The paper examines the extent to which police encourage constituency building and constituency behavior in neighborhoods. It analyzes the especially difficult task of constituency building in the poorest, highest crime, urban areas. The main argument, that the police face an uphill but not impossible battle, is presented in five sections: (1) Policing, Constituencies and Social Capital; (2) The Urban Struggle; (3) Constituency Building in Controlled Communities; (4) The Police and Sustained Community; and (5) Prospects and Strategies for Sustaining Constituency. The police, as a city agency, will be affected by many of the same forces in the urban struggle that affect urban neighborhoods. An important task in community policing research should be construction of a theory about how the political economy of cities affects the form and substance of community policing. The paper suggests that systematic examination and description of how police interact with neighborhoods should precede an examination of the urban forces that affect the quality of that interaction. Figures, references