Citizens,community,and crime control: The problems and prospects for negotiated order

Introduction

The problem of maintaining order is, as Bone (2005) notes, a question that has bedeviled sociology since its inception, and is no less central to its sister discipline criminology. Whether order emanates from the unintended consequences of self-interested action (Weber, 1978), from a shared normative consensus that we are socialized into (Durkheim, 1997), or from social practice (Bourdieu, 1977), the dilemma is often framed in terms of the tension between individual action and the structures that inscribe it. Giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration proposes that individuals engage in action that is, in some ways, predetermined by the context under which it occurs, and this structural context is, in turn, constantly modified by and exists because of human action. Giddens’ oeuvre furnishes us with a lexicon to describe and illustrate negotiated order at various levels, but it still leaves open the question of how this order happens, and how different contexts have the potential to produce very different outcomes. Criminological theory also grapples with the structure–agency question, usually within the context of explaining criminality (for instance, Agnew, 1992; Braithwaite, 1989; Farrington, 2000; Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990; Sampson and Laub, 1993; Shaw and McKay, 1942) but relatively little attention has been paid to how communities produce a negotiated order through the action of individuals and formal agents of control (exceptions are Carr, 2005; Innes et al., 2004). Jacobs (1961) found that community action is important to enhance civility and reinforce control, and recent work has touted the beneficent effects of collective efficacy (Sampson et al., 1997), which is defined as the linkage of trust and cohesion to shared expectations for control. But in both cases the theorizing of community action is static, that is, there is no real attempt at parsing out the different levels of action, beyond saying that there is efficacy or not, or there are eyes on the street and the enforcement of street norms, or not. In this way, the thinking has sidestepped the tricky question of how much agency an individual living in a community has when it comes to negotiating order, and how and when does it vary. In this article, I try to redress this imbalance by examining the phenomenon of negotiated order by drawing on qualitative data from several communities in two US cities. I illustrate how negotiated order emerges in different contexts, what influences it, and what the process intimates about community engagement in the co-production of safety. I also speculate as to the present and future role of citizens as co-producers of order and suggest avenues for further theoretical and empirical exploration.

I operationalize negotiated order here as a combination of aims and inputs, where the individual, nested in a community, contributes to defining what order is and they have an active role in achieving these aims. Order is negotiated because there is an explicit effort among citizens to advocate for safety and act in concert with other individuals and institutions to produce it.

Because order is negotiated at several contextual levels, I think that it is important to describe the broader structural context before discussing that of the community, especially as national and international events weigh heavily on how we perceive order in the early 21st century.

Order and the Politics of Crime Control

Before we can investigate how order is negotiated at the community level, it is important to chart the wider structural, ideological and institutional context that inscribes much of what happens at the local level. Several scholars (for instance, Garland, 2001; Newburn, 2006; Simon, 2007) have noted how the ideas that shape criminal justice policy and punishment in particular have taken a ‘punitive turn’ (see also Muncie, 2008). The strategies can be loosely tented under the rubric of ‘getting tough on crime’ and usually involve a predilection for tougher laws on all crimes, increased arrest and incarceration rates for offenders, even those who are convicted for minor offenses, and changes in policing that include increased use of saturation patrols, street sweeps, and stop, question, and frisk tactics.

As the ideology around control has shifted into a new era of mass incarceration (Gottschalk, 2006), it is also increasingly clear that much of the change is driven by the politicization of crime control. What politician who wants to be elected or re-elected is going declare her or himself anything but tough on crime? As Simon (2007) points out, the careful cultivation of fear of crime on a large scale has paved the way for changes in law and penal policy that have seen incarceration rates increase fivefold in the United States from 1970 to 2005 and the prison population more than double in the UK from 1995 to 2009 (Ministry of Justice, 2009).

