NCJ Number
183265
Editor(s)
Victor E. Kappeler
Date Published
1999
Length
523 pages
Annotation
This collection of readings, which provides multiple foundations for understanding the dynamic interrelationships between the police and society, presents chapters under the topics of a history of police and society, the role of the police in society, the society of police, policing society, and the police in postmodern society.
Abstract
Five chapters on the history of police and society address the evolving strategy of policing, the use and misuse of history in recent police patrol analysis, revising the histories and futures of policing, and how the public service image of the police masks the police use of repressive police tactics. Five chapters on the role of the police in society consider the mandate, strategies, and appearances of the police; the capacity to use force as the core of the police role; a moral defense of order-maintenance policing; some reservations about the use of police discretion on the streets to render justice; and the importance of the police role in giving the outward appearance of order in a neighborhood. Five chapters pertain to the society of police. The topics discussed are the quasi-military organization of the police, the informal "code" of police deviancy, police insensitivity to the perspectives of minorities, the occupational perspective of patrol officers, and the breeding of deviant conformity within police ideology and culture. Six articles on policing society focus on skid-row patrol work, the genesis and function of the police illegal use of violence, police accounts of "normal" force, police sexual violence against women, the police use of negative labels for citizens, and the police perception that the ends justifies the means. Six chapters focus on the police in postmodern society as they link conservative ideology to police practice, violence and symbolic violence, "third-party policing," the rhetoric of community policing, economic rhetoric and policing reform, and the militarizing of American police. For individual chapters, see 183266-71. Chapter notes and references and a subject index