This project examines the definitions of "community" that are mobilized by both urban neighborhood residents and by police in efforts to implement community policing. This contemporary reform movement seeks to reduce crime through more constructive interactions between citizens and the police. However, community policing assumes that there is a coherent "community" that can be organized in the name of crime control. In urban neighborhoods, this assumption is questionable. Specifically, this research will explore four critical tensions inherent in community politics: tensions of difference, scale, obligation, and interaction. To try to organize community is to implicitly ask: Who is included and excluded? At what scale does the group organize? What obligations can individuals be asked to assume? And how does the community interact with other agencies of power? This project will study how these questions are addressed in a neighborhood in Seattle through intensive qualitative research with both residents and officers. The resident data will include in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and observation of community group meetings. The police data will include ride-alongs and informal interviews with all officers with any responsibility for the study neighborhoods. Analysis of these data will reveal the implicit assumptions about community that shape how both residents and officers interact with one another. It will also reveal how the central tensions of community organizing are addressed and potentially resolved in these interactions.
