Archon Fung

• Chapter 13:
  Bridge Across Race and Class:
  Structured Deliberation vs. Laissez Faire Discussion
  • 13.1. Initial Conditions: Spatial and Socio-Economic Polarization
  • 13.2. Discussion and Domination : November 1996 - February 1997
  • 13.3. Structured Deliberation in Traxton Beat: March 1997 - August 1997
  • 13.4. Realizing Democratic Values in Traxton Beat
    • 13.4.1. High Realization of Core Democratic Values in Traxton Beat
    • 13.4.2. Explaining Traxton's Peculiar Democratic Outcomes
  • 13.5. SLD Versus Command-and-Control in Traxton Beat

Chapter 13:
Bridge Across Race and Class:
Structured Deliberation vs. Laissez Faire Discussion

The fifteen by eight block rectangle that forms Traxton Beat is one of the more diverse areas of the city. More polarized than socio-economically plural, a fenced-off set of commuter railroad tracks segregates a well-to-do west section of the area from the lower-income east side. A brief drive-though "windshield survey" of the area generates reflexive impressions that census statistics later confirm. On either side of the smooth, wide streets of Beat's west side sit large, solid houses that have well manicured lawns and shiny new cars in their driveways. The residents of this area are among the wealthiest in the city proper, enjoying a median household income of $66,000 according to 1990 census figures. The west side population is racially integrated but predominantly white; economically, householders are mostly upper middle-class and professional.
By no means dilapidated, houses on the area's east side are nevertheless more modest by comparison. While most of the east side blocks contain smaller but still well maintained houses, one clearly discerns the creep of urban decay from the boarded-up and otherwise abandoned houses that mar, for now only infrequently, the east side blocks. The residents who live in those houses are solidly middle-class, with a 1990 median household income of $34,391. This figure is slightly above the city's median but little more than half that of the west side. Also in contrast to the west, east side residents are uniformly African-American.
As a consequence of decades-old administrative determinations of policing boundaries, these two very different clusters of residents--each with its own distinct public safety needs and interests--share the same set of policing resources. Recalling the definition of a "police beat,"[1] these residents are served by the same set of patrol officers and squad car. Despite these scarce public safety resources and the conflicting demands that might be placed on them given such diversity of culture, race, class, and spatial location, east and west side residents had never come to loggerheads with one another over policing issues, or over any issues at all, for that matter. The simple explanation, and I believe the correct one, is that east and west side residents for the most part lived in separate and parallel worlds, each with its own avenues, public services, commercial areas, and civic institutions. When residents from one side or the other had problems with public safety and police action or inaction, they would pursue standard channels of redress--perhaps by taking the matter up with individual officers, their supervisors, or local politicians--that did not require awareness of, much less interaction with, residents from the other side of the Beat. The Chicago community policing reforms of 1994 and 1995, however, removed this luxury of anomic ignorance by creating a common forum that cast residents from both sides of the tracks together. Somewhat ironically and perhaps idiosyncratically, given the common perception that political and administrative decentralization tends to engender parochial sentiments and balkanize polities, Street Level Democratic policing reforms brought together previously separated neighbors in the case of Traxton Beat. In this chapter, we examine the interactions between these diverse residents and police, their decisions and actions, in light of the deliberative processes and outcomes predicted by the normative theory of Street Level Democracy and hypotheses elaborated in the previous chapter.

13.1. Initial Conditions: Spatial and Socio-Economic Polarization

Neighborhood descriptive statistics confirm and elaborate these rough impressions of socio-economic disparity between the east and west sides of Traxton Beat. According to 1990 U.S. Census figures, the west side is at least twice as well off as the east side on several standard indicators. The median household income of West Side residents is almost twice as high as that of those on the East Side residents, the percentage of female-headed households is approximately three times as great on the east side, the east side poverty rate is six times greater than of the west side, and east side unemployment rate in 1990 was four times as great as the west side's rate:

The west side of Traxton Beat, then, is one of the most peaceful and well off enclaves within the Chicago city limits. Many of these advantages can no doubt be attributed to the raw income power that west side residents enjoy as a result of their high-quality employment opportunities. This materialist account is inadequate, however, given that many other once well off neighborhoods in the city are now blighted because those who could afford to move away from the urban core did so. Traxton Beat's west side has become an oasis in the city not just because its residents enjoy material advantages that most other residents can only dream of, but because they have very successfully and self-consciously organized themselves to deploy these resources for the sake of neighborhood preservation and status reproduction over the course of some two decades.
The senior cohort of west side residents moved into the neighborhood in the late 1960s and 1970s. Many of them were young, upwardly mobile white couples, at the beginning of their careers, who sought comfortable housing on a constrained budget. Fortunately for these young families, the fear of black encroachment and outward flight of established white families had depressed housing values and thus created fireside bargains for whites who were not terrified about living next to blacks. One neighborhood notable, call him Mr. Phillips, who is now active in one of the West side's churches and president of the Traxton Improvement Association, reflected on his decision to live in the area:
In the late 1960s, we used to walk through [West Traxton] often. The [home] buys were great then because of white flight. After looking at many places [all over the South Side], we saw the place [we wanted in Traxton], closed the deal in two hours, and have been living there for twenty seven years now... Many [neighbors] said that they wouldn't live with blacks, and many of them could and did move out.
Almost as soon as Mr. Phillips and other families like his moved in, many of them began organizing mightily to transform West Traxton Beat into their vision of a livable urban community. Defying the logic that poverty and ghettoization radiate outward from city centers,[2] West Traxton residents proudly claim that they have created and maintained "a model of diversity and residential stability" through their clever and cohesive collective action. These self-help efforts occur through a web of associations that includes neighborhood committees of two churches and an impressive number of civic associations that includes[3] the Traxton Improvement Association (TIA), Traxton Area Planning Association (TAPA), the Traxton Arts Association (TAA), the 18th Street Business Association, and the Apple Avenue Business Association. The individuals in these associations have pursued strategies of neighborhood stabilization both through independent action and by leveraging their connections with local politicians, agency officials, and local business people. Mr. Phillips recalls early neighborhood preservation strategies that aimed at stabilizing the socio-economic level of residents during the period of white flight:
I got involved right away at Traxton Church [and its] Social Action Committee, chaired by Jim Stevens.[4] We took some definite steps in the early to mid-1970s to stabilize the population. We knew that we had to attract buyers to the area, and so we put together a professional brochure of homes. We went to the heads of corporate transfers of big corporations in Chicago, and made them aware of what great deals were available in Traxton, what a great place to live it was. We offered interested potential buyers on tours. Based upon the steps he devised at the time, Jim Stevens was the person most responsible for the state of Traxton as it is today.
For more than two decades, then residents have maintained what they see as the quality and peace of their neighborhood through measures that some outside observers have found controversial and others horrifying. Home sales in West Traxton, for example, almost never appear on the open market because they are passed down to acceptable potential neighbors through word of mouth. While West Traxton is itself is quite racially integrated by Chicago's standards, the area has a reputation as a white enclave within a city increasingly constituted by people of color. The geographic contours of the neighborhood itself provide perhaps the most dramatic testimony to the boldness and effectiveness of West Traxton's residents. Attentive to the spatial determinants of the quality of neighborhood life, residents in Traxton's neighborhood organizations have used public resources to construct walls around their community to keep out what they perceive to be the chaos and crime of the surrounding urban environment. The map of Traxton Beat below shows the division between its east and west sides and several notable features of each side:

