In countries around the world, from the United States to the Philippines to Chile, police forces are at the center of social unrest and debates about democracy and rule of law. This book examines the persistence of authoritarian policing in Latin America to explain why police violence and malfeasance remain pervasive decades after democratization. It also examines the conditions under which reform can occur. Drawing on rich comparative analysis and evidence from Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, the book opens up the 'black box' of police bureaucracies to show how police forces exert power and cultivate relationships with politicians, as well as how social inequality impedes change. González shows that authoritarian policing persists not in spite of democracy but in part because of democratic processes and public demand. When societal preferences over the distribution of security and coercion are fragmented along existing social cleavages, politicians possess few incentives to enact reform.

Studies of policing tend to focus on effectiveness--on what works--rather than on the more important question of what matters, of why policing should be done in particular ways or reformed or restructured. This book explores that angle, looking at the implications of recent restructurings in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, with a special emphasis on the dilemmas faced by police leadership as they confront change.

‘Stop and search’ is a form of police-citizen interaction that is confrontational, often stressful for those involved, and potentially damaging to the relationship between police and public. The extent to which police officers use their power to stop and perhaps search members of the public is intimately linked not only to the present-day context of policing but also to longer term patterns in the aims of policing, the ends used to achieve them, and ultimately to the ideology of policing in England and Wales. Stop and Search and Police Legitimacy draws upon both police-administrative and survey-based data to examine what has for many years been one of the most highly charged and contested aspects of police practice. Taking a decidedly quantitative, empirical, approach, this book examines the patterning of police stops over social and geographic space, the problem of ethnic disproportionality, and the evidence concerning how people experience and react to being stopped by police – particularly in relation to issues of fairness, legitimacy, cooperation and compliance. A further important concern is the extent to which this form of police practice shapes and re-shapes the identities of those affected by it. This ground-breaking study is a comprehensive resource for students and scholars in the fields of criminology, sociology, social policy, ethnic and racial studies and human rights. It will also be of special interest to police leaders and policy-makers.

A "searing, searching, and eloquent" (Martha Minow, Harvard Law School) investigation into the role of the legal profession in perpetuating mass incarceration--now in an accessible paperback format from the award-winning civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis doesn't think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings--an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color, for which the legal system has never offered sufficient justification. Usual Cruelty offers a radical reconsideration of the American "injustice system" by someone who is actively--and wildly successfully--challenging it. Hailed by luminaries from James Forman Jr. and Vanita Gupta to U.S. Circuit Judge Bernice Donald, and MacArthur Award-winning poet and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts, Usual Cruelty offers a condemnation of the whole deplorable enterprise, starting with profound questions about the specific things our system chooses to criminalize (marijuana plants, low-level gambling, petty theft) versus those we don't (tobacco plants, high-level gambling by bankers, massive wage theft by employers). It calls out a bail system that charges people money to go free despite the lack of any evidence this will make them more likely to show up in court or make anybody safer. And it explores the everyday brutality of our courts, prisons, and jails, and the ways in which the legal profession has allowed itself to become desensitized to the everyday pain these institutions inflict on our most vulnerable populations. Now in an accessible paperback format, Usual Cruelty will cement Karakatsanis's reputation as one of the most inspiring civil rights lawyers of our time.

In the playhouses of eighteenth-century France, clerks and students, soldiers and merchants, and the occasional aristocrat stood in the pit, while the majority of the elite sat in loges. These denizens of the parterre, who accounted for up to two-thirds of the audience, were given to disruptive behavior that culminated in full-scale riots in the last years before the Revolution. Offering a commoner's eye view of the drama offstage, this fascinating history of French theater audiences clearly demonstrates how problems in the parterre reflected tensions at the heart of the Old Regime.Jeffrey S. Ravel vividly depicts the scene in the parterre where the male spectators occupied themselves shoving one another, drinking, urinating, and confronting the actors with critiques of the performance. He traces the futile efforts of the Bourbon Court—and later its Enlightened opponents—to control parterre behavior by both persuasion and force. Ravel describes how the parterre came to represent a larger, more politicized notion of the public, one that exposed the inability of the government to accommodate the demands of French citizens. An important contribution to debates on the public sphere, Ravel's book is the first to explore the role of the parterre in the political culture of eighteenth-century France.

Proactive policing, as a strategic approach used by police agencies to prevent crime, is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. It developed from a crisis in confidence in policing that began to emerge in the 1960s because of social unrest, rising crime rates, and growing skepticism regarding the effectiveness of standard approaches to policing. In response, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative police practices and policies that took a more proactive approach began to develop. This report uses the term "proactive policing" to refer to all policing strategies that have as one of their goals the prevention or reduction of crime and disorder and that are not reactive in terms of focusing primarily on uncovering ongoing crime or on investigating or responding to crimes once they have occurred. Proactive policing is distinguished from the everyday decisions of police officers to be proactive in specific situations and instead refers to a strategic decision by police agencies to use proactive police responses in a programmatic way to reduce crime. Today, proactive policing strategies are used widely in the United States. They are not isolated programs used by a select group of agencies but rather a set of ideas that have spread across the landscape of policing. Proactive Policing reviews the evidence and discusses the data and methodological gaps on: (1) the effects of different forms of proactive policing on crime; (2) whether they are applied in a discriminatory manner; (3) whether they are being used in a legal fashion; and (4) community reaction. This report offers a comprehensive evaluation of proactive policing that includes not only its crime prevention impacts but also its broader implications for justice and U.S. communities.