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Introduction
The dominant view of public administration scholars prior to the 1970s was that the institutions of local government were 'chaotic and incomprehensible', and thus many policy analysts recommended the centralization of public goods provisions, including policing (Ostrom, 1983: 2). Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues in The Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in Bloomington (hereafter 'The Workshop') argued that a polycentric, community-based approach to the provision of public goods would make better use of localized knowledge and generate an incentive structure better suited to the maintenance of public safety. In order to empirically test this theory, scholars at The Workshop conducted field studies in Indianapolis, Chicago, Grand Rapids, Nashville-Davidson County, and St. Louis and concluded that the independent communities were more satisfied with police services than residents of the large consolidated region.
At the time, the findings of The Workshop dealt a blow to the popular belief that consolidation and centralization of services was the only way to effectively provide citizens with public goods. The idea that police and citizens engaging in the coproduction of public safety could serve as a mechanism sufficient to overcome the collective action problem of maintaining public safety began to capture the imagination of scholars and policymakers alike. As a result, popular support for community policing surged beginning in the 1980s, putting the findings of Ostrom and her colleagues in The Workshop to the test.
Advocates of community-based reforms placed an emphasis on decentralizing police bureaucracy, engaging in proactive rather than reactive problem-solving strategies, and developing strong relationships between police and community members (Greene, 2000). Some early efforts to institutionalize community policing were considered successful, especially in their initial iterations (see for example McElroy et al., 1993 and Skogan, 1992). However, the widespread movement of community policing failed to deliver the hoped-for revolution in policing practices and outcomes. Many of the more notable early programs are no longer in operation, and the genuine coproduction of public safety through police-community partnerships appears to be in decline (Mastrofski and Willis, 2010; Mastrofski et al., 2007; Robin, 2000; Rosenbaum, 1994).
In short, the large-scale implementation of community policing programs did not live up to the expectations established by the early theoretical and empirical literature....