Nowhere is the punitive turn more apparent than in policing practice. Despite philosophical challenges to the professional model of policing, and the embracing of community policing, the outcomes in terms of arrests have increased dramatically in the United States. Harcourt (2002) addresses this contradiction when he argues that ‘community policing’ itself can come to mean a set of practices that are predicated more on advancing control than on building a partnership between police and community. By way of example Harcourt points to the aggressive quality-of-life policing employed in New York, where low-level offenders are targeted and arrested. Kelling and Coles (1996) label this approach as ‘community policing’ partly because it is politically more palatable to do so, given the fact that there is little or no role for the community in this type of policing, and the label itself is much less threatening than zero tolerance, or stop and frisk for instance. This is not to say that all community policing is a sham dreamed up to deflect criticism and avoid scrutiny, while the real agenda of increasing punitivity is carried out. Rather, the on-the -ground reality is complex, where a community-based officer on bike patrol polices the same space as a team devoted to stopping and frisking youth in the hour after school lets out.

Any discussion of negotiated order at the community level must be framed by this larger structural reality of how crime policy is made and what ideas infuse it with meaning. Some scholars of community policing such as Websdale (2001) offer a dystopian viewpoint of the practice. Based on his research in Nashville housing projects Websdale contends that community policing does more to oppress than protect the poor, and that this is part of a wider criminal justice project that promotes a racialized caste system that systematically disadvantages minorities. Other commentators view the experience of citizens in disadvantaged neighborhoods in a more nuanced fashion, contending that minorities on the whole desire protection from harm, but often balk at the tactics police employ to maintain order (Bobo and Johnson, 2004). What is apparent is that it is a mistake to view all community policing as instances of negotiated order. Rather, we should first describe how some variants of community policing can represent the aims of the citizenry and reflect their involvement in outcomes for safety and order.

The Elusive and Ever-Changing Role of the Community in Community Policing

In a recent summary essay Michael Reisig (2010) talks about the multiple incarnations of community policing since the concept gained traction as an alternative to the ‘professional model’ in the 1960s and since. The common thread for the variants of community policing is that there is a partnership between police and the community to ‘address neighborhood conditions that give rise to public safety concerns, including crime, disorder and fear of crime’ (Reisig, 2010: 23).

The policy that undergirds community policing efforts can be made at several different levels. For instance, crime policy may be made at a national level that mandates that there be some form of community policing. So in Britain, the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, for example, mandated that local authorities and police work together in partnership to reduce crime and disorder though Community Safety Partnerships (CSPs) in England and Wales. Though there is no role specified for the community in this arrangement, the initial stage of the crime and disorder reduction was that each partnership should conduct and publish an audit of local crime and disorder, taking account of the views of local people, and determine priorities for action (HMSO, 1998). This broadly consultative role for the community does not preclude their active involvement in the process, but crucially, it does not mandate it either. The Police Reform Act of 2002 added to the Crime and Disorder Act and further specified the role of police in addressing crime and disorder. In particular, there was a push to address what scholars have called the reassurance gap (ACPO, 2001; Innes, 2004a; Innes and Fielding, 2002) where the fear of crime among citizens far outstrips the probability of their becoming a victim. Re-assurance policing was designed to ensure that policing could be ‘systematically targeted towards those problems that really matter to the public’ (Innes et al., 2004, vol. 1: 14), with a goal of enhancing feelings of security. Though there is scope for collaborative problem solving in reassurance policing, there is the danger that partnership does not go beyond consultation.

In the United States it is rare for the federal government to make such policy announcements, though an exception could be the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program, which was created in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 with a goal of advancing community policing in all jurisdictions in the United States. Specifically, the federal government provided funds for hiring 100,000 additional police officers nationwide, and while the funding levels declined toward the end of the 1990s there has been renewed spending associated with the COPS program recently. Despite the funneling of funds designed to ‘advance’ community policing the reality is that much of what has been earmarked over the course of the program has gone toward more traditional law enforcement, and reviews of the impact of COPS have noted little change in policing policy (Gianakis and Davis, 1998) or detail criticism of the overall effectiveness of what was the largest crime bill in United States history (see Eisler and Johnson, 2005). Federal and state police are governed by laws at the federal and state level respectively, though there is considerable overlap, and it is rare for such officers to be designated as community police. By contrast, the municipal level is usually the site where it is possible to change the philosophy and practice of on-the-ground policing, and it is here that I focus my attention for the empirical examples.

