Watchman and Community: Myth and Institutionalization in Policing
![handle is hein.journals/lwsocrw28 and id is 339 raw text is: Watchman and Community:
Myth and Institutionalization in Policing
John P. Crank
The author uses a conceptual framework grounded in theory of institutional
process to assess developments in the theory of community-based policing. He
suggests that two contemporary myths in policing-the myth of the police
watchman and the myth of community-provide core elements the theory.
Both liberal and conservative advocates for reform have drawn on these myths
to support reinstitutionalizing police as community protectors with broad au-
thority, including authority to arrest, unconstrained by law enforcement or due
process considerations. He also discusses fundamental differences in the ways
in which liberal and conservative reform advocates perceive the relationship
between the myths.
[C]ertain ideas burst upon the intellectual landscape with a tre-
mendous force. They solve so many fundamental problems at
once that they seem also to promise that they will resolve all
fundamental problems, clarify all obscure issues.
-Clifford Geertz 1973:3
Clifford Geertz thus described the force with which the
idea of culture energized the development of the field of anthro-
pology. It is with such dynamic vigor that the idea of community-
based policing currently envelops police work (Manning 1984;
Trojanowicz & Bucqueroux 1990; Walker 1992b). Community-
based policing has emerged as the articulation of a police reform
movement that addressed a central problem confronting police
in the 1960s-the problem of legitimacy (Mastrofski 1991). By
invoking two powerful myths-the myth of the 18th-century mor-
ally invested small-town American community and the myth of
police officers as community watchmen-community-based po-
licing provided a source of legitimation for police activity in
terms of community protection when legitimacy in terms of po-
lice professionalization had been lost (Klockars 1991).
Address correspondence to John P. Crank, Department of Criminal Justice, 4505
Maryland Parkway, Box 455009, Las Vegas, NV 89154-5009.
Law & Society Review, Volume 28, Number 2 (1994)
© 1994 by The Law and Society Association. All rights reserved.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/lwsocrw28&div=24&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Watchman and Community: Myth and Institutionalization in Policing
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