ISSN 1062-7421
Vol. 11 No. 11 (November 2001) pp. 503-505.
POLICING THE POOR: FROM SLAVE PLANTATION TO PUBLIC HOUSING by Neil Websdale. Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 2001. 278 pp. Cloth $50.00. ISBN: 1-555553-496-1. Paper $22.50. ISBN 1-55553-497-X.
Reviewed by Craig Hemmens, Department of Criminal Justice Administration, Boise State University.
POLICING THE POOR is a scathing, incendiary indictment of the current wunderkind of law enforcement, community
policing. In the last decade, much of the academic literature in criminal justice has been taken up with a discussion
of the goals, and merits of community policing. The National Institute of Justice has funded a number of research
projects designed to study the implementation and impact of community policing initiatives. Community policing
has even entered the popular culture, meriting mention on popular television shows such as NYPD BLUE.
What is community policing? As Websdale notes, and other researchers have pointed out (Bayley 1998), the term is
used to describe a variety of law enforcement activities, from the aggressive enforcement of minor public order
offenses and the use of sophisticated management techniques by the New York City Police (Silverman 1999), to the
increased involvement of police officers in community outreach programs (DeJong 1994). Generally speaking, community
policing involves the police abandoning their traditional reactive role and adopting a proactive role in both seeking
out criminals and attempting to prevent crime from occurring, while at the same time engaging the community. Some
critics have compared community policing efforts to the "hearts and minds" campaign waged during the
Vietnam War.
In POLICING THE POOR, Neil Websdale provides an ethnographic account of the community policing initiative in Nashville,
Tennessee. He concludes, as the subtitle of his book suggests, that community policing is just another form of
institutionalized racism. Or, as he puts it, "I identify community policing at the heart of postindustrial
apartheid. This latest form of policing constitutes just one element of a wider strategy of controlling the poor"
(p. 6). Community policing serves as the "lead filter" in the "criminal justice juggernaut,"
which itself serves to control the urban poor and black. Websdale claims that regulating this underclass of underemployed,
homeless and black urban residents requires "a special punitive energy" (p. 7).
Websdale points out that most of the extant research on community policing has focused on an examination of the
opinions of police and community leaders, rather than those directly impacted by the practice. He uses ethnography
to get at this understudied population. Websdale spent a portion of his sabbatical year at the Vanderbilt Institute
for Public Policy Studies. While there he spent much of his time talking to Nashville police and residents of the
various Nashville housing projects. POLICING THE POOR
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combines Websdale's ethnographic account of community policing in Nashville with a discussion of the cultural and
economic forces that have shaped criminal justice policy-making over the past two hundred years.
Websdale begins his book by comparing slave patrols and community policing. He concludes that the two share a number
of similarities-both are formal, "legitimate" means of social control, imposed on poor African-Americans
by white community leaders. He also argues that the Jim Crow era and the late twentieth century are similar, in
that both eras saw the rollback of previous civil rights gains made by African-Americans. During the Jim Crow period
numerous laws were passed limiting the rights of the recently freed slaves. During the later part of the twentieth
century, the rise of the "criminal justice juggernaut," of which community policing is a crucial part,
has resulted in the restriction of many of the gains from the 1960s civil rights movement.
Websdale moves from historical analysis to ethnography in Chapter Two, in which he describes in some detail life
in the housing projects of Nashville. It is not a pretty picture, one with which students of urban America are
all too familiar. In Chapter Three he focuses on the aftermath of a critical event in Nashville, the police shooting
of a suspect and the subsequent burning and looting of the Dollar General Store during the summer of 1997. He utilizes
this incident to show how community policing has failed to either reduce crime or gain public support for the police
in Nashville.
Websdale then turns his attention to how community policing has affected some of the major issues facing the urban
African-American community, including domestic abuse, drug use, and prostitution. In Chapter Four, Websdale focuses
on domestic violence in the urban African American community. The regulation of domestic abuse is, along with community
policing, one of the primary focuses of contemporary law enforcement. Websdale has written on the subject of domestic
abuse before (Websdale 1998). Here Websdale argues convincingly that community policing has failed to have a meaningful
impact on domestic abuse in the housing projects of Nashville. He blames this on a combination of factors including
the extreme reluctance of African-American women to involve outsiders in domestic situations, and the mistaken
focus of community policing on criminal activity in public spaces instead of private spaces.
Websdale's explanation for why community policing has failed to reduce domestic violence in Nashville public housing
makes for a nice segue into his discussion of the impact of community policing on drug use and prostitution, two
of the vices that so visibly plague many of America's inner cities. Community policing has its roots in the "broken
windows" approach first articulated by Wilson and Kelling (1982). According to the broken windows approach
to law enforcement, police should focus their attention on minor, public order offenses such as vandalism, drug
use, and prostitution. By cleaning up these sorts of highly visible crimes, the theory holds, the police will send
a message that misconduct of any kind is not tolerated in the neighborhood and wrongdoers will move on. What sounds
reasonable on paper has turned into what Websdale views as nothing less than an armed occupation of the inner city
by the police. Saturation patrols
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and aggressive vice enforcement do not eliminate these offenses, they merely displace them temporarily. Residents
of the inner city, meanwhile, are routinely treated as suspects and come to view the police as an occupying army.
Websdale concludes POLICING THE POOR with an argument that the rise of community policing is directly related to
the loss of industrial jobs through the expansion of global capitalism. He asserts nothing less than that community
policing is a "eugenic intervention against black people" (p. 10). Strong words. He mitigates them slightly
by acknowledging that there exists no conspiracy to destroy urban black families but that this has been the unintended
consequence of community policing and punitive criminal justice policies, such as harsh sentences for drug offenders.
In the end, Websdale sees community policing as just another brick in the wall. American society has historically
favored punitive approaches to managing surplus populations, be they the recently freed slaves in the Reconstruction
South, unemployed auto assembly workers during the Great Depression, or the new urban underclass in the post-Great
Society era.
POLICING THE POOR paints a bleak picture of life under a community policing regime. Websdale's account will force
advocates of community policing to reconsider their endorsement of techniques such as saturation policing and zero
tolerance law enforcement. Community policing sounds wonderful in principle, but Websdale presents a strong case
that it is not quite so wonderful in practice. Some will criticize him for lacking impartiality regarding his subject.
I commend him for speaking passionately and convincingly about what he saw in Nashville. He draws some extremely
disturbing parallels between slavery and the criminal justice system today. I hope that policy-makers and academics
will listen to what he has to say.
REFERENCES:
Bayley, David H. 1998. WHAT WORKS IN POLICING. New York: Oxford University Press.
DeJong, William. 1994. BUILDING THE PEACE: THE RESOLVING CONFLICT CREATIVELY PROGRAM (RCCP). Washington, D.C: National
Institute of Justice.
Silverman, Eli B. 1999. NYPD BATTLES CRIME: INNOVATIVE STRATEGIES. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Websdale, Neil. 1998. RURAL WOMAN BATTERING AND THE JUSTICE SYSTEM: AN ETHNOGRAPHY. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Wilson, James Q. and Kelling, George L. 1982. "Police and Neighborhood Safety: Broken Windows." ATLANTIC
MONTHLY (March): 29-38.
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Copyright 2001 by the author, Craig Hemmens.