Crafting Charismatic Cops: Community Policing and the Faulty Reputations Paradigm

Abstract

This article draws on theories of reputation to analyze community policing’s role in managing perceptions of the police. Drawing on longitudinal interviews and fieldwork that followed the implementation of a community policing program, this article analyzes how officers interpret, manage, and attempt to reconstruct police reputation in their everyday work. I argue that police understand reputation through a lens I call the “faulty reputations paradigm”, an expectation that most negative perceptions about the police are unearned—rooted in hearsay, prejudice, and misunderstandings about policing practices. I contend that the faulty reputations paradigm helps structure reputation management strategies that seek to alter the faulty perceptions community hold of police, alongside competing reputational labor within policing itself. To overcome faulty reputations, community police attempt to cultivate individual reputations through positive encounters with the aim of transforming policing’s institutional repute. The article argues for the central role of reputational conflicts in coproducing policing. Such conflicts emerge from the perceived disconnect between officers’ individual and institutional reputations and help to structure the work of police by legitimating the strategies they deploy.