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Highly popular with both the public and political leaders, community policing is the most important development in law enforcement in the last twenty-five years. But does it really work? Can police departments fundamentally change their organization? Can neighborhood problems be solved? In the early 1990s, Chicago, the nation's third-largest city, instituted the nation's largest community policing initiative. This book provides a comprehensive evaluation of that citywide program, examining its impact on crime, neighborhood residents, and the police. Based on the results of a thirteen-year study, including interviews, citywide surveys, and sophisticated statistical analyses, it reveals a city divided among African Americans, whites, and Latinos. By looking at the varying effects community policing had on each of these groups, the book provides an analysis of what works and why. As the use of community policing increases and issues related to race and immigration become more pressing, it will serve the needs of an increasing amount of students, scholars, and professionals interested in the most effective and harmonious means of keeping communities safe.

This book describes and illustrates eleven powerful conversational strategies used by undercover police officers and cooperating witnesses who secretly tape-record targets in criminal investigations. Twelve actual criminal case studies are used as examples. These strategies creating illusion of guilt include the apparently deliberate use of semantic ambiguity, blocking the targets’ words (by creating static on the tape, interrupting them, speaking on their behalf, and manipulating the off/on switch); rapidly changing the subject before targets can respond (the “hit and run” strategy); contaminating the tape with irrelevant information that can make targets appear to be guilty; camouflaging illegality by making actions appear to be legal; isolating targets from important information that they need in order to make informed choices; inaccurately restating things the target has said; withholding crucial information from targets; lying to targets about critical information; and scripting targets in what to say on tape. These conversational strategies gain power from the fact that the targets do not know that they are being recorded, and often let things go right by them during the discourse. Nor do they know that the real audience of the conversations consists of later jury listeners, who do not know the full context of these conversations. Unlike everyday, unrecorded conversation, the most critical listening takes place at a future time and under very different circumstances. It is shown that undercover officers and their cooperating witnesses make use of essentially the same conversational strategies.

With urban poverty rising and affordable housing disappearing, the homeless and other “disorderly” people continue to occupy public space in many American cities. Concerned about the alleged ill effects their presence inflicts on property values and public safety, many cities have wholeheartedly embraced “zero-tolerance” or “broken window” policing efforts to clear the streets of unwanted people. Through an almost completely unnoticed set of practices, these people are banned from occupying certain spaces. Once zoned out, they are subject to arrest if they return—effectively banished from public places. This book offers an exploration of these new tactics that dramatically enhance the power of the police to monitor and arrest thousands of city dwellers. Drawing upon an extensive body of data, the chapters chart the rise of banishment in Seattle, a city on the leading edge of this emerging trend, to establish how it works and explore its ramifications. They demonstrate that, although the practice allows police and public officials to appear responsive to concerns about urban disorder, it is a highly questionable policy—it is expensive, does not reduce crime, and does not address the underlying conditions that generate urban poverty. Moreover, interviews with the banished themselves reveal that exclusion makes their lives and their path to self-sufficiency immeasurably more difficult. At a time when ever more cities and governments in the U.S. and Europe resort to the criminal justice system to solve complex social problems, the book provides a challenge to exclusionary strategies that diminish the life circumstances and the rights of those it targets.

Set against the backdrop of the capital’s history, culture, and socio-political scenario, this is a full-length study of the connection between rapid urbanization, rising crime, and law enforcement in Delhi. Providing an insider’s account of the evolution of policing in Delhi since the mid-19th century, the book closely looks at the patterns of policing in the ‘seven cities of Delhi’. From infrastructure constraints and related crime, crime against women and juveniles, terrorism to technology, the typology of criminals, and its trends in the process of the growth of the metropolis—the analyses demonstrates Delhi’s uniqueness as a metropolis and the attendant challenges. Aside from presenting different methods the Delhi police adopt to prevent crime, this book attempts to evaluate the successes and failures of these methods. While the rich historical records, statistical data, maps, and empirical surveys and observations brought together for the first time provide a wealth of additional information, the bibliography offers suggestions for the interested reader. Focusing on the challenges posed by over-urbanization and the changes in policing to counter them, the book draws out valuable lessons applicable in various degrees in other Indian cities.

