Community Policing: National and International Models and Approaches

By Mike Brogden and Preeti Nijhar
Cullompton, UK and Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2005

I approached this book with some trepidation. I had feared another paean to community policing. COP has been a frustrating blend of hype, good intentions and some few best practices. Weary of North American reactive policing, reformists in academia, with some well-known advocates from policing such as Chris Braiden, the “guru” from Edmonton, launched a rather plausible and wishful exhortation to reinvent the never-realized and much cited principles attributed to Sir Robert Peel. The academic literature embraced an advocacy of COP in the name of reform, prevention, and democratization. Consequently, while criticisms and reservations are to be found, the literature is replete with uncritical exhortations, general conceptual outlines, and scant evaluation. Blessedly this book is a pleasant exception. The weight of the authors’ arguments and data is that the reforms that have been achieved are essentially updates in rhetoric, circumlocution, and Western hubris.

The authors attempt with some success a critical appreciation of the community policing movement in the developed “democracies, where they correctly illustrate how imperfectly and unconvincingly community policing has been realized. Setting the frame is a fine chapter on “Anglo-American Community-Policing: Ten Myths.” Perhaps especially noteworthy are “the myth of organic community,” “the myth of public support for COP,” and “the myth of organizational change in COP.”

They then go on to illustrate the ironies of these self-same democracies developing an export business around community policing, promoting the model in developing societies and failed states lacking the institutional and value underpinnings for legitimate and effective policing, and/or featuring cultural traditions at variance with ethnocentric conceptions of democracy and democratic policing. While Americans are in the forefront of community policing as foreign aid, there is room for subsidiaries. Canada is in the business, especially the Ontario Provincial Police, with numerous missions abroad. Even Metro Toronto Police, not obviously a paragon of COP in Canada and with conspicuous community problems and failures on their own turf, get in on the act in Eastern Europe. “Rank-and-file police officers from the West apparently spend vacations in transitional societies delivering community policing training with missionary zeal.” (5) And of ourse, the “missionaries” also include academics

The “globalization of community policing” is the thematic underpinning of the book. The authors range the globe, with analyses from North America, Western and central Europe, Asia, Africa, and central and South America. In doing so, they briefly revisit familiar text on Japan and the koban system as a non-Western manifestation of community-based policing, noting the intrusive and rights-challenged bases of the Japanese system. At least, though, it is an imperfect alternative to the “West-knows best” exportation of community policing. Their overall critical approach to community policing is a valuable antidote to prevailing rhetoric or “philosophy,” and the international survey is replete with information not otherwise easily available.

The authors are pragmatic enough to remark upon good intentions associated with community policing, and realistic enough to appreciate that it is yet another example of an inevitable failure to achieve democratic policing, an oxymoron in the context of social inequalities, state and elite interests, and police bureaucracy and power. The book rewards the reader, and should be an effective tool for the classroom where students are obliged to confront the myths and realities of contemporary policing at home and abroad.