There has been a growing awareness among academic and professional communities, as well as the general public, of the global rise in the number of aging prisoners across the world. Both the scholarly literature and social media have documented the high human, social, and economic costs of housing older adults with complex physical, mental health, legal, and social needs. It is imperative to explore the crisis and select correctional policies and practices that have contributed to the rise in the aging and the seriously and terminally ill populations in global prisons. A comparative framing and analysis across the globe show how some countries, such as the United States, have a higher per capita rate of incarcerating older adults in prisons compared to other countries, such as Northern Ireland. Variations in profiles and manifestations of personal and social conditions affect pathways to prison for some older adults. Explanatory perspectives describe why some individuals are at an increased risk of growing old in prison compared to other individuals. Indigeneity, globalization, race and ethnicity, power and inequality, and processes of development and underdevelopment have affected the growth of the aging prison population. Promising practices have the potential to disengage social mechanisms that have contributed to the mass incarceration of the elderly and engage a more compassionate approach to crime and punishment for people of all ages, their families, and communities.
Article
Aging in Prison and Correction Policy in Global Perspectives
Tina Maschi, Keith Morgen, Annette Hintenach, and Adriana Kaye
Article
Armed Robbery (Commercial)
Rob Hornsby and Dick Hobbs
The United Kingdom has seen the rise and subsequent demise of armed robbery by serious and organized criminals. The emergence of armed robbery must be considered within a context of criminal progression forged by the wider political economy and its developments, which shape the opportunities and characteristics of professional criminals. The shift from a cash-based economy towards a credit-constructed economic milieu witnessed the demise of craft crimes such as safe-cracking and the growth of project-based criminality such as armed robbery. The subsequent decline in professional armed robbers attacking banks, post offices, building societies, and cash-in-transit targets can be regarded as the result of control-of-crime strategies and situational crime prevention tactics. There has been increasing use of security measures, including (but not exclusively) within the banking sector, such as in-house closed-circuit television (CCTV), indelible dyes for tainting stolen money, and wider “risk society” measures including, for example, widespread street CCTV, automated number plate recognition, and an increasing shift to credit or debit card transactions. This approach to situational crime control has been successful, leading “elite” professional criminals to seek alternative illicit opportunities and leaving contemporary armed robbers, generally amateurs, deskilled and often desperate individuals.
Article
Body Cameras and Policing
Bryce Elling Peterson and Daniel S. Lawrence
Body-worn cameras (BWCs) are small devices that police officers can affix to their person—in a head-, shoulder-, or chest-mounted position—that can audio and video record their interactions with community members. BWCs have received strong support from the public and, in recent years, widespread buy-in from police leadership and officers because of their ability to improve accountability and transparency and enhance the collection of evidence. Implementation guidelines recommend that officers activate their BWCs during each officer–citizen interaction and inform the people they encounter that they are being recorded. Early research on this technology found that officers equipped with body cameras were significantly less likely to engage in force and receive citizen complaints. However, more recent studies with larger samples have had mixed findings about the impact of body cameras on use of force, citizen complaints, and other police activities and behaviors.
Numerous legal and ethical considerations are associated with BWCs, including their implications for privacy concerns and public disclosure. However, police officials, policymakers, civil rights groups, and the public must continue to weigh these privacy concerns against the potential for BWCs to enhance police accountability and transparency. Future scholarship should focus on the degree to which BWCs can improve police–community relations and yield valuable evidence for both criminal cases and internal investigations.
Article
Campus Policing
Kenneth J. Peak
Since 9/11 and the burgeoning number of mass shootings across the United States (one of the more recent such tragedies, at a Parkland, Florida high school in February 2018, resulted in 17 people being murdered, 17 wounded, and worldwide student protests for gun control), police at all levels and of all jurisdictions have had to train and prepare for security threats and attacks of all types. Certainly, policing on postsecondary campuses is no exception. Recognizing that campuses are no longer wholly safe, violence-free enclaves, higher education administrators have necessarily sought highly trained and equipped campus police agencies to provide a safer environment for their academic communities.