13.2. Discussion and Domination : November 1996 - February 1997

How did these racially and economically variegated residents and their public servants in the police department interact with one another within the Street Level Democratic institutions of community policing? Did they treat each other fairly, with respect, together developing and implementing effective solutions to public safety problems, thereby advancing core democratic values as the normative theory of SLD predicts? Or, did SLD yield domination of east by west or institutional paralysis, as skeptical critics might expect?
This study attempts to answer these questions with evidence gathered during ten months of close observation, between November 1996 and August 1997, of the community policing process in Traxton. As we shall see below, Traxton offers prima facia evidence to support both SLD's proponents and critics. During the first four months, better-off west side residents set the community policing agenda, east side residents were quiescent, and consequently west-siders dominated discussions about what the police ought to be doing and how they ought to be doing it. During the final six months of the observation period, however, the process included voices from both sides of the neighborhood in roughly comparable proportions. In this later period, both groups--or the unified group as a whole--agreed that problems on the east side were more severe and they devoted the majority of policing resources there. The prime explanation for this marked difference in the fairness of collective discussion and action between the first period and the second, I will argue, is that participants were reminded and guided by explicit deliberative norms and procedures in the second period, whereas meetings in the first period were free-form discussions that allowed the most articulate and aggressive speakers to dominate.
I define the first period of observation in Traxton to extend from November 1996 until February 1997. During this time, monthly community policing beat meetings exhibited several notable characteristics. First, though a substantial number of East side African-American residents attended, the majority of "civilian"--non-police--participants were whites who came from the west side. Between fifteen and thirty residents and from five to ten police officers attended the average beat meeting over this period (see figure 13.3 below). This over-representation of better-off residents conforms to the expectations of the Strong Egalitarian and Social Unity critics of SLD. Second, discussions were extremely orderly, well facilitated, and effective by the standards of community meetings. In Traxton Beat, community policing participants have adopted the practice of electing one resident, chosen by majority vote, to serve as beat facilitator each year, with terms beginning in January and ending in the following December. Both of the facilitators who served over the observation period were west side residents, and both possessed excellent group process skills that they had gained in other community associations and in professional life. As a result of their facilitation, meetings moved very quickly, decisively, and possessed continuity from one session to the next. Third, within this context of fast facilitation and formally equal participation rights, west side residents effectively, though perhaps not consciously, controlled the agenda of priority-setting and problem-solving. West side problems occupied most of the content of discussion and the attention of police officers insofar as they take direction from these meeting. The most obvious, and accurate, explanation for this domination is that better off residents enjoy advantages of articulateness, education, and attitude in open discussions with those who are less well-off (Sanders 1997).
The November 1996 beat meeting was typical for this period. Based upon the impressions of long-term participants, its style also characterized prior sessions. It was held in the community room of Christ School, a parochial school located on the West side of the beat, on a cold Wednesday night.[11] Traxton's beat meeting participation rates are high compared to the rest of the city, and on this night some 29 adult residents (2 or 3 brought their children) and 8 police officers braved the cold to attend.[12] Twenty-one of the residents were white, while eight were African-American. Approximately half--a lower ratio than at the average Chicago beat meeting[13]--were female. Three of the police officers were black, and the rest white. Most of them were regular beat meeting participants, and so knew from previous meetings where and when to go. New participants probably heard about the meeting from friends, at other community events, from street posters, and very likely from the many radio and television advertisements, sponsored by the City, that implore them to "Get with the Beat" by attending their neighborhood beat meetings.
Scheduled to start at 7:00pm, it began at 7:10pm, again remarkably prompt by Chicago community policing standards. Some 20 residents had arrived when the meeting started, and the rest trickled in slowly. Residents and police officers sat in a large circle facing one another, to both indicate and foster a sense of equality and attenuate the distinction between law enforcement professionals and residents. This simple practice is again distinctive; police sit at a head table and residents in an audience arrangement in most of the other beats in the city. It was not entirely successful, however, as police officers, white west side residents, and black east siders for the most part still tended to cluster together in their respective groups. The following figure depicts the seating arrangement for this meeting:

Problems 1.1 through 1.3 were raised before my observation began in November, discussed at the November meeting and action on these problems continued persistently throughout the period. West side residents and their allies in the police department, city agencies, and city council made significant progress on all three of these problems. The abandoned church property was first secured, and then residents working with the alderman's office helped to identify a developer who put it to commercial use. A by-product for him, but the main objective for residents and the alderman, is that the property no longer poses a public safety threat from its vacancy. As mentioned earlier, strategies to solve resident problems with disturbances at the diner (Problem 1.2) included increased police patrols and early fruitless discussions with the franchise owner. As the committee persisted, however, relations with the owner became more cooperative, and eventually he attended a beat meeting himself. The group negotiated operating changes with the owner that included hiring an extra security guard, closing earlier on weekends, and securing the parking lot. While the residents who initially complained about the diner still occasionally complain about noise, they agree that these actions have substantially abated the original problem. Street peddlers who obstructed traffic and whom some West Traxton considered an eyesore also received substantial attention. At the behest of these residents, police began to enforce vending license statutes and to confiscate the wares of those peddlers that stood in violation. Within two or three months, the peddlers had moved on to other cross-roads, and they no longer posed a problem for anyone in Traxton.
A fourth problem that arose in meetings during this period, this one shared by both East and West side residents, was slow police response to 911 calls (Problem 1.4). Residents frequently complained that police did not show up until hours after a call had been made, and they felt this to be an unacceptably poor level of service. The group took action on this problem in two ways. First, residents invited representatives of the 911 office to explain the system, and to answer questions about tardy response. The representative laid out the priority system of responding to calls and placated resident complaints a bit. Ultimately, however, the 911 system is organized as a citywide system, is quite rigid in its design. The residents of one beat, even one as well off and well organized as West Traxton could therefore not hope to change it. As a second strategy, then, residents and police short-circuited the city-wide system. Police began to carry personal pager units and publicized their pager numbers at beat meetings.
In contrast to these fairly effective responses to targeted problems, two of the major issues of distinctive concern to East Traxton residents received much less sustained attention during the first observation period. In February 1997, for example, black residents from East Traxton raised two recurring problems that directly questioned the competency, interest in public safety, and racial attitudes of the police. One woman suspected the police of carrying out surveillance operations on her house (Problem 1.5). She said that, "Whenever one of my friends comes over to visit, I [always] see police come ten minutes later. I always see them outside my house with binoculars." The police denied this surveillance, she did not press the matter, and the meeting continued without addressing her concern. In a very similar comment in a meeting some months later, one woman complained that police harassed her son. This time, however, the beat facilitator (who at that meeting was Emily Crenshaw) pressed the matter further:
Black Resident: I live on [13^th and Daniels]. We have an unusual number of plainclothes officers, and there is trouble [when they are around]. We are having trouble with those that are trying to protect us. Some of these officers harass the teens playing in the vacant lots. [You police should] make yourself useful...
Emily Crenshaw: Do you know how to identify police cars? On the top of the police cars are numbers with four digits, if you see something that is not right, then take down this number [and we can act on it]
Black Resident: The kids say, "the police told us to go away, they took our ball." The police would stop my daughter from being on the street. I want to know what we can do [to stop police harassment].
Emily Crenshaw: You are going to have to ask your daughter to get the name, or the numbers on the cars. That is the only way we can do anything.
Police Officer: What lot is this that kids are being run off of and balls taken?
Black Resident: There is an alley by my house, and a lot next to it [that is where the police harass]
Emily Crenshaw: The best thing to do is to ID them. If you bring license plate numbers, then we can track it down [and stop police harassment]...
Black Resident: You have two cars in that neighborhood, and their badge numbers are not visible. I report them to city hall. I have reported them, and all they do is harass me more.
Tactical Officer: Why don't you give me their names?
Black Resident: This won't do any good.
Unfortunately, this matter was never pursued further. The woman did not return with more detailed information such as the identity of the offending officers that would have supported her claim and enabled the rest of the group, should they have been appropriately disposed, to stop the alleged harassment if it did in fact occur. The matter remained tantalizingly unresolved and unactionable.
At the same meeting, another African-American female resident of the east side raised an even more serious matter; her brother had been shot:
Female Resident: On December 15, my brother was shot and killed at a store on the corner of [14^th and Commercial]. I don't think that the police are doing anything about this. I have made many attempts to get some satisfaction, but nothing is being done to find the person who killed my brother. You would say that he was a young black man [and so deserved it], but you don't know me, and you don't know my brother.
Detective: Within 2 days of your brother's death, seven people were picked up. One woman gave us a name [of a suspect] and he was picked up, but no one ID'd [identified] him in a line-up. I have talked to other detectives, but we are having trouble turning up more leads.

