Abstract
How police are situated in a given society has changed throughout history. Beyond Community Policing: From Early American Beginnings to the 21st Century, analyzes historical contexts of policing to consider its function for the twenty-first century. In his introduction, James J. Chriss points out that our perception of the police has fluctuated based on our experiences with and media portrayals of them. For example, major social movements, such as gay rights, antiwar protests, civil rights, and the 9/11 attacks play a significant role in whether the police are considered a positive or negative entity for certain groups of people.
In Chapter Two, Chriss describes three eras of policing. Community policing, the scope of this book, is the third era of modern policing, developed as a response to the turmoil around the social transitions of the 1960s. Community policing is known as community-oriented or problem-oriented policing, under four themes: debureaucratization, professionalization, democratization, and service integration. In reference to historical contexts, Chapter Five is devoted to a functional analysis of post 9/11 policing utilizing Talcott Parsons’ AGIL schema. Because the 9/11 attacks triggered “a flurry of government activities culminating of course in the ‘top-down’ directives of the Patriot Act and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security” (p. 108), as Chriss argues, Parsons’ AGIL schema is legitimized in moving from the larger societal system to the criminal justice subsystem, where “police” belong, and to further segmentalized components of the post 9/11 model of policing. However, whereas this functional analysis gives critical insights in how community policing has been conceptualized, especially after the 9/11 attacks, it also reveals that the function of community policing is not necessarily unidirectional. Especially because the media portrayal of the police plays a crucial role in not only how citizens see the police, but also how citizens interpret their social justice system, this chapter makes you wonder how recent and increasing lived experiences of people who have been unfairly and unjustly treated by the police would influence this “system,” given that community policing is genuinely “community-oriented.”
Last but not least, the summary of the overall conceptual understanding of the relationship between police and society in Chapter Ten is useful to learn not only an overview of the historical transition of the policing, but also to critically examine policing as a function in society. This book helps us understand how policing reflects upon who should be protected, who are suspicious, and who should be excluded as either deviant or enemy, in response to the issues and conflicts raised within society.