Policing and Boundaries in a Violent Society
Policing and Boundaries in a Violent Society

Author: Guy Lamb

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-01-31

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1000536041

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This book explores how social and territorial boundaries have influenced the approaches and practices of the South Africa Police Service (SAPS). By means of a historical analysis of South Africa, this book introduces a new concept, ‘police frontierism’, which illuminates the nature of the relationships between the police, policing and boundaries, and can potentially be used for future case study research. Drawing on a wealth of research, this book examines how social and territorial boundaries strongly influenced police practices and behaviour in South Africa, and how social delineations amplify and distort existing police prejudices against those communities on the other side of the boundary. Focusing on cases of high-density police operations, public-order policing and the recent policing of the COVID-19 lockdown, this book argues that poor economic conditions combined with an increased militarisation of the SAPS and a decline in public trust in the police will result in boundaries continuing to fundamentally inform police work in South Africa. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in policing in post-colonial societies characterised by high levels of violence, as well as police work and police militarization.

Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries
Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries

Author: Ana Muñiz

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2015-08-03

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 081356977X

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Based on five years of ethnography, archival research, census data analysis, and interviews, Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries reveals how the LAPD, city prosecutors, and business owners struggled to control who should be considered “dangerous” and how they should be policed in Los Angeles. Sociologist Ana Muñiz shows how these influential groups used policies and everyday procedures to criminalize behaviors commonly associated with blacks and Latinos and to promote an exceedingly aggressive form of policing. Muñiz illuminates the degree to which the definitions of “gangs” and “deviants” are politically constructed labels born of public policy and court decisions, offering an innovative look at the process of criminalization and underscoring the ways in which a politically powerful coalition can define deviant behavior. As she does so, Muñiz also highlights the various grassroots challenges to such policies and the efforts to call attention to their racist effects. Muñiz describes the fight over two very different methods of policing: community policing (in which the police and the community work together) and the “broken windows” or “zero tolerance” approach (which aggressively polices minor infractions—such as loitering—to deter more serious crime). Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries also explores the history of the area to explain how Cadillac-Corning became viewed by outsiders as a “violent neighborhood” and how the city’s first gang injunction—a restraining order aimed at alleged gang members—solidified this negative image. As a result, Muñiz shows, Cadillac-Corning and other sections became a test site for repressive practices that eventually spread to the rest of the city.

Gender, Power, and Violence
Gender, Power, and Violence

Author: Angela J. Hattery

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-02-06

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1538118181

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What do the Catholic Church, college sports, Hollywood, prisons, the military, fraternities and politics have in common? All have extraordinarily high rates of sexual and intimate partner violence, and child sexual abuse. Sexual and intimate partner violence is part of the landscape that women and children live with. Women and children are subjected to high levels of sexual and intimate partner violence and in the era of #metoo, Gender, Power and Violence provides a nuanced analysis of the ways in which the organizational structure of an institution, like a college campus or Hollywood, can create an environment ripe for sexual and intimate partner violence and even child sexual abuse. Gender, Power, and Violence looks at the problem of sexual and intimate partner violence through cases, observing the role that institutions play in perpetuating gender based violence, and provide a better understanding about the ways in which institutional structures shape, or have mishandled, gender based violence. Angela J. Hattery and Earl Smith touch on current events that have highlighted the pervasiveness of gender based violence across the institutions they interrogate throughout the book, but also in the entertainment industry, the government, and television journalism. Gender, Power, and Violence gives the reader a better understanding of what factors shape who will be perpetrators, who will be victims, and how organizations respond (or not) when it is reported. It also offers recommendations for transforming these institutions so that they are safe for women and children of all genders.

Policing a Class Society
Policing a Class Society

Author: Sidney L. Harring

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781608468546

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An in-depth critical analysis of how ruling elites use the police institution in order to control communities.

Policing the Second Amendment
Policing the Second Amendment

Author: Jennifer Carlson

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2022-06-21

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0691212813

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An urgent look at the relationship between guns, the police, and race The United States is steeped in guns, gun violence—and gun debates. As arguments rage on, one issue has largely been overlooked—Americans who support gun control turn to the police as enforcers of their preferred policies, but the police themselves disproportionately support gun rights over gun control. Yet who do the police believe should get gun access? When do they pursue aggressive enforcement of gun laws? And what part does race play in all of this? Policing the Second Amendment unravels the complex relationship between the police, gun violence, and race. Rethinking the terms of the gun debate, Jennifer Carlson shows how the politics of guns cannot be understood—or changed—without considering how the racial politics of crime affect police attitudes about guns. Drawing on local and national newspapers, interviews with close to eighty police chiefs, and a rare look at gun licensing processes, Carlson explores the ways police talk about guns, and how firearms are regulated in different parts of the country. Examining how organizations such as the National Rifle Association have influenced police perspectives, she describes a troubling paradox of guns today—while color-blind laws grant civilians unprecedented rights to own, carry, and use guns, people of color face an all-too-visible system of gun criminalization. This racialized framework—undergirding who is “a good guy with a gun” versus “a bad guy with a gun”—informs and justifies how police understand and pursue public safety. Policing the Second Amendment demonstrates that the terrain of gun politics must be reevaluated if there is to be any hope of mitigating further tragedies.