And the matter was largely dropped after this exchange, and again east side residents, in contrast to their more effective counterparts to the West, never moved their problem-solving efforts beyond the mode of complaint, question, and informational response. East Traxton participants never attempted, as west side residents almost certainly would have, to ascertain whether that corner is the site of recurring problems (it is) and push for sustained action to enhance its security.
During the months between November 1996 and February 1997, then, West Side residents dominated the community policing process of Traxton in the sense that problems they raised received much more airtime in meetings, sustained attention from meeting to meeting, and follow through action on the part of police, city agencies, political officials, and the residents themselves. During this period, then, the formal deliberative institutions of community policing did not yield outcomes that were fair to both well heeled and disadvantaged, west and east side residents respectively, participants. The peculiar mechanism of domination in effect in Traxton over this period is, however, worth examining in a bit more detail. It is peculiar for three reasons.
First, domination was not the intent or plan of West side residents, but rather an unintended consequence of a laissez-faire, first-come-first served style of discussion in which the most assertive and well-spoken participants guide proceedings. In no instance were there heated arguments between East Siders and West Siders or police officers about what counted as a problem, or whether some course of action should or should not be taken. To the contrary, in two instances described above and several others observed during the field research, police and west side residents tried to draw out problems brought up by east siders, but failed in that no further discussion about additional dimensions of the problem or solutions to it followed.
Second, domination in Traxton did not operate according to conventional mechanisms commonly deployed to describe the operation of power, conflict, and subjection. Consider the common typology of decision power that distinguishes between three "faces"--or modes--in which a stronger party can steer group decisions in its own interests, over the colliding interests of a weaker party. One party may dominate another through (i) victory in outright conflict, (ii) controlling the agenda of decision-making, or (iii) subject the consciousness of the weaker to the degree he does not even recognize, and therefore cannot press, his own interests (Bachrach and Baratz 1962). None of these mechanisms, however, accurately describe the discussion and decision processes that engaged East and West Traxton residents over the November 1996 to February 1997 period. Considering the three faces of domination in reverse order, East Traxton residents had subjective interests in conflict with west siders, and so were not so subjugated that they accepted West Traxton's interests as their own. They repeatedly raised issues of particular concern to those who lived on their side of the tracks--such as police harassment, gun violence on the east side, and police inaction on east side crimes. Neither were East Traxton residents unable to place their items on the agenda, as they often spoke during the "new business" section of meetings, and west siders appeared to listen. Finally, it is not as if east siders lost discursive battles in meetings to those who lived west of the tracks or to the police officers who are supposed to serve them. Far from attempting to quash their contributions, west side residents sometimes attempted to elicit elaboration on various issues from East siders.
Not well described by the three faces of power, domination and the corollary failure of deliberation resulted from yet a fourth, straightforward but so far as I know untheorized mechanism. Residents from the west side were able, even without trying, to dominate community policing deliberative proceedings because east side residents were unable to follow-through with the complaints that they raised. When different east side residents raised problems of murder and firearm violence, for example, they failed to (i) articulate that these problems constituted systemic or recurrent patterns that warrant preventative attention and action, or (ii) offer proposals to address these problems. When another resident raised the problem of police harassment, others questioned the factual basis of the allegations, and no one took the straightforward steps necessary to offer dispositive evidence or generated other proposals for solving the problem.
The institutional and normative theory of Street Level Democracy offered in Part II above describes this failure on both the level of individual participants (chapter 7) and deliberative group process (chapter 8). At the level of the citizen, east side residents either lacked or failed to exercise their deliberative capacities of practical reason and public justification. Recall that an important component of practical reason is the ability to offer solutions to problems; east siders for the most part did not make such proposals. Furthermore, east side participants did not justify why west siders and police should expend resources on these problems by offering additional evidence or by arguing that individual incidents were parts of larger criminal patterns or recurrent social disturbances. The deliberative group considered as a whole--including residents from both sides of the tracks and police officers--failed to implement the first step of SLD's five-step deliberative process: the identification and prioritization of problems (7.1). Rather than self-consciously inventorying problems and then weighing their relative severity and urgency against one another, discussions proceeded in a town-meeting format in which individuals raised issues in a serial, first-come, first-served basis. As a result, the group accorded its attention to the most aggressive, articulate, and persistent individuals. If the group had been asked to rank the various problems raised--the shootings, murder, harassment, noise pollution at the diner, street peddling, and traffic--and distribute their energy according to urgency, the discursive processes might have generated more fair outcomes.

Given this peculiar mechanism of domination--deliberative failures of east side residents and of the group as a whole--the third notable aspect of domination in Traxton Beat from November 1996 until February 1997 is its apparent fragility. Since the domination was for the most part unintended and operated according to a mechanism that seems much less robust than the more common and entrenchable "three faces of power" mentioned above, one might think that small perturbations of the discursive process might have transformed it into the kind of deliberation that would have yielded more fair outcomes. Minor failures of the imagination and lack of persistence, rather than deep structural or psychological constraints, prevented east siders from offering modest proposals or additional evidence to articulate their complaints into fuller demands for collective action. The difficult part of this counterfactual, of course, is whether West Traxton residents would have continued abide by the deliberative rules of the game--in particular by exercising their the moral capacity to restrain the pursuit of their own self-interest, as discussed in chapter 6, when those rules would have required them to accede to the redeployment of public safety resources toward East Traxton problems. The data presented thus far cannot address this question. If east siders had offered better arguments or proposals for action, west siders might well have used their greater numbers, resources, and education to perpetuate their domination of the proceedings through more common techniques, such as victory in open conflict or control of the agenda. Alternatively, they might have been guided by the deliberative norms of reasonableness even in situations where those norms required them to modify or sacrifice their own interests. Fortunately, the second period of observation in Traxton Beat, from March 1997 until August 1997, offered additional evidence and opportunities to asses the deliberative and moral capacities of Traxton Beat community policing participants.

