While community policing has long been fashionable it remains difficult to define its essential characteristics. In this timely book a leading commentator on community policing offers a detailed examination of the contemporary practice of community-based policing in England. The book demonstrates how community police officers go about such matters as gathering crime-relevant information from people in the local community, how they apply informal social control to public disorder situations, and how they manipulate the police organization itself in order to obtain resources and advancement. This detailed examination is set within a conceptual framework which attempts to advance our understanding of community policing and our ability to evaluate its success in achieving the objectives which policymakers have set for it.