Theorizing Community Policing

The article considers two of the most generally applied analytic perspectives in the field of police studies, in the context of their application to community policing. It is suggested that there has been a measure of convergence or, at least, constructive borrowing, between the approaches. While this forms a basis on which to theorize community policing, the limited explanatory power of contemporary analyses is symptomatic of the constraint imposed by prevailing understandings of the structuration process in contemporary social theory. An alternative conceptualization is examined, again in application to community policing.