13.3. Structured Deliberation in Traxton Beat: March 1997 - August 1997

At the beginning of every year, Traxton Beat elects one of its residents to serve "Beat Facilitator" who takes responsibility for preparing agendas, conducting beat meeting discussions, and ensuring continuity from one meeting to the next.[15]
The baton of beat facilitation moved from Leonard Jones to Emily Crenshaw at the beginning of 1997. While Jones had been a local civic leader active in several Traxton community organizations, he had no prior training in community policing prior to his participation in Traxton Beat meetings. Emily Crenshaw, by contrast, had worked for the Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety (CANS) as a Joint Community-Police Training Program (J.C.P.T.) trainer over the prior year and half. Recall from the discussion of J.C.P.T. in chapters 5 and 8 that these trainers--from both civilian and police backgrounds--roved throughout Chicago to organize residents around community policing issues and teach them the techniques of participatory community policing. Out of this experience, Crenshaw enjoyed greater familiarity with both the distinctive procedures of the deliberative problem solving, substantive issues in public safety, and the particular difficulties that residents often encountered in working with police officers.
Though Crenshaw lived on the west side of Traxton, she had normative social and racial justice commitments that impelled her to mobilize greater participation from east side residents. She felt, concurring with the analysis above, that those living on the east side needed community policing more than west-siders, but were gaining little from the existing process. When she began her tenure as Beat Facilitator, she independently started to organize East side residents to turn out to beat meetings through phone calls and a few visits to houses and commercial businesses of East Traxton. Beginning in February, these low-level efforts began to bear fruit, and the proportion of African-American, East Traxton residents expanded dramatically as shown in figure 13.3. below:

In the March 1997 meeting, Crenshaw shifted the meeting style from the laissez-fair, town-hall style described in the previous section to one that more closely followed the structured five-step problem solving procedure of SLD.[16] The proximate cause of this transformation of discursive style was a Chicago Police Department (CPD) administrative decree on community policing. Some months earlier, the CPD issued a general order to all police beat teams directing them to produce "beat plans"[17] containing a prioritized list of public safety problems and strategies to amelioate those problems. As a community activist, Crenshaw felt strongly that residents, not police alone, should determine the ordered list of priority problems. At the March beat meeting, therefore, Crenshaw started the discussion of problems by announcing that:
We have got to put together a beat plan. This will give the [Police] Commander some sense of what the top problems [are]. Remember that a problem is something that is ongoing, affects more than one person, and that we have the resources to deal with. Why don't we start by making a list of all the problems.
Asked to rank Traxton's problems, a white male west side resident quickly raised the alleged crack/Gangster Disciples operation run by "Spike" as the Beat's greatest priority. Whether or not these allegations are true, his house, located at 14^th and Quincy (see map in Figure 13.1 above) is the center of gravity of criminal violence in Traxton. Two of the three murders in 1995 occurred within one block of his house, as did the murder of December 1996 that was heatedly discussed in the February 1997 beat meeting.
White Male West Traxton Resident: Is [Spike] still operating? That would be the number one problem.
Emily Crenshaw: Yes he is. For those of you who don't know, he lives at ______ South Qunicy. Does everyone agree that he is a priority problem?
With quick assent and without further debate, everyone in the room--black and white, east and west side--agreed that criminal activity around Spike's house was the beat's number one problem. East Traxton residents and police testified in this meeting and others that Spike and his colleagues caused trouble. One woman reported that:
When I got home at 9pm, there were about 20 of them standing there [blocking my path]. This was at [14^th and Quincy]. When I came back out to my car, they had `fuck the police,' and gang signs [written] on the car.
Despite the fact that the previous months of community policing had been largely silent on this problem, everyone agreed immediately when asked to name the most important issue. It would have been difficult indeed to publicly justify any other problem as a higher priority.
After settling Spike's operation as the highest priority, participants discussed and finally settled on four additional problems:[18] loitering and harassment of passers-by at the Metra Station on the east side, late night noise and fighting at the pancake diner, drug and firearms activity around the corner of 11^th and Quincy, and teenage drinking in the forest preserve on Traxton's north side. The table below shows the order of urgency as established by residents in the left column, and the actions taken to address these problems in the right hand column. As with the previous table of problem priorities, East Traxton issues are shown in bold face:

Contrasting Table 13.3 with Table 13.2 above, the first major difference between this second phase (March 1997 - August 1997) and the first phase (November 1996 - February 1997) of community policing in Traxton is that the body as a whole explicitly agreed that the beat's most urgent problems lay on the east side. At the level of agenda setting, the second phase was more fair than the first. Good intentions, however, in no way imply fair outcomes. The same disadvantages that crippled east side residents during agenda-setting discussions in the first phase might hamper the development and implementation of strategies even given an equitable schedule of priority problems. Did east side residents enjoy better community policing outcomes after securing a fair list of problems? Consider the strategies taken in response to each problem and its outcomes in turn.
On the major problem of Spike's drug house and its surrounding blocks, the group implemented two strategies. First, police increased presence in that small area of the beat through more frequent patrols, the use of a controversial (but legal) technique called "field interviews" in which suspicious persons or persons in suspicious areas are stopped, questioned, and sometimes searched on the street. This technique resulted in several arrests for Possession of Controlled Substances (PCS), and in this case the substance was crack cocaine or marijuana. Second, residents and police tracked relevant cases through its Court Watch committee. The assumption, widely accepted as true among Chicago community activists, behind this strategy is that judges and juries will issue harsher sentences when residents affected by suspects' activities present themselves in court proceedings or otherwise declare their perspective. In addition to its effect on court decisions, these Court Watch groups monitor the prison and parole status of people whom they consider threats to the neighborhood. They convey this information to beat meeting participants and other neighborhood residents. Police worked with residents to use Court advocacy to target particular individuals associated with Spike's operation:
Police: [Last week, between Commercial and Quincy] we arrested [Jerry Anderson]. This is his first arrest [he is only 13]. Another one for the Court Watch is [Spike's brother]. [Third and fourth suspects for Court Watch are] "Yummie," the guy who did a bunch of their shootings, who is under arrest, and so is Washington T.
Crenshaw: "You can't really show up because he is a minor, only 13 [and so proceedings are closed]. The best we can do is send a letter. We can call court advocacy and get them to send a letter. We should attend the rest of the hearings, though.
At a later meeting, an East Traxton woman active in Court Watch told the group that:
I have been going to the Court Watch, the judges have really been cooperative with the court watch cases. They would like more people to attend. When is a crime is committed on a block, [I know that] the people from there don't like to go to that trial, because then they [those arrested] will pick on you, but it is important.
Did these measures yield progress on the crime and physical threats around the corner of 14^th and Quincy? During this period, Spike himself was not arrested for PCS, and so continued to live there throughout the observation period.[19] However, the actions did elicit a reaction; Spike himself attended the June beat Traxton meeting along with two associates. He offered a brief statement denying any criminal activity; "[I] came here to say that I don't run nothing, don't do nothing. Everybody is saying that I am a big dope dealer, but I am not doing anything." East Traxton residents who lived near him were present at this meeting, but remained curiously silent in the face of this denial. After the meeting, residents said that they had been somewhat intimidated by his presence, and others speculated that he came precisely to spark such feelings. However, both East Traxton residents and police reported enormous progress in abating the fear and threat from Spike's alleged criminal operation, though both agreed that serious problems remained. At the May meeting, a tactical police officer reported that, "In the past three weeks, there hasn't been anyone out at [14^th and Quincy]. We seem to have moved that problem away from there for now." At the June meeting, a resident who lives near Spike said that "Sunday night, at 3 or 4 in the morning, I have heard shots fired around [Spike's corner]. But that is about it [in terms of disturbing activity there]. You guys are doing great work, and please keep up the good work."
The second priority problem (2.2) was commercial burglaries in the various stores that line Commercial Avenue, but especially on the corner of Commercial and 18^th Street. The corner is a busy one, with foot traffic from several stores and from the several major bus lines that stop on the corner. In addition to the normal flow of pedestrians from busy stores, school-age children frequently visit the stores and wait for public transportation there in the afternoons. Store operators suspect that thieves come from both groups. The major strategy for dealing with commercial burglaries was straightforward. East Traxton residents asked police to patrol the area more frequently, to show greater presence, and to walk into the stores on foot from time to time. Police complied with all of these requests, and obvious measure seems to have worked. In the May meeting, one East Traxton resident reported with satisfaction that, "Since the last meeting, the visibility has been up 100%, and the boys are no longer on the corner of [14^th and Commercial]." As with Spike's drug house, however, this strategy did not eliminate the problem; according to other residents and store owners, the burglaries still continue, though less frequently.
In order to deal more systematically with this problem and others, several East Traxton residents and small business owners formed the East Side Business Association[20] in March 1997. Participation in just a few beat meetings and talking with other participants had made them more acutely aware of the crime problems on Commercial and of the possibility of reducing those problems. Those who formed the association also realized that the east side had low participation and organization at beat meetings. The members therefore scheduled their monthly meetings to occur one week before the beat meetings, so that the group could offer its issues and proposals at the beat meeting. The elevated east-side and African American participation in Traxton community policing meetings after February 1997 is probably due to the efforts of this group as much as, or more than, those of the beat facilitator Emily Crenshaw. In this instance, the existence of the community policing institutions and the resources it offers to community residents and organizations itself led to the creation of a new civic organization. This increase in associative capacity is an example of SLD's "civic engagement" mechanism described in chapter 8 above.[21]
Residential burglaries have been a long-standing problem in West Traxton. It is no secret that the area has many wealthy residents with nicely furnished houses, and those disposed to theft are often drawn from poorer areas. The most frequent kind of residential theft is the garage break-in, in which tools or lawn equipment is stolen, due to its low risk. Somewhat less commonly, thieves have broken into West Traxton homes to steal jewelry or other portable valuables, most often late at night or during the work day. A string of garage break-ins in West Traxton occurred in February and March of 1997, and residents raised this problem to priority status in the March beat meeting. Though less intense, this crime is in some ways more difficult to combat that the geographically focused drug-house and commercial burglaries discussed earlier. In response to resident concerns, police deployed addition detective capacity to investigate the problem, and eventually arrested one particularly active burglar who had preyed on West Traxton houses repeatedly. Additionally, the group organized a workshop on preventing and deterring burglaries for themselves and other Traxton residents. Not surprisingly, for such strategies are not obvious, they did not develop proposals to more systematically reduce burglaries in the future. One West Traxton resident, however, did suppose that this West side problem was intimately connected to more serious East side problems, and that reducing the latter would ameliorate the former. He asked the group whether, "you think that most of the burglaries on this map are people trying to get money for the drugs. Makes sense that if we get rid of the drug houses [on the east side], then many of the burglaries will stop as well."

