Street Justice: Some Micro-Moral Reservations, Comment on Sykes (From Police and Society: Touchstone Readings, P 155- 158, 1995, Victor E. Kappeler, ed. - See NCJ-151401)

• NCJ Number: 151408
• Author(s): C B Klockars
• Date Published: 1995
• Length: 4 pages
• Sale Source: Waveland Press, Inc.
• Publication Type: Survey
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Justice Quarterly, 3 (4) (December 1986): 513-516. Reprinted with permission of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

Annotation

This commentary responds to the article by Gary Sykes (NCJ-151407), which presents a moral justification for the distribution of street justice by urban police officers.

Abstract

The original article argues that order maintenance policing actually helps the poor and disadvantaged members of a community, if only because those are the people who most often request various police services. This commentary points to two perceived flaws in Sykes' thesis. The first is that the thesis is too abstract and general to provide any guidelines for distinguishing which types of order maintenance policing are beneficial and which are detrimental. The second flaw is Sykes' error of mistaking a specific case for a very general one. That is, his assertion that all community norms in all communities should be supported does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that supporting community norms is the only motive for order maintenance policing. This article examines the concept of street justice from a micro-, rather than a macro-, morality perspective.