Policing race, ethnicity and culture
Policing race, ethnicity and culture

Author: Jan Beek

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2023-03-28

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 1526165570

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How to deal with differences based on culture, ethnicity and race, has become a key issue of policing. This edited collected explores everyday, often mundane interactions between police officers and migrantised actors in European countries and asks how both sides deal with perceived differences. The contributions reflect that such differences are not just ‘out there’ but are being situationally (re-)produced in police-citizen encounters. By taking a comparative approach, the book develops a distinctly European perspective on these questions. The book contains 12 ethnographies from ten European countries, based on new and often innovative empirical research, two theoretical contributions, an introduction and a postface.

Police Power and Race Riots
Police Power and Race Riots

Author: Cathy Lisa Schneider

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2014-07-07

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0812209869

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Three weeks after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a New York City police officer shot and killed a fifteen-year-old black youth, inciting the first of almost a decade of black and Latino riots throughout the United States. In October 2005, French police chased three black and Arab teenagers into an electrical substation outside Paris, culminating in the fatal electrocution of two of them. Fires blazed in Parisian suburbs and housing projects throughout France for three consecutive weeks. Cathy Lisa Schneider explores the political, legal, and economic conditions that led to violent confrontations in neighborhoods on opposite sides of the Atlantic half a century apart. Police Power and Race Riots traces the history of urban upheaval in New York and greater Paris, focusing on the interaction between police and minority youth. Schneider shows that riots erupted when elites activated racial boundaries, police engaged in racialized violence, and racial minorities lacked alternative avenues of redress. She also demonstrates how local activists who cut their teeth on the American race riots painstakingly constructed social movement organizations with standard nonviolent repertoires for dealing with police violence. These efforts, along with the opening of access to courts of law for ethnic and racial minorities, have made riots a far less common response to police violence in the United States today. Rich in historical and ethnographic detail, Police Power and Race Riots offers a compelling account of the processes that fan the flames of urban unrest and the dynamics that subsequently quell the fires.

Inequality, Crime, And Social Control
Inequality, Crime, And Social Control

Author: George S Bridges

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-08

Total Pages: 589

ISBN-13: 0429979444

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This book brings together the most recent advances in theory and research on the relationship between social inequality and the control of criminal behavior, exploring the ways in which social class, race, gender, and age shape societal and organizational responses to crime.

Violence, Society and Radical Theory
Violence, Society and Radical Theory

Author: William Pawlett

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-17

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1317001699

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Shedding light on the relationship between violence and contemporary society, this volume explores the distinctive but little-known theories of violence in the work of Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard, applying these to a range of violent events - events often labelled ’inexplicable’ - in order to show how even the most extreme of acts can be seen as socially meaningful. The book offers an understanding of violence as fundamental to social relations and social organisation, departing from studies that focus on individual offenders and their psychological states to concentrate instead on the symbolic relations or exchanges between agents and between agents and the structures they find themselves inhabiting. Developing the notion of symbolic economies of violence to emphasise the volatility and ambivalence of social exchanges, Violence, Society and Radical Theory reveals the importance to our understanding of violence, of the relationship between the structural or systemic violence of consumer capitalist society and forms of ’counter-violence’ which attack this system. A theoretically rich yet grounded expansion of that which can be considered meaningful or thinkable within sociological theory, this ground-breaking book will appeal to scholars and students of social and political theory and contemporary philosophy.

A Genealogy of Violence and Religion
A Genealogy of Violence and Religion

Author: James Bernard Murphy

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2018-04-11

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1782845453

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Why are religious rituals, symbols, and rhetoric so full of images of blood, sacrifice, and death? Why does religious fervor so often lead to Holy War, Crusade, and Jihad? No wonder many people assume that religion tends to give rise to violence. But what if it were the other way around? What if violence actually gave rise to religion? So argued the French literary theorist and anthropologist Rene Girard (1923-2015). Described as the Darwin of the human sciences, he was elected to the French Academy in 2005 for his seminal theories of sacred violence. Girard argued that religious practices function to sublimate, regulate, and discharge human violence in controlled rituals. Where does violence come from? According to Girard, from the social nature of human desire itself. We desire things only because others desire them, so desire is inherently rivalrous, leading to violent conflict. But if a scapegoat can be found, then this war of all against all turns into a war of all against one. Social order, claimed Girard, stems from the unity of a lynch mob. Religious rituals then serve to commemorate the primordial murder of the scapegoat. What are we to make of Girards provocative claims about human desire, violence, scapegoat killings, and religion? Political philosopher James Bernard Murphy presents here a series of sharp and witty dialogues in which Girard attempts to defend his ideas against attacks by rival theorists, among them, Sigmund Freud, William James, Simone Weil, Elias Canetti and Joseph de Maistre. Whatever we might think of his answers, Girard asks challenging, unsettling questions. In these illuminating and lively exchanges, Girard squares off with the titans of social theory.