This chapter explores how power struggles with police and racial antagonisms between Blacks and Latin@s problematize the goals of community policing and diminish the influence community leaders could build to shape police action. The crisscrossing conflicts that the authors observed between Black and Latin@ meeting leaders, Vera Fisher and Hector Mendoza, and the conflicts between another Black meeting leader, Julie Coleman, and Captain Himura frame this chapter. The discussion of a community policing “power struggle” between Blacks and Latin@s takes place within a compromised field, premised on the idea that police devolve authority to the community. Together, these characters demonstrate the ways in which members of the CPAB have only a contingent authority in meetings—given to them at the Captain’s behest—and how the local racial order and legal status of many HO participants undermine their authority as well. Leaders, if they choose to remain, must volunteer to comply with police authority. LAPD has erected a community policing apparatus that has provided rhetoric of community accountability, but, at least in Lakeside, has also succeeded in platforming divisive community politics.
Performing democracy and violence, agonism and community, politics and not politics in Sri Lanka
