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This article draws on theories of reputation to analyze community policing’s role in managing perceptions of the police. Drawing on longitudinal interviews and fieldwork that followed the implementation of a community policing program, this article analyzes how officers interpret, manage, and attempt to reconstruct police reputation in their everyday work. I argue that police understand reputation through a lens I call the “faulty reputations paradigm”, an expectation that most negative perceptions about the police are unearned—rooted in hearsay, prejudice, and misunderstandings about policing practices. I contend that the faulty reputations paradigm helps structure reputation management strategies that seek to alter the faulty perceptions community hold of police, alongside competing reputational labor within policing itself. To overcome faulty reputations, community police attempt to cultivate individual reputations through positive encounters with the aim of transforming policing’s institutional repute. The article argues for the central role of reputational conflicts in coproducing policing. Such conflicts emerge from the perceived disconnect between officers’ individual and institutional reputations and help to structure the work of police by legitimating the strategies they deploy.

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Research on sexual violence has shown that social support sources can have both positive and negative outcomes for victims’ health. Yet few studies examine how informal supporters construct meaning from initial disclosure experiences to produce these outcomes. Using a social constructionist framework, I analyze 30 in-depth interviews with friends, family members, and partners who received disclosures of sexual violence. I examine how confidants construct meaning from initial disclosures to negotiate and construct victims’ “sympathy-worthiness”. Disclosure recipients express several facilitators and obstacles to constructing victims as sympathetic that draw on notions about their social proximity to victims, expectations of assault based on gender and sexuality, disclosure temporality, trauma visibility, and victims’ post-disclosure “recovery-work.” I argue these positionings contribute to, and draw upon, “disclosure myths” that frame confidants’ differential interpretations of victims’ narratives, resulting in both the provision and denial of support.