The fourth priority problem revolved around the Metra Station on the tracks that separate the East and West sides of Traxton (see map in figure 13.1). The station itself and its parking lot are located on the East side, and residents who use the station and those who live near it allege that young people congregate around the area, drink, and harass passers by. The compact exchange that established the problem as a priority at the March meeting illustrates how a problem can be quickly identified as a priority, how the open discussion transmits detailed information about the problem, and how mutual commitments to act on the problem can build trust between parties--in this case police, West side residents, and new East side participants--unaccustomed to working with one another:

Black Female: The Metra parking lot gets pretty good monitoring in the mornings, but the path between the green and white house and the empty school is still attracting a lot of unwanted traffic. The gang members come and drink and hang out. As it gets warmer, it will become an even worse problem.
Emily Crenshaw: What time does this happen?
Black Female: [It is worse around] 5pm or so, but happens at all times.
Police Officer: Where do you live?
Black Female: I live at [15^th and Langdon] across the street, but I think that it centers at 16^th street.
Police Officer: Have you called the police when they come?
Black Female: I have called the police, and I have gone out and talked to them directly.
Crenshaw: If we agree to work on it [the problem around the Metra Station] this month, will you come back next month to help?
Black Female: Yes, yes.
Like the commercial burglary problem directly to the East, residents proposed, and police implemented, the straightforward solution of increased police presence at times of the day that they identified as most problematic. According to field observations and residents who live near the area, the action substantially reduced the harassment after just a few weeks. One resident said, "thank you for patrolling [15^th and Langdon], I think that the [foot] traffic has gone down. I just want to say thanks... It is dangerous in the lots, and the fields, and they shouldn't be there."
Noise and occasional fighting at the pancake house was the fifth priority problem. Notably, this was the only issue to be listed as a priority in both the first and second phases of observation (compare tables 13.2 and 13.3). Several participants thought that the issue should not be treated as a priority for the beat group because of its localized character, lack of urgency, and the substantial resources that had already been devoted to it in the past. Nevertheless, participants agreed to list the problem as a priority and to act on it as such. Their strategies were discussed above and resulted in a number of operating changes that substantially reduced the late-night noise and loitering activity about which neighbors complained.
The fairness of community policing decisions and their effectiveness for East side residents was clearly greater in the months between March 1997 and August 1997 than in the earlier period from November 1996 until February 1997. This improvement was due to the shift from a laissez-faire, town-meeting, free-form mode of meeting discussion to one in which participants were asked explicitly to rank problems according their severity, and then to distribute their problem solving energies accordingly, as in the problem solving procedure of Street Level Democracy specified in chapter 7. When asked to do so, Traxton residents did not self-interestedly list as most urgent those problems that lay most near them. Instead, they agreed on a consensus ordering despite differences in their "objective" interests and lack of shared histories or culture. This ordering of problems, furthermore, was one which an outside observer neutral to both parties might herself generate if asked to rank Traxton's public safety problems on the dimension of urgency. In the remaining sections of this chapter, we step away from these case details and consider deliberations in Traxton Beat during our observation period according to the hypotheses and normative questions presented in chapter 13.

13.4. Realizing Democratic Values in Traxton Beat

Did Street Level Democracy in the form of community policing institutional reforms advance the core values of democracy--effectiveness, equity, autonomy, deliberation, and solidarity--in the case of Traxton Beat? Recall that we developed a framework that interprets this question in three ways in chapter 13: (i) how well do SLD institutions advance these values under different sets of initial conditions; (ii) how much, if at all, do SLD institutions advance these values beyond the levels reached under the previous institutional set; and (iii) to the extent that SLD advances these values, does it do so according to the mechanisms specified in its normative theory and laid out in chapters 9 and 10?