I choose the US cities of Chicago and Philadelphia because I have spent almost 20 years doing research in each city. The Chicago data reported here are drawn from five years of fieldwork I completed in one neighborhood (see Carr, 2005 for details), and include extensive participant observation, interviews with community residents, and participation in neighborhood watch and problem-solving groups. The Philadelphia data are grounded in over 12 years of active research in the city spanning several medium and high-crime neighborhoods, and include several hundred interviews with young people, community leaders, and law enforcement officials, as well as extensive participant observation in each neighborhood.

Two Cities and the Problem of Negotiated Community Order: Evidence from Chicago and Philadelphia

As US big cities go Chicago and Philadelphia have broad similarities and differences. Both are among the five most populous – Chicago is third and Philadelphia fifth – and both have had persistent issues with crime and violence throughout their history, including recent periodic spikes of street crime. Levels of violent crime peaked in both cities in the early 1990s, and since then, while there have been declines, there are areas of both cities where crime has remained a stubborn and persistent presence. The fact that crime is concentrated in certain areas is hardly in doubt, but the theorizing around this basic datum seems to group around certain tropes.

One trope proposes a ‘kinds of places’ argument that holds that crime rates are higher when certain conditions are present in communities that facilitate illicit activity (see, for instance, Sampson and Wilson, 1995; Shaw and McKay, 1942; Stark, 1987). Here the ecological context explains the concentration of crime, and so concentrated disadvantage or social disorganization is a necessary pre-condition for crime. However, not everyone living in this context engages in criminal behavior, because what happens is that the conditions reduce the capacity of a community to regulate behavior. Another explanation focuses on ‘kinds of people’ and holds that individual-level characteristics explain why crime happens, and any concentration is therefore due to the agglomeration of people with similar pre-dispositions (see, for instance, Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990; Moffitt, 1993). So people with low self-control gravitate toward others like themselves or people with anti-social tendencies associate with those similar to them, being what Warr (2006) calls ‘sticky friends’. Crime concentrates then because of individuals not neighborhood conditions. Increasingly, scholarship on communities and crime has tried to bridge these two perspectives by positing explanations that examine individuals nested in certain contexts (Sampson et al., 1997). Important here is what the individual brings to the situation but the context also matters, especially with respect to how controls or their absence function to dissipate or increase the likelihood of crime.

The tension between the individual and the collective is one that invokes the wider discussion of structure and agency (for instance, Sewell, 1992) in sociology generally and Giddens (1984) work on structuration that informs the discussion in this special issue. Crime and its control at the community level is an example of how order is negotiated and of the ongoing struggle between structure and agency as seen through the experiences of individuals. The tension encapsulates not just the commission of crime but its control, specifically how people contribute to order.

To fully explicate the process of negotiated order at the community level I turn to examples in the two municipalities of Chicago and Philadelphia, both of which are charged with order maintenance and furnish different instances of individual and community engagement with the process.

Chicago: CAPS and the Community

Few cities have been as adventurous or as committed to embracing community policing as Chicago. Dabbling is the word that comes to mind most frequently when one thinks about what different municipalities in the United States have done with respect to community policing. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s there are multiple examples of experiments with various forms of community policing. These range from the Newark foot patrol experiment (Kelling, 1981) to police storefront offices in Houston (Wycoff and Skogan, 1986), and many other variations on the theme (Fielding, 1995). Some of these programs merely changed the way policing was done on a small scale, while others had provisions for a more active community role. In contrast to the piecemeal and episodic approach to community policing, Chicago, beginning in 1993 with a pilot program in five of 19 districts and extending to all districts in 1994, created the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy or CAPS (see Skogan and Hartnett, 1997). What was and is radically different about the CAPS model was that it changed fundamentally the overall way that policing was done in Chicago. At a basic level, CAPS was built upon a foundation of a police–community partnership, and even the initial slogan ‘Together We Can’ sought to underscore this change. Rather than relying solely on the professional model of the rapid response patrol car linked to an emergency response system, the basic building block of CAPS is the beat officer, a person assigned to work in a defined geographic area for a period of time with a brief to get to know the people and issues of their beat and to work in conjunction with the community to address whatever crime and disorder issues that are present. To assist in the process of developing beat integrity each police district was divided into beat areas, and sets of officers were assigned to work in a beat for a minimum period of at least a year to facilitate their bedding in with the community. Beat meetings are held on a monthly or bi-monthly basis in each beat and are opportunities for community residents to bring issues and concerns to their beat officers and in return receive information on crime and disorder in their area. Beat meetings are the fulcrum around which CAPS works and are a very popular part of the program according to evaluations (CAPS, 1998; Skogan and Steiner, 2004), though Skogan and Steiner (2004) report that their popularity peaked in 1998.

