Politics & Power Quote by James Q. Wilson

“Community-based policing” lands here as a political Rorschach blot: a phrase so warmly lit it can’t cast a shadow. James Q. Wilson’s point isn’t that the idea is inherently bad; it’s that once a policy concept becomes a slogan, it stops doing the job that concepts are supposed to do: constrain choices, force trade-offs, risk being falsified. A slogan is frictionless. It lets everyone claim virtue without committing to mechanisms.

Wilson is aiming straight at the bipartisan reflex to baptize complex institutions with comforting language. “Community” signals democratic legitimacy; “based” implies evidence or rootedness; “policing” promises order. Stack them together and you get a political product that can be sold to reformers, mayors, police unions, and federal appropriators at once. The subtext is bureaucratic: if Congress funds “community policing” while not knowing what it is, the money will drift toward whatever agencies already do, now repackaged as reform. That’s not implementation; that’s rebranding with a grant.

The jab at Congress also carries Wilson’s skepticism about elite consensus. Endorsement becomes a substitute for comprehension; unanimity becomes a warning sign. In the late-20th-century context where “community policing” rose as both a reform response and a crime-control strategy, his critique anticipates today’s vocabulary wars: “defund,” “reimagine,” “public safety.” When language inflates to include everything, it quietly authorizes anything. Wilson’s cynicism is procedural, not poetic: politics loves a phrase that can’t be audited.