Rethinking Community Policing

Community policing is in decline, threatened with obsolescence by data-driven practices like COMPSTAT and Intelligence-Led Policing. Efficiency driven and aided by technology, these practices are delivering on the crime reduction promises community policing aspired to. Ray argues that much of community policing’s difficulties lie in the lack of a clear theoretical foundation informing its community engagement mandate. The uncritical incorporation of pluralism needlessly highlights the differences between police and community groups. Deliberative democratic theory offers a theoretical foundation that may save community policing. Moreover, Ray uses historical sources to suggest the inevitability of community policing in America.