13.4.1. High Realization of Core Democratic Values in Traxton Beat

Fully answering the first question requires an evaluation of the relative democratic performance under SLD of our six cases. Since Traxton Beat comes first in our narrative sequence, inter-case comparisons must wait until we have more qualitative data. However, the periodization of community policing in Traxton into an initial phase of meetings dominated by West side residents followed by a period of more fair deliberation allows us to explore contrasting democratic outcomes under SLD institutions within the single case of Traxton. Elaborating on what the discussion immediately above generally established, democratic values were realized to a much higher degree in the second period of observation (14.3) than in the first (14.2).
Recall from chapter 2 that our first core democratic value is that public institutions ought to effectively secure the ends that citizens desire. An effective set of community policing institutions is, then, one that dramatically abates the crime, public safety, and disorder problems that citizens have. In both the dominated and deliberative phases of our observation, residents and police quite effectively developed and implemented strategies to solve problems (see Tables 14.2 and 14.3 above). Indeed, as we shall see in the following chapters, Traxton Beat ranks among the most effective neighborhood-level groups in our series of six case studies. The group, counting both residents and police, was able to focus its attention on priority problems over time and develop strategies to significantly reduce the severity of all the problems on which it focused. As a rough and ready assessment, therefore, we say that the community policing group in Traxton beat realized the democratic value of effectiveness to a high degree in both the first and second periods of observation.
The principle difference between the first and second phase, of course, is that outcomes in the first phase benefited primarily west side residents despite the relatively benign character of their problems, while priorities, strategies, and outcomes in the second phase served both east and west side residents more equitably. In so far as it is possible to construct an objective list of urgent public safety problems in Traxton during the observation period, that list would probably resemble the actual list of problems that residents themselves generated, shown in Table 13.3 above. One objection to this characterization of deliberation in the second period as fair is that some voices were excluded from the process. Notably, both police and neighbors ignored the claims of Spike and his associates, and certainly did not incorporate his priorities into those of the group. Does this exclusion problematically reduce the fairness of community policing deliberations in Traxton? Certainly, an institutional context in which others took Spike's concerns more serious, in which it would be legal to act as a group on those concerns, in which he supported his opinions and proposals with verifiable evidence, in which his proposals are reconcilable with those of other residents, and in which other participants did not feel intimidated in his very presence would rank more highly in terms of its fairness than did Traxton Beat. Developing such an institutional vision that is at the same time plausible is a non-trivial matter of institutional design, and lies far outside the scope of the present project. Admitting that some perspectives and interests were excluded even at the high point of deliberation in Traxton Beat and that fairness was not perfectly realized, we nevertheless rank Traxton Beat quite highly on the dimension of fairness in the second period, but quite low in the first.
Since both fairness and effectiveness for east side residents in the second period resulted from the persuasive injection of their own voices and perspectives into Traxton Beat discussions, it is unsurprising that our assessment of this case on the dimensions of autonomy and deliberation tracks that of fairness. As with fairness, we say that the values of autonomy and deliberation were highly realized in the second period but largely unrealized, at least for east side residents, in the initial period. Recall that autonomy in the Kantian sense and deliberation are closely related democratic values. Roughly, they are together realized when our actions are guided by our own internal ethics, morals, and interests (autonomy) and when our fate is governed by our collective will as manifest in open discussion rather than by chance or external power (deliberation). Heuristically, one might think of effectiveness and fairness as characteristics of the "outputs" or consumable benefits generated by democratic institutions, while autonomy and deliberation describe the integrity with which "inputs" or popular voice drives them. The core democratic values of autonomy and deliberation were realized to a fairly high degree in the second phase of Traxton's community policing proceedings because those residents asserted their priorities to the larger group and participated in the development and implementation of strategies to address those problems. Autonomy and deliberation for them was realized to a much lower degree in the first period because their voices were largely absent, and because collective decisions and actions failed to incorporate them when they appeared.
It is much more difficult to assess the realization of the fifth core democratic value of solidarity in Traxton, for those connections between citizens typically develop over spans of time that greatly exceed the duration of my observations. Nevertheless, SLD institutions of community policing in Traxton served as handmaiden to the early development of two kinds of solidarity in Traxton. First, it is difficult to imagine how the cooperation, consensus, and group action between west and east side residents, documented in 13.3, would have developed in the absence of bridging institutions such as SLD. East and west side residents hardly spoke to one another prior to these community policing reforms; indeed, west siders had spent much collective energy barricading their neighborhood on all sides in order to minimize the opportunities for interaction with the less wealthy neighbors that surround them. Second, community policing institutions drove east side residents to greater levels of organization--as manifest in the formation of the East Traxton Business Association and the informal self-mobilization of east side residents to participate in the beat meetings. An explicit motive of this community and social organization was to capture and direct the public safety resources for east side problems, just as the "civic engagement" hypothesis described in chapter 9 predicts. While the temporally compressed observations about Traxton Beat cannot reveal whether these new solidarities that bridge east and west side residents and tie east siders closer together are durable, these auspicious beginnings are the only data we available, and so lead us to rank Traxton in the later period highly on the dimension of solidarity.