As the CAPS program was further rolled out several additional layers of police– community cooperation were added. First, there was an effort to stimulate police–community problem solving by training local residents in the rudiments of the approach and having them identify issues that they could tackle and then equipping them with the tools to do so (see Carr, 2005; Skogan et al., 1999). In problem solving police and other city agencies are available to help residents solve their problem, whether it is an unruly tavern (Carr, 2005) or a disorder producing slumlord (Skogan et al., 1999). Though not all beat areas were eventually trained in problem-solving techniques, many that did have crafted successful organizations that have endured beyond the initial issue they had identified to solve.

Another CAPS initiative that has endured since the mid-1990s and has certainly been popular with community groups is the Court Advocate program. The Court Advocate program asks concerned citizens from a neighborhood or beat area to attend cases that are of interest to their locale. For instance, if a youth was due in court on a charge of throwing up graffiti in a neighborhood, Court Advocate volunteers from that district would attend the case to show that the community is mobilized and interested in the outcome of the case. The thinking behind it is that the presence of volunteers in a court room

sends a strong message to the defendant, the judge and all other interested parties in the criminal justice system: the community cares about the outcome of these cases and is willing to devote its time and energies to monitoring the workings of the judicial system. (CAPS, 2011)

It is unclear precisely how effective the program is, but what is apparent is that it provides a secure avenue for activism that bolsters community social control.

What effect beat meetings or indeed the CAPS program overall has on crime is harder to pin down. Though the successes of problem-solving groups and court advocates are extolled, some in the monthly cable access and podcast show CrimeWatch, the crime rate in Chicago has fluctuated over the course of the last decade-and-a-half regardless of CAPS-related activities. However, the overall trends may disguise the real gains made in terms of capacity building and the extent to which individuals and community groups are taking an increasing stake in co-producing order.

In five years of fieldwork in the pseudonymous neighborhood of Beltway in Chicago, Carr (2005) illustrates how, in what seemed to be the paragon of a stable neighborhood, crime and disorder had seeped in, which culminated in the shooting deaths of two local teenage girls by local gang members in December 1995. At that point, a community that had become complacent about its ability to maintain law and order was faced with the reality that the victims and the perpetrators were homegrown. As the CAPS program had been deployed to Beltway the eventual response to the murders was filtered through the community policing and problem-solving mechanism, and though community members took no part in the apprehension of those responsible for the killings, the events catalyzed the neighborhood into taking an active role in co-producing order. Carr labels this process the ‘new parochialism’ where the activity is driven by community residents but facilitated by actors from the public domain of order (see also Hunter, 1985).

The context under which the Beltway action was undertaken and became a successful example of the co-production of order is one where there was and continues to be an institutional apparatus that can give shape to and facilitate the activism. The signal crime (Innes, 2004b) of the double homicide is the immediate catalyst around which social action takes place, but in the absence of the CAPS apparatus, such as beat meetings and problem-solving training, the furor may have dissipated and not led to any action. Carr (2005) notes examples of signal crimes in the neighborhood before the deployment of CAPS that did not accomplish anything in the way of producing order. The new parochial activity is enabled by the structural context, which is in turn shaped by what citizens do to re-establish order. It is not that this is the only configuration under which order can be re-established in Beltway, but rather one where there is an improved chance because the structures exist to help the action become efficacious. There could also be a situation where order is restored without any input from community members, but this would entail order being imposed rather than negotiated. Crime can be controlled in this manner, but the evidence suggests that under such circumstances trust between individuals and law enforcement can be eroded and legitimacy undermined (see, for example, Sunshine and Tyler, 2003; Tyler, 2002). Kirk and Papachristos (2011) argue that in the opposite circumstance where communities are left to fend for themselves legal cynicism can take hold and there is little expectation that law enforcement will help restore order. Here social control can be ‘dispersed’ by individuals (see also Black, 1983), which can take the form of increased crime and disorder.

