Crafting Charismatic Cops: Community Policing and the Faulty Reputations Paradigm

Abstract

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.

Mass support for proposals to reshape policing depends on the implications for crime and safety

“…At the same time, it is also important to note that public expectations about the roles that police departments play in society extend well beyond crime control. Since at least the early 1990s, municipal police departments throughout the United States have regularly engaged in "community policing" activities that involve nonenforcement contact and cooperation with the public on matters that are, at best, only indirectly related to crime reduction (Cheng, 2020;Peyton et al, 2019;Rivera-Cuadrado, 2021). Perhaps unsurprisingly, national surveys fielded in the aftermath of Floyd's murder showed that majorities were opposed to reductions in spending on police services in general, but also believed officers should continue to play a role in a variety of specific tasks, ranging from vehicle stops to community engagement activities like youth outreach, even if supplemented by social service workers (e.g., Pew, 2020; Peyton et al, 2020).…”