Stop Frisk And The Politics Of Crime In Chicago

Author : Simon Balto
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (18 download)

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Download or read book "The Law Has a Bad Opinion of Me" written by Simon Balto and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is about policing in Chicago's black community, and black Chicagoans' relationships with the police, from 1919 through the mid-1970s. Its central explorations revolve around black communities' dual experiences of being both under-protected and over-policed by the Chicago Police Department (CPD). On the one hand, it shows the degree to which the CPD and urban policymakers corralled criminal activity into black communities at various junctures, withheld police protection at others in order to extract political or economic favors, and consistently failed to respond effectively to black demands for protection from vice, crime, and white racist violence. On the other hand, it documents the many ways that racial suspicion contoured police actions toward black Chicagoans as early as the 1910s, and the many resulting abuses and harassments that followed. In so doing, it argues that the extreme racial disparities witnessed in the modern mass incarceration crisis originate not in the post-Civil Rights Wars on Crime and Drugs, as many scholars and citizens have assumes, but in local policing practices and traditions that have been extant and growing for a century. Racial disproportion in arrests (from which convictions and incarceration stem) is a very old tradition in Chicago, and was a feature of the city's law enforcement culture that nonpartisan observers began acknowledging a hundred years ago. Even when black people were not being arrested, they were frequently subject to an intensifying surveillance apparatus, and to mechanisms of control such as stop-and-frisk, harassment, and torture. To be sure, when the federal government unleashed the drug and crime wars beginning in the mid-1960s, they exacerbated the disparate ways that black people would be freighted with the weight of the criminal justice system. But those wars did not create such disparities, and their foundational logics when it came to treating black communities with suspicion and force were, at the wars' inceptions, already heavily engrained in law enforcement cultures, both locally and across the country. Those dual experiences - over-policed, under-protected - have sat at the heart of police-community dynamics for roughly a century. They continue to pose intense challenges for urban communities to this day.