Beyond Police Presence: Institutional Legitimacy, Community Policing and Capable Guardianship in Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Abstract

Community policing is widely promoted as a mechanism for strengthening urban crime prevention, yet its effectiveness depends not merely on police presence but on the institutional conditions that make guardianship credible, legitimate and actionable. This study examines how police conduct, community participation and informal security arrangements shape capable guardianship in Borokiri, Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Drawing on Routine Activity Theory, it addresses a neglected question in community-policing scholarship: what makes a formally present guardian substantively capable in contexts characterised by institutional distrust and plural security provision? A qualitative cross-sectional case-study design was employed, based on 62 semi-structured interviews with residents, community leaders, police personnel, local-government representatives and vigilante actors, conducted from March to June 2026. Thematic analysis revealed three interconnected patterns. Conditional effectiveness (community policing as hybrid guardianship), Institutional conduct, trust and the capacity of formal guardianship, and from fragmented security to accountable co-produced guardianship. Positive accounts of police patrols coexisted with critical experiences, suggesting that cooperation was conditional rather than uniformly absent. The study advances Routine Activity Theory by conceptualising capable guardianship as an institutional and relational capacity constituted through integrity, legitimacy, responsiveness, information exchange and coordinated action rather than physical presence alone. It argues that sustainable urban crime prevention requires accountable police reform, structured police–community co-production and complementary social and spatial interventions capable of addressing the conditions that reproduce neighbourhood insecurity. It recommends accountable police–community collaboration alongside rights-based regulation of informal actors and targeted social and spatial prevention. Because the study relies on interviews rather than administrative crime records, it documents perceived processes and does not estimate reductions in offending.