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Focus group interviews have seen explosive growth in recent years. They provide evaluations of social science, educational, and marketing projects by soliciting opinions from a number of participants on a given topic. However, there is more to the focus group than soliciting mere opinions. Moving beyond a narrow preoccupation with topic talk, Gilbert and Matoesian take a novel direction to focus group analysis. They address how multimodal resources - the integration of speech, gesture, gaze, and posture - orchestrate communal relations and professional identities, linking macro orders of space-time to microcosmic action in a focus group evaluation of community policing training. They conceptualize assessment as an evaluation ritual, a sociocultural reaffirmation of collective identity and symbolic maintenance of professional boundary enacted in aesthetically patterned oratory. In the wake of social unrest and citizen disillusionment with policing practice, Gilbert and Matoesian argue that processes of multimodal interaction provide a critical direction for focus group evaluation of police reforms. Their book will be of interest to researchers who study focus group interviews, gesture, language and culture, and policing reform.

This study examines how collective memory and cultural trauma inhere in the multimodal interplay between macro structures of space-time and microcosmic action. Using a criminal trial as data, we show how collective memories and cultural sentiments function in the multimodal details of poetic oratory and emotionally charged speech to frame evidence, construct legal identity and shape the interpretation of testimony. Legal actors integrate language, gesture and gaze to shift the plane of legal reality into a sacred performance, a solemn and co-operative ritual that contains thoroughly unveiled allusions to the assassinations of President John F Kennedy and Senator Robert F Kennedy. In so doing, lawyers and witness co-construct an emergent space for jurors to step into history and connect to national tragedy as a socio-legal strategy.

Recent high profile police shootings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Lacquan McDonald in Chicago, have triggered social unrest and tense relations between police and minority citizens in the United States. In the wake of such events, minority residents view the police with growing levels of suspicion and distrust—a crisis of legitimacy offering unpromising prospects for reform. Just as alarming, recent Department of Justice (DOJ) investigations indicted both cities for a pattern of civil rights violations and unconstitutional law enforcement practices. Even so, the DOJ resolved its lawsuits against both cities with a rather interesting proposal for reform: the resurrection of community policing programs to restore trust and build cooperation between the police and minority populations. With such optimistic expectations of community policing, researchers must evaluate its ability to deliver the “goods” and restore legitimacy between the police and urban residents. However, rather than using orthodox evaluation with quantitative methods to assess community policing, I take a different direction and develop a more sociocultural approach to evaluation. Using audio-video tapes of a focus group evaluation on the effectiveness of community policing training, I analyze how group participants mobilize community as a multimodal resource—as the integration of language and gesture—to construct symbolic boundaries and negotiate expertise between small-town police trainees and big-city academic trainers. Rather than conceive of community as a ‘social fact’ or territorial ‘ideal type’ in the manner of Durkheim or Tonnies, I consider the multimodal practices through which social collectivities and professional identities are contextualized in what I refer to as an evaluation ritual. That is, I examine evaluation as a situated form of identity construction. I demonstrate the sociocultural meaning and relevance of community for community policing and its impact on the evaluation process.