The Beltway case study is an example of successful co-production of order in a context that facilitates the process. Moreover, it illustrates what is possible for a community in terms of negotiated order, which might be adaptable to other contexts. But what is possible in terms of community order in a different institutional context, where there is not a wholesale re-organization of on-the-ground policing?

Philadelphia’s Story: Bringing in the Community as a Last Resort?

If the Chicago story is one of a bold overhaul of policing that reduces the reliance on the professional model for on-the-ground action, then Philadelphia stands in stark contrast as a department that is loath to sever ties with so-called ‘hard’ policing (Innes, 2005). After all, this is the department that, under orders from then Mayor Wilson Goode, dropped a bomb from a helicopter on the building occupied by radical group Operation MOVE in 1985 killing 11 people. This is not to say that there have been no efforts at engaging the community in reducing crime and disorder (Greene et al., 2002), rather that these fall under the rubric of small-scale and time-limited experiments where little if any change in the overall philosophy of policing took place. The recent history of policing in Philadelphia is marked by various manifestations of saturation and/or zero tolerance approaches. For instance, at the turn of the century persistently high crime rates prompted the street sweeps and enhanced patrolling of Operation Sunrise in 1999–2000 and the drug corner targeted sweeps of Operation Safe Streets in May 2002. In recent years, the predominant mode of combating violent crime has been the wider deployment of so-called ‘stop and frisk’ tactics by police.

The net result of much of the law enforcement response to street crime in Philadelphia is a hefty increase in the arrest rate, which has swelled the numbers incarcerated in the state of Pennsylvania, which have increased from 8582 persons in 1980 to 51,487 in 2009, a fivefold increase. According to a report published by the Justice Policy Institute in 2008, Philadelphia at the time had the highest incarceration rate of any major city in the United States with 527 per 100,000 behind bars (Petteruti and Walsh, 2008). Though former Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson admitted publicly in 2005 that it was impossible for the city to incarcerate its way out of the crime problem, the arrest rate has not declined in recent years, and the number of pedestrian and vehicle stops initiated by law enforcement has increased. In 2007, there were 138,319 recorded pedestrian stops by police, and this figure ballooned to 238,679 by 2010, an increase of 72.5 percent.

The reliance on hard policing methods and the overall commitment of the department to the professional model of policing means that the institutional context within which community social order is produced in Philadelphia is markedly different to Chicago. Under former Police Commissioner John F. Timoney, the Philadelphia Police Department drew more inspiration from the New York City model of policing (see Kelling and Coles, 1996) with its emphasis on officer accountability and targeting resources to crime hotspots than it did from the Chicago model of beat policing.

Philadelphia does not lack for signal crimes either. The city has averaged about a murder a day from 2000–2010 and over a thousand non-fatal shootings a year in the same period, but several stand out as potential catalysts for community action, most notably the accidental shooting of 10-year-old Faheem Thomas-Childs on Wednesday, 11 February 2004 while he was walking to school in North Philadelphia. At the same time, five men, three on foot and two in a car, who hailed from rival criminal groups saw each other at a nearby intersection and promptly opened fire as they ran up and down several streets close to the school. The gun play spilled over into the school playground and Faheem was shot in the face and critically injured. He was taken to hospital and, as Faheem fought for life, a city that is normally immune to the carnage that is a daily ritual in some parts was transfixed, hoping and praying that he would pull through. Five days later on 16 February, Faheem, who never regained consciousness, died.

