“Habermasville”: Police–Community Intersections and Communicative Rationality

Abstract

Police–community relations in the United States are seeing a crisis of trust and legitimacy. Minorities disproportionally experience police contact, and recent shootings of unarmed persons raise concerns about whether minority communities have equal protection of the law. This paper uses Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality to examine this distrust. The argument is that Habermas’s theory positively informs understanding of police–community relations in that distrust is caused by lack of communicative acts in favor of strategic acts emphasizing crime control that maintains unjust systems.

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Notes on contributors

Sean McCandless

Sean McCandless works as an assistant professor of public administration at the University of Illinois, Springfield

G. M. Vogler

G. M. Vogler is a patrol sergeant and a 20-year veteran of the Denver Police Department. He is also a Lecturer with the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado, Denver.