NCJ Number
171968
Journal
Sociological Spectrum Volume: 17 Issue: 3 Dated: (July-September 1997) Pages: 339-361
Date Published
1997
Length
23 pages
Annotation
The postmodernism perspective, used to illuminate the rhetoric and practice of community policing, draws attention to the role of violence in sustaining social order and the increasing role of symbolic or representational violence in shaping interpersonal relations.
Abstract
When societies valorize violence in some public contexts, it can be suppressed or effaced in others. The media-driven spectacle of violence uses representations of violence to increase ratings, sell goods and services, and maintain salience by diminishing violence to a cartoon-parody status. The focus on symbolic violence distracts public attention from the everyday violence and infrequent excesses of governmental social control. The rhetoric of community policing is "postmodern" and displays "hyperviolence" rhetoric. Such rhetoric denies the role of violence yet indicates its presence in practice, suppresses the centrality of violence to the police mandate, and displaces attention to a notional community. A case study of community policing in a western city, based on interviews, observations, and focus groups, reveals that, even though community policing rhetoric is used as public discourse, practices of police patrol officers have not changed significantly and the absence of a crime control emphasis creates ambiguity in the police role, raises morale questions, and alters public expectations. A quite different future is projected, depending on the scenario adopted: spread of community policing, increasing punitive crime control and rising prison population, multiple modes of "soft control" that partially obscure the dramatic rise in the incarcerated population, and use of the death penalty or some dialectic between representational and hyperviolence and rising violence on the part of excluded lower classes. 36 references and 1 table