13.4.2. Explaining Traxton's Peculiar Democratic Outcomes

Bifurcated outcomes in Traxton Beat--high democratic performance in the second period and low in the first--make it difficult to explain its democratic success with any simple theory. In particular, contrasting democratic outcomes rule out explanations that rely upon various kinds of initial conditions (wealth, social unity, etc.) that remained static throughout the observation period. Recall from chapter 12 that the initial conditions of Traxton Beat--high interest dispersion and great inequality--led us to assign this case rather low democratic expectations. This assignment was in turn based on a predictive consensus among five critical, theoretical perspectives developed in chapter 11: the rational choice, strong egalitarian, social unity, cultural difference, and elite-technocratic views. Had our observations of Traxton Beat been limited to the months from November 1996 until February 1997, our data would have supported both the low expectations and the first four of the critical perspectives. However, the positive democratic outcomes observed in the second period (March 1997 until August 1997) greatly reduce the accuracy of the prediction and the persuasiveness of the critical perspectives. How, then, do we explain the peculiar pattern of democratic failure followed by success in Traxton Beat?
The explanation, already suggested above, is that the SLD prescription was more completely implemented in the second period than in the first. In particular, the first period might be characterized as decentralization without deliberation, while the second, more democratic, phase incorporated both critical elements of Street Level Democracy. In both periods, policing activity was decentralized in that substantial operating autonomy devolved to the level of individual beats. However, as described in 13.2, discussions in beat meetings were not properly deliberative in the first phase; to the contrary, discussions were laissez-faire, town-hall affairs in which the most outspoken and articulate voices dominated. Against the unfavorable initial background conditions of material inequality and interest dispersion, this discursive style resulted in the domination of worse off east side residents by better off west-siders, and the consequent low realization of democratic values. This domination occurred according to just those dynamics specified by the four critical perspectives of rational choice, strong egalitarianism, social unity, and cultural difference. In the second period, however, group processes more closely and self-consciously followed the deliberative procedure, and more democratic outcomes resulted. Once implemented, the mechanisms and norms of deliberation overran the dynamics, pathological from the perspective of SLD, operating in phase I and so well described by the critical perspectives.
The strong rational choice perspective (11.2) predicts that participants will use SLD's processes to advance their selfish, narrow, and given interests and that they will be unwilling to voluntarily sacrifice the maximization of these interests for the sake of, for example, norms of restraint or reasonableness. The character of participation bore out these expectations in the first period. As a result of power and interest differentials, concerns such as street peddling received more "airtime" and action than seeming more serious concerns like gun violence and random shootings. In the second period, however, participants were asked explicitly to rank neighborhood problems in order of severity in order to appropriately deploy shared policing and community action resources. This request implicitly asked them to adopt, in their own minds, a view toward the good of the whole neighborhood--East and West--rather than to pursue their own selfish ends. Especially given the vast differences of interest revealed in discussion during phase I, the rational choice theorist predicts that participants will offer up the same kinds of problems as urgent--east siders pushing east side problems and west siders pushing for maximal attention for their side of the tracks.
As we saw in 13.3, however, precisely the opposite transpired. Diverse participants from both the East and West sides quickly agreed on a single list of priorities, beginning with a West side resident who suggested that an East side drug house ought to be the beat's top priority. The data that we have show, therefore, that Traxton's west side residents did act according to deliberative norms, in particular they displayed the moral capacity to restrain the pursuit of their own self interest according to the demands of reason (chapter 6) when asked to do so. In the laissez-faire discussions of the initial period, no one suggested, either implicitly or explicitly, that such norms ought to be followed. In the second period, however, these norms were implied in the process of prioritizing neighborhood problems. The data, therefore, support SLD's contention that citizens will act as reasonable pragmatic citizens[22] when situated in SLD's institutional context. Therefore, they also disappoint the strong rational choice expectation that individuals will use SLD contexts to maximize their narrowly construed self-interest. Before proceeding, however, an limitations in this discursive data ought to be noted. We have no way of knowing whether west siders would have continued to be reasonable even if they faced more severe crime problems. If there had been a crack house in West Traxton, for example, would those who lived around it demand that all police resource be devoted to that problem, or would they have continued to reasonably allocate these scarce resources. The strong rational choice perspective may well have enjoyed more predictive accuracy if there were an even greater difference of interest between East and West, but this case data did not offer that extreme variation.
Similarly, the first period of Traxton Beat observation seems to bear out strong egalitarian expectations about SLD, only to have them turned on their head in the second phase. Recall that strong egalitarianism is simply the view that rough resource inequality is a necessary background condition for fair democratic deliberation. Therefore, the strong egalitarian thinks that the extreme resource inequality makes positive democratic outcomes in Traxton beat very unlikely because the better-off will use their resources to dominate the worse-off and because the worse off may lack the capacities--such as skills and time--necessary to deliberate effectively. While these predictions were very accurately fulfilled between November 1996 and February 1997, the shift to structured deliberation in March 1997 created cooperation and partnership between east and west side residents that harnessed some of the resources and energies of west side residents toward east side problems. While east side residents did seem to lack the argumentative force to press their issues onto the agenda in the laissez-faire discursive mode, they had no problem doing so under dramatically different context of structured deliberation. In this case, then, deliberation fulfilled its promise as a mode of decision where the only power is the power of a better argument, and the power of money and numbers count for little.[23]
Just as the west side enjoyed more material wealth than the east side, they also enjoyed much higher levels of social organization as manifest in its rich texture of associations. The social unity perspective might expect this social capital to translate into capacities to control community policing proceedings and to dominate East side residents. High west side social capital manifested itself in high meeting turnout and in cohesive committee action during the first phase of observation. In the second phase of Traxton observations, however, east side residents showed up in large numbers and participated effectively in community policing sub-groups despite the absence a rich associational history and thick social networks. Low levels of social capital did not, therefore, prevent them from participating effectively, even on a par with, socially advantaged West side residents in the second phase of observation.
Now the shift in Traxton Beat from low realization of core democratic values to a more deliberative mode with much better democratic outcomes may seem to rest on the improbable rise of a skilled facilitator with substantial social justice commitments in the person of Emily Crenshaw. On one interpretation of this case narrative, the shift to structured deliberation and the subsequent gains for democratic values in Traxton's community policing process depends upon her conjunctural election to beat facilitator and her idiosyncratic combination of personal capacities and political inclinations. Without her, one might think, west siders might have been able to continue to assert their priorities over east side residents indefinitely because the decision process would have remained a discursive free-for-all. Is SLD so fragile that it depends upon such uncommon personalities for its success?
The first response to this contention is that the operation of any institutions--including markets, bureaucracies, and political parties--depends upon competent individuals who understand how those institutions ought to function and possess the capacities to work and lead within them. That such individuals can be found in our case studies is not an embarrassment for SLD, but rather a point in its favor. Emily Crenshaw was this kind of person. Without denying her substantial skills as a facilitator and social leader, her critical actions in moving Traxton to structured deliberation were fully prescribed by the rules and institutions of community policing and not extraordinary actions of maverick leadership. The move to prioritize problems rather than merely discussing them as they come up is an explicit part of the five step problem solving procedure described in chapter 7 above and suggested by the official Chicago community policing materials. Furthermore, she suggested the prioritization procedure in order to generate group decisions that would fulfill her responsibility of helping to construct the "beat plan" required by the District office. None of this is to say, however, that community policing participants as familiar with its norms and procedures as Emily Crenshaw can be easily found in Chicago. The institutions are still relatively young, she has participated in them almost since their inception, and the procedures have developed so quickly that their requirements are sometimes ambiguous even to those quite close to the process. In these early stages of the development of a complex institution, one might expect wide variation in outcomes such as we observed above due to large differences in participants' familiarity with prescribed procedures. As this institutional reform matures and if it continues to develop along the lines laid out by the theory of Street Level Democracy, we can expect to see many more participants gain the levels of knowledge and skill that Crenshaw exhibited.
A second response to the problem of over-dependence on personality is that the institutional design of SLD, and Chicago's community policing program to the extent that it approximates that design, attempts to reinforce the kinds of deliberative procedures and motivations that make phase two more attractive than the earlier period. Again, the structured deliberation that led to the generation of a fair agenda and collective action is not an accident of individual whim, but rather it is the fundamental, constituting, group decision process of SLD as described in chapter 7. While the implementation of this deliberative architecture may have come via the leadership of the beat facilitator in Traxton, many other mechanisms transmit the deliberative structure to SLD's component "communities of inquiry," including the materials that organize these groups and elements of the "supportive center" that provide training and ameliorative functions in case of "deliberative break-down" (see chapter 8.1). The institutional design of SLD attempts to generate the human capital--people with knowledge of its procedures and commitment to its norms--necessary for its successful operation. While the existence of seemingly extraordinary leadership that transformed Traxton Beat from discussion to deliberation is definitely a condition for the success of SLD, SLD itself attempts to produce just these kinds of participants.

