Your Friendly Neighborhood Bureaucracy: Documents, Discourse, and Community Policing

• In Event: Critical Police Studies: An Invitation

Abstract

In the mid-90s Los Angeles city officials introduced community policing as a means of correcting strained police-minority group relations. LAPD officials promoted engagement and partnership, and began conducting meetings with local volunteers to devise ways of resolving local problems. My work examines the bureaucratic artifacts of community policing: the documents police and city agencies produce and distribute to community stakeholders. I seek to understand how police produce meaning through crime prevention discourse in a poor, high-crime minority community, Lakeside. Documentary and discursive analyses are rooted in the Weberian tradition. Scholars place documents at the center of the bureaucratic organization, enabling power networks, and defining and reifying hierarchical divisions. But human actors can resist these actions, and can contest the validity of documents, or reconstitute and redirect them for extra-bureaucratic ends. To understand documentary action in Lakeside I analyze 200 fliers, bulletins, and announcements, asking: What documents are residents exposed to? What is being communicated in these documents? What purpose do they serve? Who has the authorship and agency to determine the content? Looking at policing bureaucracies will allow future researchers and activists to find ways of articulating community interests through crime prevention partnerships.

Author

• Luis Daniel Gascon, University of San Francisco