Input without Influence: The Silence and Scripts of Police and Community Relations

• Published in: Social problems (Berkeley, Calif.) Calif.), 2020-02, Vol.67 (1), p.171-189
• Main Author: Cheng, Tony
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Community meetings; Community relations; Complaints; Decision making; Justice; Narratives; Police; Police departments; Political participation; Procedural justice; Residents; Scripts; Silence; Social order
• ISSN: 0037-7791; 1533-8533
• DOI: 10.1093/socpro/spz007

Since its establishment in 1993, the Department of Justice’s Office of Community-Oriented Policing Services has invested $14 billion into local police departments’ efforts to improve community relations. Yet in 2015, the public’s confidence in police reached its lowest point since 1993. Drawing on seven years of Chicago Police Board meeting transcripts, this article identifies one mechanism why, despite police investment, community relations can fail to improve. While community meetings where residents present complaints are envisioned as enhancing citizen voice, police replied to 74 percent of complaints with literal silence. When police were not silent, both police and residents repeated identifiable scripts—defined as stylized narratives based on generalized knowledge from typical events—that reflected divergent conceptualizations of community issues. Police use of silence and scripts are examples of “perfunctory policing,” where officers superficially comply with procedural requirements of a program or practice, but resist substantive changes in performance—leaving residents to shoulder the consequences of police inaction. As local jurisdictions invest more into closing the gap between the government and public, insufficient analysis into how initiatives are implemented can legitimize decision-making processes that reinforce the pre-existing social order, rendering community interactions more procedurally symbolic than substantively productive.