Community Policing in Comparison

Abstract

If community policing in Western democracies is often a unilateral action of the police promoting community self-rule, in most of the rest of the world, informal policing in communities is ubiquitous, popular, and sometimes excessive. Bracketing the Western ideology of community policing as state-initiated and -controlled (top-down) allows to discover a rich field of informal policing widely practiced by communities in Asia, Latin America, or Africa (bottom-up). Using secondary data as material, the article suggests accounting for these patterns of community policing with a state-centered model. Key variables identified by the authors are the service delivery capacity of the state, the dominant ideology, indirect or dual rule, political alliances as well as the framing of opportunites by civil society enterpreneurs or police managers, and available cultural repertoires of policing.