Policing on college and university (postsecondary) campuses has a unique history, philosophy, role, and functions. Specifically, from their humble beginnings in the early 1900s through the social and campus unrest of the 1960s and 1970s, and until today, their administration, jurisdiction, authority, methods, legal mandates, technologies, and personnel have had to evolve with the times and with new challenges. In addition, like their local and state counterparts, they have come to embrace community policing and problem solving as well as develop plans for all types of critical incidents, both acts of nature and acts of terrorism. In short, history has shown that these organizations must be prepared for the entire gamut of human and natural disorder.
Article
Causes and Consequences of Police Self-Legitimacy
Heather Prince, Kiseong Kuen, and Danielle S. Rudes
In recent years, research on policing, police legitimacy, and police decision-making has increased dramatically in part due to several high-profile police use of force and deadly shooting incidents in the United States. This line of studies largely focuses on individual-level factors such as police procedural justice during interactions with citizens from the perspective of the public. However, a growing body of studies suggests that police authority and legitimacy is not only formed by citizens’ evaluations and perceptions derived from police behaviors during the interactions. It is also shaped by factors from both individual-level and structural-level external sources of police organizations, such as citizens’ animus toward the police and crime rates of the jurisdiction. More importantly, research suggests that police culture and organizational-level factors, such as organizational justice and feeling recognition from others in an organization, play large roles in shaping officers’ self-legitimacy. The sense of low self-legitimacy derived from the above sources can lead officers to make racially biased decisions to reinforce their legitimate status with the public. Officers’ decision-making as well as their perceptions of self-legitimacy, by interacting each other, can play crucial roles in police negative behaviors toward citizens, such as use of deadly force, especially toward racial minorities. Some organizations have implemented changes such as implicit bias and procedural justice trainings, or body-worn camera requirements, but changes must be made at the overall organizational level to reduce racially biased police decision-making.
Article
Civilian Oversight of Police in the United States
Taryn Zastrow and Danielle S. Rudes
Civilian oversight of police is a tool commonly used in cities across the United States to hold police accountable for misconduct. Law enforcement agencies have a history of violence, brutality, and misconduct, specifically toward marginalized populations. Thus, oversight of police by civilians can be traced to the early 20th century, but models for implementing oversight have evolved over time. Literature on civilian oversight identifies three contemporary oversight models: investigative agencies, review boards, and auditor/monitor agencies. These models play different roles in providing oversight of police, including independently investigating civilian complaints, reviewing internal investigations of complaints, developing recommendations for police executives, and overseeing department practices and patterns. However, oversight agencies and boards often lack any legal power to enforce their recommendations, making them virtually ineffective. The lack of power held by oversight agencies can be traced to political pushback as well as conflicting organizational models within police departments. Given the variability between and within different oversight models, scholars have struggled to adequately study these agencies. However, some proposed solutions to ineffective oversight have been identified in the literature, including making the oversight agencies more autonomous. Further, when civilian oversight agencies are improved and public confidence in them increases, agencies should be provided with adequate resources to deal with the potential influx of civilian complaints.
Article
Community Policing in Comparative Perspective
Jacques de Maillard and Jan Terpstra
Community (oriented) policing has become one of the most popular models of policing worldwide. After its initial implementation in many Western countries, community policing has also been transferred to transitional societies, which often lack strong democratic traditions. The international diffusion of community policing should not make us forget that community policing comes in all shapes and sizes and is highly varied in its operations.
After having defined the concept and analyzed its rise in Anglo-American countries, this diversity is illustrated by scrutinizing its implementation in different national configurations: a continental European country relatively open to Anglo-American influences (the Netherlands), socially homogeneous countries with a high level of trust in the police (the Nordic countries), a centralized country with an administrative Napoleonic tradition (France), and postconflict societies (South Africa and Northern Ireland).
These various national trajectories highlight the common drivers and barriers in community policing reforms: political priorities (through emphasizing crime fighting or zero tolerance policing), socioeconomic disparities and ethnic tensions (which may imply a history of mistrust and vicious circles between the police and some segments of the public), professional identities and interests (disqualifying community police officers as “social workers”), and organizational resources (managerial procedures, lack of training and human resources) that may hinder the reform process. These diverse experiences also draw attention to the variety of context-dependent factors that impact the fate of community policing reforms. Political climates, police–government relations, socioeconomic inequalities, and police traditions may differ, which requires further analysis of the various political, historical, socioeconomic, and cultural contexts of specific community policing reforms.
