Community Environmental Policing: Assessing New Strategies of Public Participation in Environmental Regulation

Abstract

This paper evaluates a new form of public participation in environmental monitoring and regulation advanced through local "bucket brigades," which allow community members to sample air emissions near industrial facilities. These brigades represent a new form of community environmental policing, in which residents participate in collecting, analyzing, and deploying environmental information, and more importantly, in an array of public policy dialogues. Use of this sampling technology has had marked effects on local residents' perceptions and participation in emergency response and citizens' right-to-know. However, when viewed through the lens of the more developed literature on community policing, the bucket brigades are limited in their ability to encourage "co-production" of environmental protection between citizens and the state. Means are examined to strengthen the bucket brigades and to more broadly support community participation in environmental regulation.

Keywords: pollution monitoring, bucket brigades, right-to-know, co-production, air emissions sampling, environmental policing