Faheem Thomas-Childs’ death galvanized the whole city and, on 10 April 2004, an estimated crowd of 10,000 people went on a ‘March to Save the Children’ from 20th and Cecil B. Moore to TM Peirce Elementary school. Marchers chanted ‘Don’t be silent! Stop the Violence! Save Our Children!’ but nothing emerged from this spontaneous demonstration of community sentiment. Part of the reason for the inaction could stem from the fact that the citizens who marched were drawn from all over the city and so there was no real geographic concentration of potential activists, but a more fundamental reason for the lack of follow through was the lack of an institutional node through which activism could be stimulated and order could be co-produced. The moment passed and in the years following Thomas-Childs’ death violent crime in Philadelphia spiked, and the response to it has been to widen and enhance the draconian practices of street stops and zero tolerance as a first option. Stop and frisk policing strategies inevitably deepen the chasm of mistrust between police and community members because of the nature of the tactic and the infrequency with which it leads to an arrest. In 2010, less than 10 percent of pedestrian stops in Philadelphia resulted in an arrest. Ultimately, this lack of trust can be harmful to crime reduction if a significant portion of the public views many of their local officers more as an occupying army than as a resource in the struggle to maintain order. Though there is a danger that this can lead to legal cynicism, research among youth in three Philadelphia high-crime neighborhoods has illustrated that despite negative dispositions toward law enforcement that are borne from encounters with police, youth still overwhelmingly saw police as fundamental to the control of crime (Carr et al., 2007). Crucially, youth made a distinction between the policing they experience – arbitrary, hostile, and punitive – and the policing they desire – organic, dependable, and just.

Recently there have been signs that the thinking on crime reduction in Philadelphia might be changing. In particular, there are two programs that have been selectively deployed in disadvantaged high-crime neighborhoods that are inching toward a more negotiated order, one where citizens will have a more active role.

First, in 2010, the City of Philadelphia instituted a new program called the ‘PhillyRising Collaborative’, with a stated aim of targeting ‘neighborhoods throughout Philadelphia that are plagued by chronic crime and quality of life problems that require a coordinated, multi-agency and community response’. Further, the primary objectives of PhillyRising are to ‘help those living and working in neighborhoods to realize their vision for their community’ and to ‘build sustainable, responsive solutions to the concerns of people living and working in each neighborhood’ (PhillyRising Collaborative, 2011). PhillyRising was first deployed in the neighborhood of Hartranft, located in North Philadelphia in 2010. The neighborhood was selected after city officials consulted high-ranking police officers and asked for neighborhoods with high levels of crime and quality of life issues, and after Hartranft was selected, the city began to work with residents to develop a plan to ‘sustain the neighborhood’ (John-Hall, 2011: 4). During his 3 March 2011 budget address Mayor Michael Nutter reported on the progress in Hartranft. ¹ He stated that the city had ‘demolished 14 dangerous buildings, cleaned and abated 85 vacant lots, removed graffiti from 330 properties, and organized four community clean-ups’. In addition, a Police Athletic League was opened, and a computer lab, staffed by volunteers from the nearby university, was established. Moreover, a community center with a pool, which had been abandoned and neglected, was re-opened, making it possible for seniors to do water aerobics and children and teens to have a safe place to play. These actions may sound like they have little to do with reducing crime, but in fact they play an important role in decreasing neighborhood disorder and increasing the ability of community residents to work alongside police officers to cut down on street crime. In fact, after the first year of PhillyRising, Mayor Nutter reported that violent crime fell by 16 percent in the district over the previous year. The Hartranft pilot has been so successful that the city has expanded the program into three other neighborhoods in 2011 and has set aside $500,000 in the budget to fund the efforts.

The second nascent initiative in Philadelphia is based in the same police district that is responsible for Hartranft, and is a smart policing program that actually predates PhillyRising where officers were deployed strategically to areas of the 26th District, with a brief to be more visible and involved in the community but to also use this presence to generate arrests. Some of the officers from this original program have since been folded into the PhillyRising initiative and have been dubbed ‘officers friendly’ in a local paper (Otterbein, 2011). These officers are deployed to attend community meetings, get to know residents, and collaborate on the initiatives that are ongoing as part of PhillyRising. This police component of the program is essential if there is to be effective co-production of safety and a negotiated order.

The Philadelphia attempts to involve the citizenry in co-production of law and order are still in their infancy, and so it is much too early to assess success, but the initial signs are that they have the potential to change the nature of citizen involvement at least, and perhaps institute a mechanism for order that is more negotiated than imposed.

Whither Negotiated Order at the Community Level?

