Disorderly community partners and broken windows policing

How do residents in community groups define deviance, community, and their relationship to local government? Relying upon approximately two years of multi-method ethnography, I argue that despite law enforcement attempts at dissuasion, community group members utilize the broken windows theory to portray street vending as a harbinger of crime. Residents request police action and demand government services based on the self-adopted identities of victim and consumer-citizen. The police, in turn, enact a model of community policing in which the public is restricted to a supportive role as informants and guarantors of quality-of-life issues. Both sides of the partnership deploy broken windows arguments in conflicting visions about the disorderly other.