The Space Community Policing Makes and the Body That Makes It

This paper examines the ways that community policing organizes urban space in order to increase the police's ability to observe and to enforce. The logic of that organization, I argue, rests in the particular way that police are integrating civilians into police practice as part of community policing's police-community partnership, a partnership that is characterized by the concrete metaphor of a policing body. This paper presents the results of twenty months of field research with the Boston Police Department whose community policing program, Neighborhood Policing, is being hailed as a national model.