The admittedly brief examples of co-production in Chicago and crime suppression in Philadelphia illustrate book-end instances of how community-level order can be produced. The Chicago example seems to show that given a context where there is institutional support and avenues for citizen participation, some form of collective agency is possible, while in Philadelphia there is a more limiting institutional context, albeit one that is showing some signs of change. In both instances, the political landscape of the city, and, to some extent, the larger context of the politics of crime play an important role in shaping the context under which community order is negotiated. Chicago’s bold embrace of a new model of policing at the ground level, while not neglecting the crime fighting aspects of hard policing, opened up a space for citizen participation even if the scope of this agency is delimited. On the other hand, the context in Philadelphia contrasts in that the current Mayor, Michael Nutter, was elected because of his tough stance on violent crime, and he has delivered many of the draconian measures he promised before he was elected. The ensuing law and order crackdown has left little scope for a citizen role in negotiating order, though the recent programs to increase citizen input into neighborhood safety and stability offer a sliver of hope for community activism.

However, the Chicago and Philadelphia stories also gloss over some very important confounding issues, not least of which is the uneven success of community policing among different race and ethnic groups. Skogan (2009) offers up some sobering data on community policing in Chicago and argues that city is essentially divided into three, where whites really do not need community policing, African-Americans have benefitted enormously from it, and Latinos hardly at all. Skogan (2009: 174) also downplays the overall co-productive potential of CAPS saying that in essence the police set the agenda for such efforts and limit what is done to a different method of providing community services, what he terms a ‘new political machine’. Skogan and his colleagues have veritable rafts of data on CAPS and so anything he says has to be taken seriously. However, I would argue that even though Beltway is a white neighborhood, they did seem to need community policing, and that despite the de-limited, and, it has to be said, humdrum nature of much community involvement in CAPS, there is a sense that it is at least possible for citizens to help shape order at the neighborhood level. Skogan does concede that a key contribution of the program is to make people feel more secure, even if there are negligible effects on crime rates. However, despite the commitment to community policing, Chicago has not abandoned the professional model. Crime suppression and arrests have always existed alongside beat meetings and the pendulum may be swinging toward more harsh policing tactics. Skogan is correct to express his concerns about the overall trend in Chicago toward embracing punitive approaches to crime, which may have the effect of negating the positive outcomes of community policing.

The examples of Chicago and Philadelphia illustrate the different degrees to which citizens negotiate order at the community level. Further, the data show how the structural context, in each case that of citywide policing policy and the overall political context within which criminal justice practice is shaped, inscribes the activism at the community level and influences the level of citizen involvement, and what roles they have in negotiating order.

Roles for the Citizen in Negotiated Order

Even though a true negotiated order where communities are equal partners in the co-production of safety is illusory, in all likelihood there are four citizen roles that are identifiable. In the first place there is the citizen partner, one who takes an active role in negotiating order and contributes to the stability and maintenance of their community. The partner helps identify and solve local problems and knows how to leverage social goods by combining forces with police and other city agencies. The partner is fully engaged in negotiating order. Second, there is the citizen associate, who plays a more scaled down and de-limited role in negotiating order than the partner. The associate is consulted about neighborhood crime and safety concerns, but has no real means of making inputs into the ongoing process of producing law and order. The associate is encouraged to call for service and be the ‘eyes and ears’ of the police. The citizen associate is the most likely outcome under the conditions of responsibilization (Garland, 2001), where the community is exhorted to take responsibility for producing order but is not given the means to actively do so. As Garland points out, responsibilization really entails the expansion of the State’s reach, while at the same time diffusing responsibility for crime control. The associate is called upon to do something but not really given the tools to negotiate order in a meaningful active fashion. Third, there is the citizen bystander, who does not take any role beyond being a passive observer of law enforcement professionals, and presumably supporting what is being done in their name. The bystander accepts that the police and law enforcement have the sole responsibility for producing order and all they can and should do is get out of their way and provide information when asked. Finally, there is the opponent, a citizen who is completely alienated from police and conventional law and order. Opponents are numerically the smallest group, but they have a disproportionate effect on both negotiated order and criminal justice policy. Examples of opponents include hardcore members of criminal squads in Philadelphia, certain gang members in Chicago, or ‘the group of young, alienated, disaffected youth who are outside the social mainstream and who live in a culture at odds with any canons of proper behaviour’ that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair tagged as responsible for the 2011 riots (Blair, 2011: 29).

