When the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts erupted in violent protest in August 1965, the uprising drew strength from decades of pent-up frustration with employment discrimination, residential segregation, and poverty. But the more immediate grievance was anger at the racist and abusive practices of the Los Angeles Police Department. Yet in the decades after Watts, the LAPD resisted all but the most limited demands for reform made by activists and residents of color, instead intensifying its power. In Policing Los Angeles, Max Felker-Kantor narrates the dynamic history of policing, anti–police abuse movements, race, and politics in Los Angeles from the 1965 Watts uprising to the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Using the explosions of two large-scale uprisings in Los Angeles as bookends, Felker-Kantor highlights the racism at the heart of the city's expansive police power through a range of previously unused and rare archival sources. His book is a gripping and timely account of the transformation in police power, the convergence of interests in support of law and order policies, and African American and Mexican American resistance to police violence after the Watts uprising.

A policewoman chronicles her historic legal battle against sexism within the LAPD in this “valuable . . . and at times, frightening” memoir (Kirkus Reviews). Former Army major Fanchon Blake dreamed of becoming a top cop. She joined the LAPD in 1948, confident that her efforts and talent would be rewarded. Instead, despite long hours and high achievement ratings, Blake—like all other women on the force—was denied promotion time and again. Over the years, the tenacious officer challenged the LAPD’s discriminatory agenda from within. Eventually, she broke the “blue wall of silence” by going to the press. And when all else failed, Blake saw one last chance to effect change: she filed a complaint against the LAPD with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1973. What followed was a harrowing struggle against discrimination that would make history for women and other minority groups. Despite the ensuing verbal abuse, silent treatment, and intimidation, Blake pushed on. Seven years later, her heroic efforts would finally make it possible for women to bust through the brass ceiling.

Policing Space is a fascinating firsthand account of how the Los Angeles Police Department attempts to control its vast, heterogeneous territory. As such, the book offers a rare, ground-level look at the relationship between the control of space and the exercise of power. Author Steve Herbert spent eight months observing one patrol division of the LAPD on the job. A compelling story in itself, his fieldwork with the officers in the Wilshire Division affords readers a close view of the complex factors at play in how the police define and control territory, how they make and mark space. A remarkable ethnography of a powerful police department, underscored throughout with telling on-the-scene vignettes, this book is also an unusually intensive analysis of the exercise of territorial power-and of territoriality as a key component of police power. Unique in its application of fieldwork and theory to this complex subject, it should prove valuable to readers in urban and political geography, urban and political sociology, and criminology, as well as those who wonder about the workings of the LAPD.

In June 1943, the city of Los Angeles was wrenched apart by the worst rioting it had seen to that point in the twentieth century. Incited by sensational newspaper stories and the growing public hysteria over allegations of widespread Mexican American juvenile crime, scores of American servicemen, joined by civilians and even police officers, roamed the streets of the city in search of young Mexican American men and boys wearing a distinctive style of dress called a Zoot Suit. Once found, the Zoot Suiters were stripped of their clothes, beaten, and left in the street. Over 600 Mexican American youths were arrested. The riots threw a harsh light upon the deteriorating relationship between the Los Angeles Mexican American community and the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1940s. In this study, Edward J. Escobar examines the history of the relationship between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Mexican American community from the turn of the century to the era of the Zoot Suit Riots. Escobar shows the changes in the way police viewed Mexican Americans, increasingly characterizing them as a criminal element, and the corresponding assumption on the part of Mexican Americans that the police were a threat to their community. The broader implications of this relationship are, as Escobar demonstrates, the significance of the role of the police in suppressing labor unrest, the growing connection between ideas about race and criminality, changing public perceptions about Mexican Americans, and the rise of Mexican American political activism.

An insider view of an urban subculture! While much of the literature on police analyzes critically what they do, few works address issues of how police officers feel about their chosen profession, their worldview, or their visions. This refreshingly original and unique ethnographic contribution by anthropologist Joan Barker exposes the human elementone rarely seen by non-policeof officers working for the often-controversial L.A.P.D. During her twenty years of fieldwork, Barker gathered valuable information through formal, in-depth interviews and firsthand experiences, distilling her findings into an illuminating, coherent account. She discovers that five phases of occupational socialization normatively mold officers experiences and perceptions. Fleshing out her discussion is the compelling narrative of Fred, a traditional officer whose authentic voice reveals feelings and attitudes that manifest the essence of the human who does the job of policing. An insider view of an urban subculture usually known only from its public presentation.

A critical look at the realities of community policing in South Los Angeles The Limits of Community Policing addresses conflicts between police and communities. Luis Daniel Gascón and Aaron Roussell depart from traditional conceptions, arguing that community policing—popularized for decades as a racial panacea—is not the solution it seems to be. Tracing this policy back to its origins, they focus on the Los Angeles Police Department, which first introduced community policing after the high-profile Rodney King riots. Drawing on over sixty interviews with officers, residents, and stakeholders in South LA’s “Lakeside” precinct, they show how police tactics amplified—rather than resolved—racial tensions, complicating partnership efforts, crime response and prevention, and accountability. Gascón and Roussell shine a new light on the residents of this neighborhood to address the enduring—and frequently explosive—conflicts between police and communities. At a time when these issues have taken center stage, this volume offers a critical understanding of how community policing really works.

Once considered among the most respected police departments in the world, the LAPD suffered a devastating fall from grace following the 1991 police officer beating of Rodney King and the Los Angeles riots stemming from the officers acquittal in 1992. Unique to the literature of policing, management, and policy studies, Los Angeles Police Departmen