In 1966 the Supreme Court ruled that law-enforcement officers were required to inform criminal defendants about their rights to remain silent or have an attorney present during their interrogation. In the 40 years since the inception of the “Miranda rule,” its anticipated effect has not been realized. The purposes of this book are to examine the reasons why the goal of the authors of the Miranda ruling has not been met and to identify procedures that move the criminal justice system closer to this goal. Separate chapters deal with four causes: the limitations and compromises in the original decision, the problems in comprehension of the Miranda warnings by various vulnerable populations (adolescents, non-English speakers, the deaf, and the mentally-challenged), the decisions subsequent to the 1966 decision that have eroded its breadth and application, and the efforts by police to avoid the curtailments from the ruling. The final chapter examines possible remedies such as requiring the presence of an attorney when the rights are given and videotaping the entire interrogation.

In this book, Anthony A. Braga and David L. Weisburd make the case that hot spots policing is an effective approach to crime prevention that should be engaged by police departments in the United States and other countries. There is a strong and growing body of rigorous scientific evidence that the police can control crime hot spots without simply displacing crime problems to other places. Indeed, putting police officers in high crime locations is an old and well‐established idea. However, the age and popularity of this idea does not necessarily mean that it is being done properly. Police officers should strive to use problem‐oriented policing and situational crime prevention techniques to address the place dynamics, situations, and characteristics that cause a “spot” to be “hot.” Braga and Weisburd further suggest that the strategies used to police problem places can have more or less desirable effects on police‐community relations. Particularly in minority neighborhoods where residents have long suffered from elevated crime problems and historically poor police service, police officers should make an effort to develop positive and collaborative relationships with residents and not engage strategies that will undermine the legitimacy of police agencies, such as indiscriminant enforcement tactics. This book argues that it is time for police departments to shift away from a focus on catching criminal offenders and move towards dealing with crime at problem places as a central crime prevention strategy.

This book seeks to give a comprehensive theory of policing. To set out the background for such a theory, the diverse types of agencies involved in policing, the history of policing, and the representations of policing in the press and in police literature are examined. The police are then defined by their use of a wide array of means, including violence, which are prohibited as legal violations for all other citizens. This definition is tested in the subsequent chapters bearing on the main components of the police web. First, the public police working in uniform are described in respect of who they are, what part of their activities are devoted to crime control, and the ways in which they operate. Second, criminal investigators are put in focus and empirical findings on how they clear up cases are discussed. The security and intelligence services are the subject of the next chapter, which develops a model that contrasts “high policing” (intelligence services) with “low policing” (public constabularies). The following chapter addresses the crucial issues that relate to private security, stressing the uncertainty of our current knowledge, and proposes a fully developed model integrating public and private security. The last chapter is devoted to military policing in its democratic and undemocratic variants, and to the extra‐legal social control exercised by criminal organizations such as the Mafia. In conclusion, the book tries to link the theoretical issues raised throughout the book and make his position explicit with respect to all of them.

Peace operations are the UN's flagship activity. Over the past decade, UN blue helmets have been dispatched to evermore challenging environments from the Congo to Timor to perform an expanding set of tasks. From protecting civilians in the midst of violent conflict to rebuilding state institutions after war, a new range of tasks has transformed the business of the blue helmets into an inherently knowledge-based venture. But all too often, the UN blue helmets, policemen, and other civilian officials have been ‘flying blind’ in their efforts to stabilize countries ravaged by war. The UN realized the need to put knowledge, guidance and doctrine, and reflection on failures and successes at the center of the institution. Building on an innovative multidisciplinary framework, this study provides a first comprehensive account of learning in peacekeeping. Covering the crucial past decade of expansion in peace operations, it zooms into a dozen cases of attempted learning across four crucial domains: police assistance, judicial reform, reintegration of former combatants, and mission integration. Throughout the different cases, the study analyzes the role of key variables as enablers and stumbling blocks for learning: bureaucratic politics, the learning infrastructure, leadership, as well as power and interests of member states. Building on five years of research and access to key documents and decision-makers, the book presents a vivid portrait of an international bureaucracy struggling to turn itself into a learning organization.

