ABSTRACT
Scholars and practitioners around the world have adopted the term community policing to describe a wide variety of policing strategies during the past 30 years. Most discussions of the history of police in the United States refer to the latest chapter in U.S. police history as the Community Era of policing, as the era was identified in Kelling and Moore’s (1988) now classic work. Departing from Kelling and Moore, we have identified the past three decades of policing in the United States as “postmodern policing” (Barlow & Barlow, 1999, 2000). In this chapter, we discuss how characterizing the contemporary era in policing as postmodern not only captures the various initiatives that have been implemented in policing during the time period, but also has explanatory power, connecting developments in policing to developments in the political economy. We demonstrate that the changes that have occurred in policing in the past three decade and the ways in which policing has failed to change in the United States have resulted from the nearly universal adoption of community policing.
