Left-wing criminologists and police practitioners both look at community as the place where crime is committed and the source of preventive intervention. Attempts to activate the community for social and crime control can be seen in the establishment of neighborhood watch programs that aim to reconstruct the community in order to create general crime-prevention effects. The prototype of the ideal community, economically and socially self-contained stable neighborhoods, can most easily be found in 15th century Europe. However, current attempts at community-orientation are designed to artifically achieve the goals of social integration through strategic intervention. In order to establish a community spirit, cognitive models are provided and distributed in the public discourse. This occurs through a process of storytelling in which the listeners acquire the authority to retell the story; by participating in storytelling, society engages in cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization. In the public discourse to reactivate the community for purposes of crime control, storytelling is important in terms of systems and social integration. In the example of the neighborhood watch program, the residents' motivation was essential for the program's implementation, but stories were used to keep the program symbolically meaningful and socially acceptable. 9 endnotes, 20 references.