Changing National Perspective: A Decade of Transition in Large Industrial Cities (From Minority Group Threat, Crime, and Policing: Social Context and Social Control, P (64)-88, 1989, Pamela Irving Jackson -- NCJ-119389)

• NCJ Number: 119390
• Author(s): P I Jackson
• Date Published: 1989
• Length: 25 pages
• Sale Source: Praeger Publishers
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This study compares cross-sectional analyses of the determinants of municipal police resources in 1971 and 1978, relating the influence of social context to the link between minority population composition (with a focus on Hispanic and black Americans) and the level of public commitment to social control.

Abstract

The study focused on five large industrial cities: Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, and Newark. For these cities the decade of the 1970's was a time in which the salience of race and the importance of police brutality continued, but it was also a period of gradual movement away from municipal reliance on the police and on the law-and-order approach to crime reduction. As blacks grew in relative population size in these cities, achieving or approaching numerical majority, citizen demands for police accountability and fiscal cutbacks constrained the police agenda. Citizens assumed greater control over police policymaking. Curbs were placed on police use of deadly force, and new ethics codes provided severe sanctions for excessive use of force by officers. Police layoffs and reductions in the police budget also signaled declines in public faith in the ability of the police to fight crime. 11 tables.