Article
Consent Decrees and Police Reform
John L. Worrall and Zachary A. Powell
Charged with enforcing the law and regulating human behavior, the police have considerable leeway in their ability to control the population. On occasion, situations arise in which police officers misuse their authority, resulting in racially discriminatory practices, illegal searches and seizures, abusive use of force, or other forms of misbehavior. In some cases, unconstitutional practices are isolated incidents that are restricted to the actions of a small group of officers; in other cases, misbehavior may be more emblematic of a systemic problem within a criminal justice agency. To the extent that a pattern or practice of unconstitutional behavior exists, the interest of any government, and the people governed, is in limiting official misconduct.
One method of correcting unconstitutional behavior is through a consent decree, a court-ordered agreement following a major U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation that is designed to correct long-standing unconstitutional practices within police departments.
Despite the fact that consent decrees have been available to the DOJ for nearly 25 years, their use is somewhat limited (especially lately, in light of the Trump administration’s resistance to their use). A small body of evidence suggests there is promise for consent decrees as a tool for correcting police misbehavior. Existing studies show consent decrees are correlated with boosted citizen perceptions of treated police departments, lower counts of civil rights litigation, and improved methods for recording and disciplining police misbehavior. The influence of a consent decree may gradually build up over time before lapsing post-treatment. In addition, focus group interviews with law enforcement officers suggest that many express apprehension about the goals of reform and the impact on the day-to-day lives of police officers. A number of questions remain unanswered that require further exploration from the field.
Article
Crime Analysis in Policing
Eric L. Piza and Rachael A. Arietti
Crime analysis involves the use of data to study crime-related problems. This includes identifying spatial and temporal patterns of crime events, understanding the characteristics of crime scenes, and identifying high-risk victims and offenders. Work products of crime analysts provide police the ability to understand the nature of crime problems in their jurisdiction. This information is then used to develop crime prevention interventions. Crime analysis is a requirement of the types of proactive, focused, problem-solving activities that work best in policing. Crime analysis can be categorized into four broad types: crime intelligence analysis, tactical crime analysis, strategic crime analysis, and administrative crime analysis. Crime mapping has become an important skill that cuts across the different crime analysis types and informs many activities of modern police agencies. The crime analysis profession has increased in size and scope over the early 21st century. However, some core components of crime analysis have existed in policing as far back as the mid-1800s in Great Britain and the early 1900s in the United States. The evidence-based policing movement—which advocates for policy solutions to be based on scientific evidence about what works best in preventing crime—presents opportunities for further advancement of the crime analysis profession. Barriers to maximizing the benefits of crime analysis relate to inconsistent training standards, reliance on outdated models of policing, and a lack of clarity regarding roles and agency standing for crime analysts. An increased commitment to applied research efforts may help navigate these barriers in the future.
Article
Crime Control, Community Relations, and Barriers to Community-Based Reforms in Policing
Kevin Petersen and Danielle S. Rudes
Efforts to prevent crime often involve high concentrations of police presence in disadvantaged minority communities. When combined with aggressive enforcement and proactivity, these efforts may negatively affect police–community relations. There is often a tendency to view community relations and crime reduction as discrete goals; however, citizen cooperation is an important component of efficient crime control. Policing strategies that incorporate problem-solving and community involvement show promise in their ability to simultaneously reduce crime and improve community relations. Despite the growing number of police agencies that report implementing these strategies, however, police–community relations have not shown widespread improvement. Organizational frameworks help to identify factors that might lead police agencies to prioritize enforcement and crime control over community relations, as well as the organizational barriers to effective community-based reform. A reliance on efficiency and centralized authority, resource dependency, and symbolic legitimacy all may help to explain police agencies’ lack of effective community-based reform efforts.
Article
Crime Hot Spots
David Weisburd and Sean Wire
Hot spots of crime, and the criminology of place more generally, deviate from the traditional paradigm of criminology, in which the primary assumption and goal is to explain who is likely to commit crime and their motivations, and to explore interventions aimed at reducing individual criminality. Alternatively, crime hot spots account for the “where” of crime, specifically referring to the concentration of crime in small geographic areas. The criminology of place demands a rethinking in regard to how we understand the crime problem and offers alternate ways to predict, explain, and prevent crime. While place, as large geographic units, has been important since the inception of criminology as a discipline, research examining crime concentrations at a micro-geographic level has only recently begun to be developed. This approach has been facilitated by improvements to data availability, technology, and the understanding of crime as a function of the environment. The new crime and place paradigm is rooted in the past three decades of criminological research centered on routine activity theory, crime concentrations, and hot spots policing.
