In 2012 the concepts of “neighborhood” and “community” have made a big comeback in the language of law enforcement in Baltimore. January saw Baltimore State’s Attorney  roll out his plan for “community prosecutors.” Instead of having prosecutors take cases from across the city, district attorneys would now focus only on specific “zones” in Baltimore, with the charge that those prosecutors develop relationships  in the neighborhoods and communities of their zone—to more knowledgeably and fairly mete out justice.

Similarly, earlier this week, new Police Commissioner Anthony Batts made good on his pledge at his hiring to emphasize “community policing” by appointing former Eastern District Commander Major Melvin Russell as head of a new “Community Policing Division.”

Community prosecutors and community policing are not new ideas or unique to Baltimore. However, they do represent a striking change in recent Baltimore law enforcement rhetoric that has emphasized more abstract, less spatially specific ideas like “bad guys with guns,” and the roving ”Violent Crimes Impact Section” policing. Moreover, contrary to the local, Baltimore police have been more likely to tout the use of federal forces and the bringing of federal charges in police and prosecutorial work than claim community-based, neighborhood success. Indeed, the common, regular complaint of Baltimore police and prosecutors has been that “the community” does not trust them enough by coming forward to help law enforcement.

Community law enforcement—and the distrust of law enforcement—is a significant theme of one of 2012’s most important works of social science written for both the academic and the general reader: Robert Sampson’s Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect.

William Julius Wilson, Harvard professor, author of the influential works The Truly Disadvantaged and When Work Disappears and a significant intellectual influence on President Barack Obama—calls Great American City, “one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated empirical studies ever conducted by a social scientist.” Far from being a narrow parochial work idiosyncratic to Chicago, Wilson writes in his preface to the book that it “will be debated and discussed for years and will become a standard reference for social science disciplines.”

Using the rich data from the years-long longitudinal Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, Sampson–also at Harvard–looks at everything from policing, housing, the role of local churches and local economies to the density of non-profit organizations, children’s verbal acquisition, social protest and civic participation. Sampson demonstrates a “spatial logic,” where “neighborhood contexts are, in themselves, important determinants of the quality and quantity of human behavior.”

While Great American City should be read by Baltimore policy makers, advocates and citizens interested in understanding our post-industrial metropolis, the work provides a helpful template through which to examine and judge what  local law enforcement mean by their recent adoption of the rhetoric of “community” policing and prosecuting.

Here is part of the vision Sampson argues we need to have with community policing and prosecuting:

Based on the theory and research of this book, I believe that we need to first pay special attention to integrating violence prevention with other efforts to rebuild communities at risk. … There is no magic bullet of violence prevention, but there are promising efforts with a community focus that deserve further scrutiny. One is Operation Ceasefire …

“[C]ommunity policing” can work when it genuinely integrates crime policy with efforts to build networks of informal social control, trust, and collective efficacy. One mechanism is the regular meetings of police and residents on neutral turf (e.g., in a school or church) where both sides identify the location of problems (e.g., “hotspots”) and targeted place-based solutions …

Community reentry programs should be added to the safety agenda, given the severe neighborhood concentration of incarceration and the known vulnerabilities of ex-prisoners, especially in the job market. I showed how the nation’s experiment with ‘mass’ incarceration is in fact highly stratified locally, transforming some Chicago communities into hyperincarcerated outliers with prison intake rates almost inconceivably high. Exiting one dysfunctional social system into such stigmatized and resource-disadvantaged communities is virtually a recipe for recidivism. …

Recall that legal cynicism was a central concept that emerged in my analysis—where mistrust of the law and cynicism about institutions are prevalent, community norms erode and violence is expected as a routine feature of everyday life. The nexus of incarceration, policing, and institutional legitimacy is ignored at our peril …

Sampson has much more that is immediately applicable to Baltimore and this city’s law enforcement leaders. Citizens, journalists, advocates should pay attention and make informed judgments about this new rhetoric of neighborhood and community.