out of the definition of
“community member” in the context of community policing. One case
in point: suspected gang members. “What they’re trying to do … is
to leave people who are gang members out and to tell communities,
‘This is not you. This is the bad element. We want to talk to
you,’” notes New York anti-policing organizer and scholar Josmar
Trujillo. “The police want you to cut [gang members] off, like an
arm that has gangrene.” In other words, gang members are made to
seem like a group outside of community—a group that is disposable.
This is the kind of logic that encourages K’s older neighbors to
fear the children on their block as they grow into young
adulthood. It’s the logic that allows police to harass,
intimidate, arrest, and brutalize people with impunity in their
own neighborhoods. It’s also the logic that overlooks the reasons
that gangs tend to exist in underresourced, marginalized
communities in the first place.</p>
<p>Community policing normalizes the idea that police should be “in
charge” of programs that might ordinarily be outside their
wheelhouse. Placing cops in charge of other programs and services,
such as mental health or homeless services, means that departments
can justify the placement of police pretty much anywhere.</p>
<p>In a wide-ranging study of community policing in Seattle,
political science professor William Thomas Lyons notes, “Community
policing colonized community life.” At the same time, he writes,
the infiltration of the community by the police made it possible
for the police department to “shield itself from critical public
scrutiny,” because so much of its work was done in partnership
with community groups. The “community” end of the partnership
becomes simply a “docile and dependent client,” and community
policing ends up “replacing more critical forms of public scrutiny
with citizen surveillance plugged directly into state information
systems.” In other words, community policing became a brilliant
public relations move that bolsters both popular support and
additional resources for the police without demanding real change
or safety. Not only does it increase the amount of surveillance in
play and stoke the fires of existing power dynamics in the
community, but it also masks the actual role of police on the
ground.</p>
<p>He challenges the idea that “building trust” with the police—a
phrase that pops up again and again in reformers’ arguments for
community policing—is ever a good thing. “When you trust someone,
you let your guard down, you let things bypass, you give cops the
benefit of the doubt,” he says. “We know what the relationship
with the police is, and it’s been repeated to us generation after
generation; it’s clear. We’re not supposed to mend bridges with an
abuser. We’re supposed to hold that abuser to account.”</p>
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