The focus on crime hot spots has led to several core empirical findings. First, crime is meaningfully concentrated, such that a large proportion of crime events occur at relatively few places within larger geographies like cities. This may be termed the law of crime concentration at places (see Weisburd, 2015). Additionally, most hot spots of crime are stable over time, and thus present promising opportunities for crime prevention. Crime hot spots vary within higher geographic units, suggesting both that there is a loss of information at higher levels of aggregation and that there are clear “micro communities” within the larger conceptualization of a neighborhood. Finally, crime at place is predictable, which is important for being able to understand why crime is concentrated in one place and not another, as well as to develop crime prevention strategies. These empirical characteristics of crime hot spots have led to the development of successful police interventions to reduce crime. These interventions are generally termed hot spots policing.
Article
Crime Mapping and Policing
Lisa Tompson
The empirical truism that crime clusters geographically has increasingly informed police practice in the first two decades of the 21st century. This has been greatly aided by crime mapping, which can be thought of as a summary term for the geographic analysis of data related to crime and disorder. Crime analysts use a range of mapping techniques to describe and explain patterns in data, being mindful of the unique qualities of geographically referenced data. These include point pattern maps, thematic maps, kernel density estimation, and GI* statistic maps. Rate maps are also used when the aim is to understand the risk of victimization. Crime maps can be used to identify hot spots for targeted action, identify recently committed crimes that might form part of a linked series, monitor the impact of police initiatives, and aid understanding of crime problems. Environmental criminology theory is often used for the latter of these purposes, as this can explain spatiotemporal patterns revealed through crime mapping and assists in understanding the mechanisms driving the patterns. The logic for organizing police efforts around geographical crime concentration is instinctive: by focusing on a small number of locations with high crime volumes, police can be more focused and hence effective. Thus, “hot spots policing” has become business as usual in many jurisdictions, focusing attention at small units of geography. Hot spot policing has, in many countries in the early 21st century, evolved into “predictive policing,” which is a data-driven crime forecasting approach. However, this approach has attracted strong criticism for further entrenching bias in the criminal justice system. Critics argue that the data sets on which the predictive policing algorithms are founded are racially biased and perpetuate police attention on communities of color. This serves to highlight the systematic biases that can be present in crime-related data, and professional crime analysts use a range of approaches to mitigate such biases, such as triangulating data sources.
Article
Crime Mapping and Spatial Analysis
Matthew Valasik
Crime mapping and the spatial analysis of crime includes a variety of techniques and topics. The most rudimentary form of crime mapping is the use of geographic information systems to visualize spatial patterns and organize geographical data for more traditional statistical analysis, i.e., multivariate regression. Spatial analyses may be used in an exploratory way to help ascertain how certain environmental or ecological factors of a neighborhood may affect the geographic distribution of crime. Of particular interest is an understanding of the spatial patterns of crime and responses to them. Topics related to understanding such patterns include crime displacement and diffusion, the mobility patterns of criminal participants, and the evaluation of the effectiveness of geographically targeted crime reduction strategies.
There is a robust relationship between crime and space. Within the field of criminology, crime mapping remains an innovative domain with new techniques and visualizations, which assist researchers and practitioners in better understanding how the social and physical environments affect criminal behavior. Combining new approaches like spatialized network analysis or risk terrain modeling with more conventional crime mapping and spatial analysis techniques allows for a more holistic strategy that could inform neighborhood public safety and aid in directing the allocation of resources, e.g., specialized law enforcement and directed patrol, in a more efficient manner.
