VIOLENCE AND HYPERVIOLENCE - THE RHETORIC AND PRACTICE OF COMMUNITY POLICING

The postmodernism perspective, used here to illuminate the rhetoric an d practice of community policing, draws attention to the role of viole nce in sustaining social order and the increasing role of symbolic or representational violence in shaping interpersonal relations. When soc ieties valorize violence in some public contexts, it can he suppressed or effaced in others. The media-driven spectacle of violence uses rep resentations of violence as a means to increase ratings, sell goods an d services, and maintain its salience by diminishing it to cartoon-par ody status. Focus on symbolic violence distracts public attention from the grinding everyday violence and the infrequent excesses of governm ental social control. The rhetoric of community policing is ''postmode rn'' and displays ''hyperviolence'' (rhetoric that denies the role of violence, yet indicates its presence in practice) in that it suppresse s the centrality of violence to the police mandate and displaces atten tion to a notional ''community.'' A case study of community policing i n one western city, based on interviews, observations, and focus group s, reveals that although community policing rhetoric is used as public discourse, the practice of patrol officers is little changed, and the absence of a crime control emphasis creates ambiguity in the police r ole, raises morale questions, and alters public expectations. A quite different future is imagined, depending on the scenario one adopts: th e spread of community policing, in creasing punitive crime control and a rising prison population, multiple modes of ''soft control'' partia lly obscuring the dramatic rise in the incarcerated population. and th e use of the death penalty or some dialectic between representational and hyperviolence and rising violence on the part of the excluded lowe r classes.