Contents: recent & long term trends in U.S. homicide; youth violence, guns & the illicit-drug industry; patterns, stability & change of homicidal victimization; age patterns in homicide; homicide arrest trends & the impact of demographic changes on a set of U.S. central cities; int'l. & regional violence patterns; violence against women; non-lethal violence against women by marital partners; violence & parenting; the Menendez murders; predicting rearrest for violence; homicide in convenience stores; nonfatal violence in the work place, & much more.
Includes: intervention strategies based on data analysis, spatial analysis, victim precipitation, how to manage large hierarchical databases for easy & efficient access to incident, victim & offender information, & much more. 29 presentations. 70 charts, tables & graphs.
Analysts have long noted that some societies have much higher rates of criminal violence than others. They have also observed that the risk of being a victim or a perpetrator of violent crime varies considerably from one individual to another. In societies with ethnically and racially diverse populations, some ethnic and racial groups have been reported to have higher rates of violent offending and victimization than other groups. This series of essays explores the extent and causes of racial and ethnic differences in violent crime in the United States and several other contemporary societies.
The malign and long-lasting influence of Chicago police commander Jon Burge cannot be overestimated, particularly as fresh examples of local and national criminal-justice abuse continue to surface with dismaying frequency. Burge’s decades-long tenure on the Chicago police force was marked by racist and barbaric interrogation methods, including psychological torture, burnings, and mock executions—techniques that went far “beyond the usual beating.” After being exposed in 1989, he became a symbol of police brutality and the unequal treatment of nonwhite people, and the persistent outcry against him led to reforms such as the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois. But Burge hardly developed or operated in a vacuum, as Andrew S. Baer explores to stark effect here. He identifies the darkness of the Burge era as a product of local social forces, arising from a specific milieu beyond the nationwide racialized reactionary fever of the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, the popular resistance movements that rallied in his wake actually predated Burge’s exposure but cohered with unexpected power due to the galvanizing focus on his crimes and abuses. For more than thirty years, a shifting coalition including torture survivors, their families, civil rights attorneys, and journalists helped to corroborate allegations of violence, free the wrongfully convicted, have Burge fired and incarcerated, and win passage of a municipal reparations package, among other victories. Beyond the Usual Beating reveals that though the Burge scandal underscores the relationship between personal bigotry and structural racism in the criminal justice system, it also shows how ordinary people held perpetrators accountable in the face of intransigent local power.