Article
Critical Challenges to Police Officer Wellness
Brooke McQuerrey Tuttle, Daniel M. Blumberg, and Konstantinos Papazoglou
Police officers face unique challenges in the line of duty that threaten their health and well-being. Officers experience organizational, operational, community-related, and personal stressors ranging from shift work and critical incident response to public pressures related to police-community relations and social media. Police stress was amplified by the COVID-19 global public health crisis and the fractured community–police relations during the civil unrest of 2020 following a high-profile police use-of-force death in the United States. Exposure to police stress and trauma presents external challenges to wellness which makes officers vulnerable to experiencing compassion fatigue, moral injury, and burnout. Compassion fatigue, resulting from caring for those who suffer, is associated with feelings of anger, anxiety, guilt, hopelessness, and powerlessness. Other symptoms may include emotional instability, diminished self-esteem, self-harm, inability to concentrate, hypervigilance, disorientation, rigidity, apathy, perfectionism, and preoccupation to trauma. Furthermore, moral injury occurs when officers witness or take part in acts that violate their deeply held moral beliefs, which in turn carries implications for psychological and spiritual well-being. The interconnectedness of challenges to officer wellness are detrimental to physical, cognitive, emotional, spiritual, behavioral, and social health, as well as ethical decision-making in the line of duty. Negative health outcomes include risk for sleep disorders, cardiovascular disease, destructive coping, posttraumatic stress disorder, and suicide.
Implications from prior research with police, other frontline professionals, veterans, and military personnel have led to a police health promotion approach that focuses on wellness, ethics, and resilience, as well as a number of interventions and techniques that can potentially promote wellness and effective stress management for police officers. Training related to stress management and wellness promotion have been found to significantly improve officers’ performance in the line of duty and overall health. This includes viewing wellness as a perishable skill, requiring ongoing practice, updated training, and numerous outside resources (e.g., psychological services, posttrauma intervention, peer support, and chaplaincy). Stress management techniques, gratitude and appreciation letters, mindfulness, and other community-oriented programs are some examples of effective strategies to promote the health of the law enforcement community. Furthermore, compassion satisfaction, emotional intelligence, and emotional regulation play a significant role in helping officers maintain stability in their personal and professional lives while capably serving their communities.
Article
Cyberpolicing
Jin R. Lee
Cybercrime is generally understood as behaviors that involve the use of virtual environments and/or networked computer systems to generate harm. This broad definition of cybercrime captures a variety of different online behaviors, including interpersonal violence offenses such as cyberbullying and online harassment, as well as those involving the unauthorized use and access of computer systems such as malware dissemination, ransomware, and distributed denial of service attacks.
Cybercrimes are policed by both law enforcement (e.g., local, state or provincial, federal) and extralegal agencies. Local law enforcement agencies are composed of police officers, who are generally tasked with maintaining public order within a specific municipality or county, including investigating crimes, apprehending offenders, and implementing crime prevention mechanisms (e.g., educating the public on available resources; proactive neighborhood patrol) within their local jurisdiction. State and provincial law enforcement agencies are larger police forces that are generally responsible for conduct that occurs within their wider state and provincial borders, including conducting highway traffic control and providing forensic services to smaller local agencies residing within their state or province. State and provincial agencies often become involved only when local forces are limited in their resources to adequately respond to an incident or when local jurisdictional conflicts exist. Federal agencies operate at the highest level of law enforcement, because they deal with crimes that involve homeland security. In fact, federal agencies can obtain cooperation among several national jurisdictions depending on existing political ties and extradition agreements. Several extralegal agencies (e.g., Internet Crime Complaint Center; Computer Emergency Response Teams) are also active in responding to cybercrime incidents. These agencies, which may develop from either public or private sectors, generally perform acts that support law enforcement, including facilitating communication and information sharing between victims and law enforcement agencies.
Despite efforts to sanction online offenses, research suggests that cybercrimes present several challenges for law enforcement agencies across all levels of government. First, cybercrime offenders often anonymize their attacks and offline identities, making arrests and criminal prosecutions extremely challenging. Second, even if offenders and their actions are identified, agencies are limited by their geographic location and jurisdiction. Third, the technical nature of cybercrime means that victims may not be aware of their victimization until months after the attack, which may affect the identification of digital evidence necessary to prosecute an offender. Fourth, law enforcement officers may not possess the knowledge and expertise needed to secure and investigate a digital crime scene adequately.
One approach that could improve how cybercrimes are enforced and regulated is the paradigm of evidence-based policing (EBP). EBP is a collective effort involving law enforcement agencies, academic researchers, and industry personnel/practitioners, whose central focus is to develop a robust evidence base that can identify current and emerging problems in policing, examine possible solutions to these problems using rigorous scientific methods, and monitor these solutions over extended periods of time to ensure successful outcomes are maintained. Knowing which operational practices work best in different situations will not only lead to a more intentional use of officers’ time and agency resources but also strengthen public perceptions of law enforcement in responding to cybercrime calls for service.
