The Community in Community Policing: How Community Attachment Shapes Police Perceptions of Their Assigned Community

• In Event: 1451 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 13. Policing and Surveillance in Public and Private Spaces

Abstract

Scholars, politicians, and policymakers have called for reforms to strengthen police-community relations within communities of color. Among these recommendations include community policing, i.e. greater community outreach and increased racial and ethnic diversity (based on theories of racial homophily and community attachment) within police departments. However, despite the widespread use of the phrase “community-policing,” there is a lack of scholarly attention to how police officers perceive the communities in which they work, which I argue influences their willingness to engage in community policing within that locale. Drawing on the community attachment literature, I examine the relationship between police officers’ attachment to their communities and police perceptions of the communities in which they work. In particular, I examine five types of community attachment, particularly: 1) institutional ties, 2) racial/ethnic ties, 3) organizational/social ties, i.e. formal and informal engagement with community members; 4) family and friend networks; and the 5) affective attachment of police officers to their assigned locales. Through in-depth interviews with 36 police officers, I found that the relationship between police officers’ community attachment and police perceptions is largely contextual. Some police officers who exhibited several forms of community attachment had positive perceptions of the community whereas others did not. Thus, community attachment does not necessarily induce positive relations and in some cases, can lead to negative police perceptions. Police officers who expressed affective attachment to their communities, however, expressed positive perceptions of, and vested interests in their assigned community. I discuss the implications of these findings throughout this working paper.

Author

• Jasmine Nicole Olivier, Harvard University