All roles are, of course, ideal types and it is important to note that they can overlap. For instance, the ambiguous expected role of the citizen who aids law enforcement in the War on Terror combines elements of the associate and bystander. Though the War on Terror would seem to be the apotheosis of the professional model of policing, the public are still exhorted to do their bit – or, as the recent US Department of Homeland Security public awareness campaign has it, ‘if you see something, say something’. In reality, individuals can occupy hybrid roles, or combine elements of different roles as they face choices related to their safety. What is interesting is that the different roles reflect different abilities to negotiate order. The citizen partner is closest to the ideal structuration instance where there is individual agency, which in turn, influences the structure that inscribes it, while the associate and bystander have a declining influence on the context. Indeed, it is more likely that a non-negotiated punitive order exists the farther one goes away from the citizen partner role, and the prospects for meaningful citizen involvement in the future are, at best, unclear. But at the same time there is evidence that what Fung (2004) calls ‘empowered participation’ can happen, and there is enough to suggest that it is possible to create the structural conditions under which this is more likely.

Some questions remain with respect to negotiated order at the community level. The role of the citizen and community in the early 21st century should be better specified. I hinted above at some of the wider societal developments that have impacted not only how police function but also the expectations of support and assistance from the public. Future work should examine more closely not only the citizen roles but also how both prevailing discourses within the criminal justice system and actions by key agents influence the eventual role adopted. Key here is the underspecified role of actors at intermediary points in the criminal justice system, which begs questions such as how is responsibilization deployed and what respective influence do citizens and social control agents have on the eventual shape of action? The ideas discussed here and the examples given offer a perspective on some of these issues but the question remains as to whether it is truly a negotiated order rather than one adopted from a set of finite options, none of which truly spring from the grassroots. I would like to believe that citizenry exert an ongoing influence on the process and eventual outcomes and are not just passive recipients of ideas and directives from institutional actors, but it is an ongoing empirical question. The evidence from my work in Chicago suggests that citizens can play an active role, but it is unclear whether this experience is mirrored elsewhere. Finally, there is the question of when and how individual aspirations and/or roles become a collective response. How many partners or associates are needed for the response to become a collective one? Partly, I believe that the roles imply that one needs more than a handful but fewer than a horde to achieve a genuinely negotiated order at the community level, and the fact remains that the number of volunteers in any given area will always be quite small relative to the overall population as previous work has shown (Carr, 2005; Grinc, 1994). It is safe to say that there is no set power estimate for action, but future work should examine the presence and interaction of local, regional, and national stimuli, and their interrelationships with individual and collective action. Signal crimes matter but so does the way they are interpreted, mediated, and responded to at various levels of society.

Conclusion

Negotiated order, here defined as a combination of aims and inputs for social control, at the community level is difficult but not impossible to achieve. Much depends on the local context, particularly the social control climate and the mode of policing that is predominant. Even with these structural factors in place, truly negotiated order requires positive community input and involvement, and may need the spark of a signal event, or an ongoing series of more minor events. The more pressing concern is that it is easier and politically more palatable to turn to punitive measures as the Philadelphia evidence seems to suggest. Building trust and partnerships takes more time, is always messy, and is not guaranteed to contribute greatly to the law enforcement bottom line, namely, reducing incidents of crime.

Going forward, I would expect that there will be far more citizen associates and bystanders than partners, despite the lip service being paid to involving the community in co-producing safety. Worrying also is the often disproportionate influence that opponents can have on the prevailing punitive political climate, and it does not seem that they will disappear any time soon. Under specific conditions co-production can be transformative in both its outcomes and in the civic confidence and efficacy that is accrued by those who are active in producing a negotiated order. Returning to Giddens momentarily, the prospects for negotiated order are better when the structural context supports it, and this context in turn is renewed when individuals engage in action to promote order, a self-reflexive feedback loop that offers the potential for real citizen partnership. The trick will be to have the necessary steps taken to ensure that there is a structure that can promote bona fide partnerships, which is a leap of faith few decision-makers may be willing to take.