Article
Errors of Justice in Policing
Brian Forst
Errors of justice are a serious problem, and the police contribute substantially to them. Much can be done to reduce these errors, involving overreaction, underreaction, and misreaction that imposes either due process errors on the arrested or errors of impunity on the community, or both. The sources, severity, and frequency of these errors vary considerably, and they vary by circumstance and the characteristics of the victim, suspect, and community. Dealing with them effectively begins with understanding these variants and the costs, both social and fiscal, of each type of error on the community. Police legitimacy is likely to be enhanced in the process, especially in an era of mistrust of public institutions.
Article
Evidence-Based Policing
Renée J. Mitchell
Evidence-based policing (EBP) by its original definition is “the use of the best available research on the outcomes of police work to implement guidelines and evaluate agencies, units, and officers.” Since then, the definition of EBP has been evolving, with academics adjusting the definition to better fit how police and researchers apply research in the field. EBP is best described as an approach to law enforcement and public safety. It involves the application of empirical research, scientific methods, and data-driven decision-making to policing practices, strategies, and policies. The term “evidence-based” is borrowed from the field of medicine and has been adapted to various disciplines, including education, social work, and, in this case, policing.
An EBP approach emphasizes the following:
1. Use of research and data: Implementing strategies and practices shown to be effective through rigorous research.
2. Evaluation and adaptation: Continuously assessing the effectiveness of policing methods and making adjustments based on empirical evidence.
3. Scientific methodology: Applying the principles of scientific inquiry to test the effectiveness of different policing strategies.
EBP is a practical approach that integrates scientific research into police work to improve outcomes, decision-making, and policy development in law enforcement. This approach has slowly begun to create a shift in both academics’ and practitioners’ points of view. When a paradigm shift occurs in a scientific discipline, there is always a period before the shift occurs where the definitions and parameters of the discipline are ambiguous. A paradigm shift refers to a fundamental change in the underlying assumptions or dominant methodologies within a given scientific discipline or more broadly in any intellectual field or approach. This concept was popularized by philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Paradigm shifts can initially face resistance until the new paradigm becomes widely accepted and mainstream.
In essence, a paradigm shift is not just a small modification or improvement, but a complete overhaul of the foundational principles and methods in a particular field, leading to a new way of thinking and understanding. As EBP developed from evidence-based medicine, it has followed the same developmental trajectory of changes in definition and application, resistance to adoption, advocates and critics of the approach, and the development of societies to assist with incorporation of practices by police departments. EBP is different from other disciplines such as criminology or crime science, as the core of EBP is to use rigorous research methodologies to test policing practices in the field. The reason for this approach is to determine whether policing practices “work” under real-life circumstances rather than just theoretically. Additionally, EBP advocates argue that rigorous testing is a better approach to serving the public than having officers use anecdotes to drive practices. EBP is an approach that not all academics or practitioners agree with, but it is one way of determining the causal effects of a policing practice.
Article
Experimental Methods in Criminology
Rylan Simpson
Experimental methods have been a hallmark of the scientific enterprise since its inception. Over time, experiments have become much more sophisticated, complex, and nuanced. Experiments have also become much more diverse, and their use within research settings has expanded from the physical sciences to the social sciences, including criminology.
Within criminology, experimental methods can manifest in the form of laboratory experiments, field experiments, and quasi-experiments, each of which present their own strengths and weaknesses. Experimental methods can also be applied in the context of between-subject and within-subject paradigms, both of which exhibit unique characteristics and implications. Experimental methods—as a research method—are unique in their ability to help establish causal relationships among variables. This article introduces the topic of experimental methods in criminology, with a specific focus on the subfield of policing.
