ABSTRACT
The urban crisis of the 1960s and 1970s prompted the federal government to increase social welfare spending at the local level on programs designed to reduce poverty, provide adequate housing, create jobs, and protect public safety. A different historical moment and issue dynamic, the emergence of community policing as a public safety intervention mimics the arson case in that public safety agencies were called on to address biased outcomes that they had helped to create. Fire and police services require new organizational orientations and structures to shift from a reactive to a proactive focus in response to community problems. This chapter describes regulation of urban building fires and community policing as a form of social outreach, especially as this concerns illicit drug users and alternatives to punitive drug control policies. It discusses the concept of "institutional selectivity" to demonstrate the dynamics of state bias and to show how these work to shape social problems and unequal outcomes.
