Community policing structures erected in the wake of rising crime rates and civil disorder throughout the 1990s were supposed to provide civilians a platform from which to influence law enforcement policy. Yet the fires that burned in Ferguson in 2014 raise doubts about how much influence the public has on police, particularly in marginalized communities. This book challenges the common narrative that community policing has democratized the police, when there is ample evidence that US police powers have expanded alongside the proliferation of community-based strategies. It reveals how community governance works to limit civilian power and turn residents into appendages of the state—their “eyes and ears” on the street as well as their mouthpieces during crises. Further, the authors argue that disputes about who does and does not count as community complicate mobilization. Finally, they argue that until police departments are forced to adapt directly to the needs of communities of color, grassroots organizations should lead initiatives that purport to be community based.

Community policing partnerships are built and maintained by community meetings wherein participants coproduce social order by identifying local problems and devising strategies for their reduction and resolution. Coproduction is a dynamic process of meaning construction that takes place through social interaction. These interactions build toward a mutually satisfactory discourse on local definitions of law, crime, and order. This discourse creates a set of understandings about what citizens interpret as problems, disorder, and crime, as well as police officers' ability to address these issues using a range of enforcement and non-enforcement strategies. Through this interactive process, police and residents define the "policeability" of residents' interpretations. Drawing on literature in symbolic interactionism, we chart a course for unpacking the contest over policeable discourse using ethnographic data gathered over a fouryear period in community-police meetings in South Los Angeles. This paper explores participants' roles and explicates the process of defining policeability through a set of ideal-type interactions (cooperation, control, and resistance). Power, in this setting, is control over the definition of policeability. Residents are locked into a supplicatory role, while officers are akin to legal brokers, accepting, rejecting, or reframing residents' claims of crime and disorder. Our findings suggest that, in this precinct, while the rhetoric of cooperation abounds, pessimism on the part of policing scholars about the claims toward true partnership are warranted with respect to the power police retain and express in police-citizen interactions.

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Juvenile correctional boot camps seek to transform youth labeled ''at-risk'' into productive members of society. While these military-style programs have been in decline since the early 2000s, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), one of the largest agencies in the country, continues to embrace them as a key disciplinary practice and vestige of the ''get tough'' era in U.S. juvenile justice reform. Contemporary transformative programs have been linked to Progressive Era juvenile social control, and scholars are beginning to show that, historically, racial exclusion has been a central function. The goals of this research are to interrogate the treatment of boot camp participants by police and demonstrate how racial exclusion remains central to juvenile social control. Drawing on collaborative ethnographic fieldwork, this study shows how police stigmatize Black and Latino parents, adopt the role of disciplinary authority in the family, and infuse formal control processes into domestic life. Youth face stigmatizing encounters through degradation and punitive physical training as part of the camp's disciplinary regime. This research suggests that youth intervention programs built on liberal ideals are the most recent in a long line of racialized social control systems in the United States that seek to stigmatize and confine youth of color.