Article
Gangs, Crime, and Race
Roberto R. Aspholm
Street gangs first emerged on a broad scale in U.S. cities in the late 19th century in step with industrialization, urbanization, and mass waves of European immigration. Up until the 1960s, the vast majority of gang members in the United States were second- and third-generation European immigrants. Like their Black and Latino successors, these groups routinely engaged in collective violence, which helped push nationwide levels of homicide to a historic peak toward the end of Prohibition. At the same time, White ethnic gangs were integrated into the urban political machines and organized crime syndicates of that era. Moreover, these groups existed within a burgeoning urban industrial economy in which an abundance of low-skilled manufacturing jobs provided readily available opportunities for gang members to transition out of gang life in late adolescence or early adulthood. New Deal policies institutionalizing protections for unions and workers and expanding homeownership opportunities via federal mortgage underwriting, in turn, greatly enhanced economic security for widening sectors of the working class, especially White workers. In short, political patronage, lucrative illegal rackets, a vibrant labor movement, and New Deal labor and housing policies variously punched a ticket to upward mobility for countless White gang members during this period, and, by the mid-1960s, White street gangs had largely disappeared from the urban landscape.
During and after World War II, meanwhile, millions of Southern Blacks as well as Mexicans and Puerto Ricans migrated to America’s urban industrial centers. Conversely, millions of Whites left these cities in the postwar decades, an exodus facilitated by federal highway construction and housing policies that promoted racially exclusive suburbanization. Industry largely followed this outmigration in search of cheaper land, more pliable labor, lower taxes, and greater profits, leaving many central cities economically devastated and without an industrial base for their increasingly Black and Latino working class. At the same time, the urban political machines and organized crime groups that had once provided mobility for White ethnic gangs were in dramatic decline as municipal governance was bureaucratized and criminal rackets were supplanted by the development and expansion of legalized gambling and revolving credit markets. It is within this context that contemporary Black and Latino street gangs emerged and have persisted since the 1960s. Unlike their White predecessors, today’s gang members have been largely excluded from the conventional economy at the same time that society has abandoned the welfare state in favor of incarceration as its major strategy for managing inequality. Prison, the illicit drug trade, and persistent economic dislocation are among the fundamental realities shaping life for contemporary gang members.
Street gangs, violence, and crime, both historical and contemporary, must be understood against this broader backdrop of societal transformation.
Article
Global Developments in Policing Provision in the 21st Century
Clifford Shearing and Philip Stenning
Significant developments in our understandings of, and thinking about, “policing” have occurred in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These have been reflected in redefinitions of the words “police” and “policing” that scholars use when writing about it. By the middle of the 19th century the word "police" in English was understood to refer to the state-sponsored institution responsible for order maintenance, crime control, and law enforcement, and its officers; and the word policing referred to what its officers did to achieve these objectives. Police were typically referred to as “the police,” indicating that they uniquely performed this role. But in the decades after the Second World War, scholars and consultants brought the world’s attention to a dramatic growth in nonstate institutions that were fulfilling similar roles; they were referred to as “private security.”
Research revealed that private security were undertaking the same tasks and responsibilities as the police were but doing so in different ways, with different objectives, and different means. They more often saw their role as loss prevention—rather than crime control—and did not see presenting offenders before the criminal justice system as a good way to achieve that. Rather, they developed ways of achieving order and preventing losses that drew on the power of their clients—for instance to exclude troublemakers from their property—rather than the kinds of legal powers relied on by the police, which they typically did not have anyway. Policing scholars began to talk of “private police” and “private policing.” What is more, research revealed that within a couple of decades of the end of the Second World War, private security personnel had come to outnumber public police personnel, in some countries by as much as 3 to 1. It also became apparent that even within government there was an increasing number of organizations and personnel, other than “the police,” such as customs officials, tax inspectors, and so forth, who could also be considered to be doing policing. Many police researchers redefined themselves as policing researchers, interested in studying all these different public and private organizations and personnel who seemed to be doing policing, and what their relationships with each other were.
By the 1990s, in light of these research findings, policing scholars began to talk about plural policing provision, rather than just about the relationships between “private security” and “the police.” A whole lot of new questions arose: Who is doing policing? What are the different ways of doing it? In whose interests is it being done? What are the implications of this for policing policy? How can policing provision be effectively governed given its prolific diversity? How are developments like globalization and technological advances impacting the challenges faced by policing providers? And which providers are best placed to meet which of these challenges? And finally, is policing just about addressing human threats to safety and security ? What about threats to safety and security arising from natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, and droughts, or other manifestations of climate change such as global warming? Or from pandemics and the like? Or from the development of artificial intelligence? In short, what do “policing” and policing provision mean in the 21st century? And how will we understand and think about them in the future? Certainly not as we understood them in the middle of the 20th century.
