Deliberation, Accountability, and Legitimacy: A Case Study of Police-Community Forums

Can public deliberation improve the way police treat people of color? The imbalance of power between state officials and historically oppressed communities makes many theorists skeptical of deliberative approaches. Our case study of police-community forums in a mid-sized Southern city suggests that efforts to ensure the legitimacy of such approaches in settings of inequality may be enhanced by intertwining, and even blurring, understanding-oriented dialogue and more agonistic interventions. Any legitimacy generated by the deliberative process in such settings is likely to be tentative, because the full force of mutual confidence arising from that dialogue will come into being only if talking is followed by clear accountability in the form of concrete reforms taken by the police. Even so, such deliberative attempts may open up the constitution of reforms in ways that are advantageous to the community.