Community policing initiatives in Europe and North America are often touted as a means of restoring public trust in the police, and, by extension, in the state more broadly. Despite a limited evidence base, programmes that promote police problem-solving, crime prevention, and partnerships with the public are also commonly identified as vehicles for countering violent extremism and promoting social cohesion. These perceptions have influenced second generation Security Sector Reform initiatives and in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings, international development agencies have supported the establishment or expansion of Community Policing programmes in several Arab states including Jordan. Unlike other states in the region, whose ‘civil’ police have a record of brutality against the public, in Jordan, polling both before and after the Uprisings has indicated high public approval ratings for the Public Security Directorate (PSD). Police professionalism has been cited as a contributory reason for regime survival, and the PSD already lays claim to longstanding partnerships between the police and community representatives. In 2013, the organization initiated a new community policing initiative in Syrian refugee camps, whose primary purpose was to liaise between residents, the Jordanian administrative authorities and non-governmental aid organizations working in the camps. The programme’s success led to attempts to replicate it through pilot projects in Jordanian host communities in the north of the country and Amman, but early assessments suggest that realizing genuinely participatory partnerships between the population and the police in these areas is far more problematic. This paper uses Partha Chatterjee’s reflections on ‘Communities in the East’ and the role of social capital within them to critically assess how efforts to introduce Western-styled Community Policing to Jordan over the past decade relate to attempts by the Executive to re-imagine how ‘communities’ are conceived in a Kingdom facing rapidly changing demographics. Using findings from a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews and focus groups conducted in Jordan between 2010 and 2018 with serving and former police officers, external development and security sector agencies, members of local voluntary organizations and ‘traditional’ tribal and administrative representatives, and refugees, the paper considers how measures introduced under the rubric of Community Policing reflect broader challenges to the governmentality of Jordan’s population.