The police are perhaps the most visible representation of government. They are charged with what has been characterized as an "impossible" mandate -- control and prevent crime, keep the peace, provide public services -- and do so within the constraints of democratic principles. The police are trusted to use deadly force when it is called for and are allowed access to our homes in cases of emergency. In fact, police departments are one of the few government agencies that can be mobilized by a simple phone call, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They are ubiquitous within our society, but their actions are often not well understood. The Oxford Handbook of Police and Policing brings together research on the development and operation of policing in the United States and elsewhere. Accomplished policing researchers Michael D. Reisig and Robert J. Kane have assembled a cast of renowned scholars to provide an authoritative and comprehensive overview of the institution of policing. The different sections of the Handbook explore policing contexts, strategies, authority, and issues relating to race and ethnicity. The Handbook also includes reviews of the research methodologies used by policing scholars and considerations of the factors that will ultimately shape the future of policing, thus providing persuasive insights into why and how policing has developed, what it is today, and what to expect in the future. Aimed at a wide audience of scholars and students in criminology and criminal justice, as well as police professionals, the Handbook serves as the definitive resource for information on this important institution.

This anthology explores the political nature of making order through policing activities in densely populated spaces across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Based on ethnographic research, the chapters analyze this complex with respect to marginalized young men in Haiti, community policing members and national politicians in Swaziland as well as other individual and collective actors engaged in policing and politics in Indonesia, Swaziland, Ghana, South Africa, Mexico, Bolivia, Haiti and Sierra Leone. What these contexts have in common is a plurality of order-making practices. Not one institution monopolizes the means of violence or a de facto sovereign position to do so. A number of interests are played out simultaneously, entailing re-negotiations over the very definition of what ‘order’ is. How and by whom a particular order is enforced is contested, at times violently so, and is therefore inherently political. In the existing literature on weak states, legal pluralism and policing in the Global South it is seldom made explicit that making order is a route to power and positions of political decision-making. It is this gap in the literature that this anthology fills, as it analyses the politics at stake in processes of order-making.

In this book, an international group of public policy scholars revisit the stage of formulating policy solutions by investigating the basic political dimensions inherent to this critical phase of the policy process. The book focuses attention on how policy makers craft their policy proposals, match them with public problems, debate their feasibility to build coalitions and dispute their acceptability as serious contenders for government consideration. Based on international case studies, this book is an invitation to examine the uncertain and often indeterminate aspects of policy-making using qualitative analysis embedded in a political perspective.

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.

Investigation and comparison of important issues of police policy in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago for the period covering 1966 to 1969. The book focuses on the three overlapping policy areas which have received a great deal of attention in the news media of all three cities -- civil review and accountability of the police, the 'law and order' issue, and police-community relations. They were selected for study because of the way they demonstrate the changing political role of the police in society. The book concentrates primarily on the process by which issues are resolved rather than on a thorough treatment of the issues themselves. For each issue the author discusses the nature of decision-making participation, including the point of view of key participants, power resources brought to bear, and the degree of success as measured by the outcome of an issue. Attention is directed to determining which individuals or agencies most often initiated the proposals that were finally adopted or most often successfully vetoed the proposals of others. The document discusses the basic environmental characteristics of the three cities considered, their political and governmental structure, and special qualities of law enforcement organization. An overview of patterns of police politics and their effect on the outer parameters of city politics is presented. The appendixes contain lists of decision-making cases in the three selected cities for the period 1966-1969.

How does an authoritarian state reform its police force following a transition to democracy? In 1998, Indonesia, the third largest country in the world, faced just such a challenge. Policing had long been managed under the jurisdiction of the military, as an instrument of the Suharto regime – and with Suharto abruptly removed from office, this was about to change. Here we see how it changed, and how far these changes were for the better. Based on direct observations by a scholar who was involved in the last days of the New Order and who saw how the police responded to regime change, this book examines the police, the new regime, and how the police was disassociated from the military in Indonesia. Providing a comprehensive historical overview of the position of police in this change of regime, the book focuses on two key areas: the differences between local and national levels, and the politicisation associated with decentralisation. Arguing that the disassociation of the Indonesian National Police from the military has achieved only limited success, the book contends that there is continued impetus for the establishment of a professional police force and modern and democratic policing, which will entail effective public control of the police. A pioneering study of the police in Indonesia, examining key issues in the post-Suharto era, this book will be of interest to scholars of Southeast Asian politics and of policing and politics in the developing world.