Geographies of Community Policing: Reform Imaginaries and the Apolitics of Compromise in Baltimore

Abstract

The Department of Justice’s 2016 investigation of the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) diagnosed the department as suffering from a legitimacy crisis, with “frayed community relationships” that were worsened by BPD’s killing of Freddie Gray. Following the investigation, BPD legally committed to enacting a package of reforms designed for “building community trust” and “creating a culture of community.” Reformers argued that genuine redress of BPD’s racist violence would emerge only from community engagement. This paper will explore how the imaginaries of “community” mobilized in BPD reform efforts were used to translate political demands on BPD into an apolitical practical imaginary that limited the possibilities of redress. Drawing on interviews with civilian reformers as well as observations of town halls, monitoring team meetings, and public hearings, I examine why community engagement efforts during BPD’s initial reform process failed to translate into the outcomes desired by “the community.” I argue that a key reason involves the moral geographies of “community” at stake in reform efforts. I trace how reformers envisioned “community” as simultaneously the key stakeholder of police reform and as simply one constituency among others, variously fabricating “community” as discrete, homogeneous, racialized, geographically fixed, and coequal to “the police”—and as thereby the grounds on which demands for compromise could be made.