Race, Place, and Suburban Policing


Book Description

"Relying on compelling interviews from the Meacham Park neighborhood--a marginalized Black enclave located in a predominately white affluent St. Louis suburb, this book brings to life the everyday interactions of disadvantaged suburban Blacks as they faced annexation, aggressive policing, two nationally profiled shootings, and intervention from the United States Department of Justice (USDOJ)"--Provided by publisher.




You Can't Stop the Revolution


Book Description

You Can’t Stop the Revolution is a vivid participant ethnography inside of Ferguson protests, as the Black Lives Matter movement exploded onto the global stage. Sociologist Andrea Boyles offers an everyday montage of protests, social ties, and empowerment as coalescing to safeguard black lives while simultaneously igniting unprecedented twenty-first-century resistance. Focusing on neighborhood crime prevention and contentious black citizen–police interactions, all in the context of preserving black lives, this book examines how black citizens work to combat disorder, crime, and police conflict. Boyles offers an insider’s analysis of cities like Ferguson, where the socialization of indifference leaves black neighborhoods vulnerable to citizen and state conflict, all in a climate where black lives are not only seemingly expendable but also held responsible for their own oppression. You Can’t Stop the Revolution serves as a reminder that community empowerment is still possible in neighborhoods infected with police brutality and interpersonal violence.




Race and Policing in America


Book Description

Race and Policing in America is about relations between police and citizens, with a focus on racial differences. It utilizes both the authors' own research and other studies to examine Americans' opinions, preferences, and personal experiences regarding the police. Guided by group-position theory and using both existing studies and the authors' own quantitative and qualitative data (from a nationally representative survey of whites, blacks, and Hispanics), this book examines the roles of personal experience, knowledge of others' experiences (vicarious experience), mass media reporting on the police, and neighborhood conditions (including crime and socioeconomic disadvantage) in structuring citizen views in four major areas: overall satisfaction with police in one's city and neighborhood, perceptions of several types of police misconduct, perceptions of police racial bias and discrimination, and evaluations of and support for a large number of reforms in policing.




Black Lives and Spatial Matters


Book Description

Black Lives and Spatial Matters is a call to reconsider the epistemic violence that is committed when scholars, policymakers, and the general public continue to frame Black precarity as just another racial, cultural, or ethnic conflict that can be solved solely through legal, political, or economic means. Jodi Rios argues that the historical and material production of blackness-as-risk is foundational to the historical and material construction of our society and certainly foundational to the construction and experience of metropolitan space. She also considers how an ethics of lived blackness—living fully and visibly in the face of forces intended to dehumanize and erase—can create a powerful counter point to blackness-as-risk. Using a transdisciplinary methodology, Black Lives and Spatial Matters studies cultural, institutional, and spatial politics of race in North St. Louis County, Missouri, as a set of practices that are intimately connected to each other and to global histories of race and race-making. As such, the book adds important insight into the racialization of metropolitan space and people in the United States. The arguments presented in this book draw from fifteen years of engaged research in North St. Louis County and rely on multiple disciplinary perspectives and local knowledge in order to study relationships between interconnected practices and phenomena.




Meacham Park


Book Description

Historically, relationships between police and residents in minority communities have often been contentious. However most of the literature on race, place, and policing has focused on the policing of Blacks and their interactions with the police in urban settings. Building on this work, this study aims to capture similar processes of racialized policing as they occur in the suburbs. This project expands our understanding by exploring policing as it is carried out in a marginalized Black enclave located in a predominately white middle class suburb. Specifically, I focus on Meacham Park, which is a segregated enclave annexed to the nearby white community of Kirkwood, Missouri. Drawing on interviews with thirty African-American residents of Meacham Park, I explore how residents experience policing and their attitudes toward the police. The interviews reveal a contentious history of relations between residents and the police, and I discuss respondents' accounts of specific experiences with police surveillance, harassment, and (in some cases) misconduct. However, though many respondents reported extremely negative attitudes toward the police, the great majority also reported at least some positive interactions and experiences. This study extends research on the policing of minority communities into a segregated suburban context and offers implications for improving relations between the police and minority communities.




Proactive Policing


Book Description

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.




The Dream Revisited


Book Description

A half century after the Fair Housing Act, despite ongoing transformations of the geography of privilege and poverty, residential segregation by race and income continues to shape urban and suburban neighborhoods in the United States. Why do people live where they do? What explains segregation’s persistence? And why is addressing segregation so complicated? The Dream Revisited brings together a range of expert viewpoints on the causes and consequences of the nation’s separate and unequal living patterns. Leading scholars and practitioners, including civil rights advocates, affordable housing developers, elected officials, and fair housing lawyers, discuss the nature of and policy responses to residential segregation. Essays scrutinize the factors that sustain segregation, including persistent barriers to mobility and complex neighborhood preferences, and its consequences from health to home finance and from policing to politics. They debate how actively and in what ways the government should intervene in housing markets to foster integration. The book features timely analyses of issues such as school integration, mixed income housing, and responses to gentrification from a diversity of viewpoints. A probing examination of a deeply rooted problem, The Dream Revisited offers pressing insights into the changing face of urban inequality.




Policing Life and Death


Book Description

In her exciting new book, Marisol LeBrón traces the rise of punitive governance in Puerto Rico over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present. Punitive governance emerged as a way for the Puerto Rican state to manage the deep and ongoing crises stemming from the archipelago’s incorporation into the United States as a colonial territory. A structuring component of everyday life for many Puerto Ricans, police power has reinforced social inequality and worsened conditions of vulnerability in marginalized communities. This book provides powerful examples of how Puerto Ricans negotiate and resist their subjection to increased levels of segregation, criminalization, discrimination, and harm. Policing Life and Death shows how Puerto Ricans are actively rejecting punitive solutions and working toward alternative understandings of safety and a more just future.




You Can't Stop the Revolution


Book Description

You Can’t Stop the Revolution is a vivid participant ethnography inside of Ferguson protests, as the Black Lives Matter movement exploded onto the global stage. Sociologist Andrea Boyles offers an everyday montage of protests, social ties, and empowerment as coalescing to safeguard black lives while simultaneously igniting unprecedented twenty-first-century resistance. Focusing on neighborhood crime prevention and contentious black citizen–police interactions, all in the context of preserving black lives, this book examines how black citizens work to combat disorder, crime, and police conflict. Boyles offers an insider’s analysis of cities like Ferguson, where the socialization of indifference leaves black neighborhoods vulnerable to citizen and state conflict, all in a climate where black lives are not only seemingly expendable but also held responsible for their own oppression. You Can’t Stop the Revolution serves as a reminder that community empowerment is still possible in neighborhoods infected with police brutality and interpersonal violence.




Policing the Racial Divide


Book Description

"This book explores the relationships between racial segregation, urban governance, and policing in a postindustrial city. Drawing on rich ethnographic data and in-depth interviews, Gordon shows how the police augmented racial inequalities in service provision and social control by aligning their priorities with those of the city's urban growth coalition"--