Since the American Bar Foundation Survey of the Administration of Criminal Justice (1953–69) “discovered” the phenomenon of discretion in criminal justice, it has become something of a truism that the administration of criminal justice in the United States consists of a series of discretionary decisions by officials in regard to police discretion, bail, plea bargaining, and sentencing. This book is a history of the attempts over the past forty years to control these discretionary powers in the criminal justice system. In a field which largely produces short-ranged “evaluation research”, this study, in taking a wider approach, distinguishes between the role of the courts and the role of administrative bodies (the police) and evaluates the longer-term trends and the successful reforms in criminal justice history. It focuses on four critical decision points in the criminal justice system: police discretion, bail setting, plea bargaining, and sentencing. It examines the various reforms that have been proposed, the major ones implemented, and the impact of those reforms.

The history of police and policing have been the subject of much interest and research in recent years, but this book provides the first serious academic exploration of the origins and development of the role of soldier-policemen: the gendarmeries of 19th-century Europe. The author presents a detailed account of the French Gendarmeries from the old regime up to the First World War, and looks at the reasons for how and why this model came to be exported across continental Europe in the wake of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies. In particular, their role is examined within the differing national contexts of Italy, Germany, and the Habsburg Empire. The gendarmeries, it is argued, played a significant role in establishing the state, particularly in rural areas. As the physical manifestation of the state, gendarmes carried the state's law and a promise of protection, whilst at the same time ensuring in turn that the state received its annual levies of conscripts and taxes. This account fully explores how the organization and style of 19th-century soldier-policing in France developed in such a way that it brought the idea of the state and the state's law to much of 20th-century continental Europe.

In Britain today, if you are in the business of fighting crime, then you have to be in the business of dealing with alcohol. ‘Binge drinking’ culture is intrinsic to urban leisure and has come to pose a key threat to public order. Unsurprisingly, a struggle is occurring. Pub and club companies, local authorities, central government, the police, the judiciary, local residents, drug and alcohol campaign groups, and revellers all hold competing notions of social order in the night-time city and the appropriate uses and meanings of its public and private spaces. Bar Wars explores how official discourses of ‘partnership’ and ‘self-regulation’ belie the extent of fierce adversarial contestation between and within these groups. Located within a long tradition of urban ethnography, the book offers unique and hard-hitting analyses of social control in bars and clubs, courtroom battles between local communities and the drinks industry, and street-level policing. These issues go to the heart of contemporary debates concerning urban civility, alcohol and drugs policies, and the impacts of and justifications for new police powers introduced as part of the Licensing Act 2003 and Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006. The author's experiences as a disc jockey and as an expert witness to the licensing courts provide a unique perspective, setting his work apart from other academic commentators. Bar Wars takes the study of the ‘night-time economy’ to a new level of sophistication, making it essential reading for all those wishing to understand the policing and regulation of contemporary British cities.

The crime rate in the US has exploded since 1960. Despite decreases in recent years, reported violence in 2001 exceeded the levels of the late 1970s. Government at all levels has tried to address the crime problem, with mixed success. Police forces that formerly focused on patrol cars’ responding to citizen calls embraced the proactive approach of community policing; courts set up specialized branches, hearing cases relating to narcotics, guns, and domestic violence; criminal sentences sharply increased, filling prisons and jails with more than 2 million people. Yet, crime rates continue to rise and fall, seemingly without regard to government programs. Strikingly, little evidence has been collected about which anticrime activities are truly effective and which are not. Instead, members of Congress and state legislators, who set the tone for the fight against crime, tend to base their actions on what sounds good in political advertisements rather than what has proved to work through scientific experiment. Still, there are a number of promising ideas in law enforcement, juvenile crime, corrections, and other areas that could help prevent crime if they could obtain adequate financial support.