The Unbearable Lightness of Community chapter
It is understandable that two leading police scholars would argue that community policing “is the most important development in policing in the past quarter century.”1 No self-respecting police department in the United States—and now much of the world—does not have a program that can plausibly be placed under the community policing umbrella. Today, there is little talk of the professional model, little talk of competing models for organizing police departments. Community policing is the preferred ideal.
And why not? Given the desired ends of community policing—more cohesive and politically competent urban neighborhoods, closer ties between residents and officers, more creative police problem-solving—how could one object to its hegemony as a model for police organizations? Why not a more capable and engaged citizenry, why not a more responsive and effective police force?
In preceding chapters, I have addressed these and related questions. I pursued two broad goals. One was to disinter the normative assumptions about community, and about the community-police relation, that underlie legitimations of community policing. I sought to expose and contrast the architecture of differing normative visions of community and of the state-society relation. I both stressed the force of such visions and demonstrated that no single one of them commands absolute allegiance. Such normative competition is inescapable. Any broad evaluation of

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