13.5. SLD Versus Command-and-Control in Traxton Beat

Having argued that community policing SLD processes in Traxton generated high levels of democratic success on five core values, we now move to the more complex question of comparative institutional assessment. Were democratic outcomes in the arena of policing in Traxton superior under SLD than under the prior institutional context which we have characterized as "Command-and-Control?" In chapter 9, we argued that SLD is more effective than command-and-control institutions because its offers five mechanisms unavailable to bureaucratically directed and insulated public institutions: directed discretion, institutionalized learning, coordination amid complexity, studied trust, and civic engagement. In this final section, we explore whether these mechanisms came into play and whether they made policing more fair and effective under community policing reforms.
The question is much more difficult to answer for the west side of Traxton than for the east because west siders already enjoyed very articulated social and political networks that connect them to one another, to local businesses, and to external political powers. For those on the west side, community policing adds one institutional avenue to their already rich panoply of options for social and political action. Some community policing participation from West Traxton residents, therefore, probably substitutes for or displaces other kinds of social action and engagement. In other words, West Traxton problems that were dealt with through community policing might well have been solved through other channels if community policing had not existed. Because those residents chose community policing channels to solve those problems, however, suggests that this option was either more promising or less costly than other alternatives.
Even so, it is clear that West Traxton residents had developed informal versions to most of the five mechanisms that chapter 9 described as distinctive to SLD and unavailable to command and control arrangements. For example, SLD's mechanism of civic engagement was not very pertinent to West Traxton residents because most of West side community policing participants were already involved in neighborhood organizations such as churches, the school, or local improvement associations. Through these organizations, many residents had developed connections with police officers that allowed them to direct the discretion of police actions toward problems that these residents considered more important. Out of these working partnerships with police, residents and police had gained healthy levels of both trust and accurate skepticism about the motives and capacities of the others, and so the mechanism of studied trust was operating even without SLD reforms. Finally, the effective and venerable associations of West Traxton had practiced the mechanisms of institutional learning and gained the ability to coordinate complex transactions among different parties in the public, private, and community sectors--for instance in orchestrating the commercial redevelopment of the commercial corridor that lies on the beat's southern edge--many years before the advent Chicago community policing reforms. Since informal versions of all of these mechanisms existed in the absence of SLD reforms, we say cannot say that community policing reforms resulted in dramatic democratic gains for West Traxton.
The operation of these mechanisms through the formal and public institutions of Street Level Democratic community policing offers two important advantages over these informal, associative mechanisms, however. First, the use of these mechanisms through the open meetings and other processes of SLD is likely to be more accessible and fair to all residents than their relatively more hidden operation in civic organizations or private associations. Under the informal, associative version of directed discretion for example, those who happen to know particular officer enjoy the ability to focus otherwise discretionary police power. Under SLD, however, decisions about where and how to focus police power are made in open, public meetings. Second, the informal versions of these mechanisms operates sometimes in opposition to, sometimes independently from, the logic of command-and-control institutions. Since SLD changes the central operating logics of these public institutions in ways that thoroughly incorporate the five mechanisms, those mechanisms are likely to be much more effective under SLD than when they are informally generated. Consider again the example of directed discretion. When asked by a resident to pay special attention to a particular area or to particular suspicious persons, for example, an officer may rightly feel equivocal about doing special favors for a private friend and might indeed be punished for ethical violations if this interaction became public. When this request comes through an open community policing meeting and when meetings are organized precisely to elicit such requests, as in SLD, they move from the gray borders of policing to its center stage.
The gains that SLD brought to East Traxton residents through these five mechanisms is both greater and more clear. Since they lacked the associations, connections, and history of cooperation of their neighbors to the west, they also lacked the networks with which to construct these mechanisms. During the second, more successful, period of observation, however, we saw East Traxton residents together with police and other residents use several of the mechanisms of SLD's effectiveness.
By far the simplest and most commonly used mechanism during the observation period was directed discretion. Prior to community policing, east side resident lacked working connections with police and so police power was distributed according to the logics of random patrol and emergency call response. Though the community policing process, east side residents gained the power to direct police attention to problems that they considered priorities. They focused police attention all three of the east side priority problems shown in Table 13.3 above, and in all three cases residents report this increased presence and police activity was effective.
SLD also set into motion the second mechanism of increased civic engagement in East Traxton. After hearing about opportunities to affect and deploy police action, East Traxton residents organized themselves to participate in the community policing process. This increased participation, in turn, made possible east side resident contributions[24] to problem solving strategies such as advocacy in the Court Watch program. As mentioned above, SLD in Traxton also catalyzed the formation of the East Traxton Business Association. Though this association was too nascent to bear substantial fruit during our observation period, it is the only business association in East Traxton.
In terms of gains over the prior institutional context of command-and-control policing, then, SLD generated small but substantial gains for West Traxton and much more dramatic gains for East Traxton. This result belies the common expectation, characterized as Strong Egalitarianism in chapter 11, that decentralizing schemes such as SLD primarily benefit the already well off while leaving the worst off behind.
While we cannot confidently generalize from the experience of one small neighborhood over a short span of ten months' time, community policing in Traxton Beat does offer some basis for optimism about the potential for Street Level Democracy. Traxton Beat's initial conditions of great resource inequality and high interest dispersion led us to assign it low expected democratic outcomes. These predictions, however, turned out to be far too pessimistic. For six of ten months of the observation period, the community policing process in Traxton beat scored high marks on all five core democratic values of effectiveness, fairness, autonomy, deliberation, and solidarity.
One critical response to this neighborhood's experience as evidence to support SLD as a democratic reform proposal is that Traxton Beat is not really such a hard case. Though the west side is much wealthier than the east, the east side is far from poor by Chicago standards. Therefore Traxton does not test the hypothesis that SLD cannot function well under material poverty. Another critic might argue, following Matthew Crenson's (1983) contention, that material inequality actually favors neighborhood collective action and so Traxton is actually an easy case rather than a hard one. In the rest of these case study chapters, we respond to these critics by continuing to explore the operation of SLD at various points in the two dimensional space of material endowments and interest dispersion. In the following two chapters, we examine SLD under conditions of severe poverty.

[1] See discussion of Chicago Police Department organization in Chapter 5.
[2] See, for example, Downs (1994).
[3] Names modified to conceal the location of this case study.
[4] Throughout, I have used aliases to conceal resident identities.
[5] Street names on this map have been modified to conceal the location of this neighborhood.
[6] On theories that busy areas tend to be safer than quiet ones, see Jacobs (1993), Merry (1981), and Murray (1983).
[7] While riding with police during the observation period, I witnessed patrol officers stop several 13-15 year old African-American youths in this area who had previously been identified GD lookouts for "Spike." While police did not find narcotics on the kids, one did have $150 in his pocket.
[8] The Black P-Stone Nation was an organization in Chicago headed by Jeff Fort on Chicago's West side in the 1970s. In the 1980s, they changed their name to the El Rukins, but activists in beat 2221 still refer to the group as the P Stones. I am not sure whether this is a terminological mistake on the part of police and residents, or whether the group north of 89th is a splinter faction.
[9] See chapter 2 for a discussion of these core democratic values.
[10] This relative outcome is depicted in Figure 12.5.
[11] Community beat meetings in Traxton are held on the first Wednesday of each month so that residents and police can plan their schedules far in advance; most Chicago beats use some such regular scheduling practice.
[12] Recall from Chapter 11 that the average beat meeting in Chicago has 18 participants, and that the figure is seasonally sensitive with most participation occurring in summer months.
[13] See Chapter 11, figure 11.5 for a closer examination of gender ratios at beat meetings.
[14] The MAC-10 is a submachine gun, typically capable of fully automatic fire and accurate at ranges of less than 150 yards.
[15] In this simple process, candidates are nominated prior to the December meeting. Nomination requires only one vote, so in practice anyone who wants to stand for election may do so (he or could simply nominate himself). Elections are held in the December meeting, and the winner is the candidate who receives the plurality of votes. This process is distinctive to Traxton Beat. As of this writing, not all beats have designated facilitators, and those that do have each devised their own selection procedures. Some facilitators are appointed by their police District Commanders, others are volunteers who serve by the assent of the rest of the participants.
[16] See Chapter 7.1.
[17] See 7.2 for the description of beat plans and Fung (1997c).
[18] Refer to the map of Traxton in Figure 13.1 to locate these problems.
[19] By way of epilogue, Spike was arrested in 1998 for attempting to sell crack cocaine to an undercover police officer in a sting operation.
[20] The name of this association has been changed to preserve anonymity.
[21] We shall see this mechanism of community policing activity causing the formation of new civic gps again, and in more detail, in the creation of Southtown Park association in Chapter 16.
[22] See Chapters 6-7.
[23] For a discussion of deliberation as a central mechanism of fairness in SLD, see Chapter 11.
[24] For related notions of citizen co-production of public goods, see Schneider (1987).