The Anthropology of Police

Download The Anthropology of Police PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317419081
Total Pages : 378 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (174 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Anthropology of Police by : Kevin Karpiak

Download or read book The Anthropology of Police written by Kevin Karpiak and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the potential contributions of anthropology to the study of police? Even beyond the methodological particularities and geographic breadth of cultural anthropology, there are a set of conceptual and analytical traditions that have much to bring to broader scholarship in police studies. Including original and international contributions from both senior and emerging scholars, this pioneering book represents a foundational document for a burgeoning field of study: the anthropology of police. The chapters in this volume open up the question of police in new ways: mining the disciplinary legacies of anthropology in order to discover new conceptual tools, methods, and pedagogies; reworking relationships between "police," "public," and "researcher" in ways that open up new avenues for exploration at the same time as they articulate new demands; and retracing a hauntology that, through interactions with individuals and collectives, constitutes a body politic through the figure of police. Illustrating the various ways that anthropology enables a reassessment of the police/violence relationship with a broad consideration of the human stakes at the center, this book will be of interest to criminologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and the broad interdisciplinary field invested in the study of policing, order-making, and governance.

The Torture Letters

Download The Torture Letters PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022672980X
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Torture Letters by : Laurence Ralph

Download or read book The Torture Letters written by Laurence Ralph and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.

Writing the World of Policing

Download Writing the World of Policing PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022649778X
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (264 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Writing the World of Policing by : Didier Fassin

Download or read book Writing the World of Policing written by Didier Fassin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-10-25 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As policing has recently become a major topic of public debate, it was also a growing area of ethnographic research. Writing the World of Policing brings together an international roster of scholars who have conducted fieldwork studies of law enforcement in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods on five continents. How, they ask, can ethnography illuminate the role of the police in society? Are there important aspects of policing that are not captured through interviews and statistics? And how can the study of law enforcement shed light on the practice of ethnography? What might studying policing teach us about the epistemological and ethical challenges of participant observation? Beyond these questions of crucial interest for criminology and, more generally, the social sciences, Writing the World of Policing provides a timely discussion of one of the most problematic institutions in contemporary society.

Enforcing Order

Download Enforcing Order PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 0745670946
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (456 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Enforcing Order by : Didier Fassin

Download or read book Enforcing Order written by Didier Fassin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-09-19 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most incidents of urban unrest in recent decades - including the riots in France, Britain and other Western countries - have followed lethal interactions between the youth and the police. Usually these take place in disadvantaged neighborhoods composed of working-class families of immigrant origin or belonging to ethnic minorities. These tragic events have received a great deal of media coverage, but we know very little about the everyday activities of urban policing that lie behind them. Over the course of 15 months, at the time of the 2005 riots, Didier Fassin carried out an ethnographic study in one of the largest precincts in the Paris region, sharing the life of a police station and cruising with the patrols, in particular the dreaded anti-crime squads. Far from the imaginary worlds created by television series and action movies, he uncovers the ordinary aspects of law enforcement, characterized by inactivity and boredom, by eventless days and nights where minor infractions give rise to spectacular displays of force and where officers express doubts about the significance and value of their own jobs. Describing the invisible manifestations of violence and unrecognized forms of discrimination against minority youngsters, undocumented immigrants and Roma people, he analyses the conditions that make them possible and tolerable, including entrenched policies of segregation and stigmatization, economic marginalization and racial discrimination. Richly documented and compellingly told, this unique account of contemporary urban policing shows that, instead of enforcing the law, the police are engaged in the task of enforcing an unequal social order in the name of public security.

Police, Provocation, Politics

Download Police, Provocation, Politics PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501762184
Total Pages : 135 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Police, Provocation, Politics by : Deniz Yonucu

Download or read book Police, Provocation, Politics written by Deniz Yonucu and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Police, Provocation, Politics, Deniz Yonucu presents a counterintuitive analysis of contemporary policing practices, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence, perpetual conflict, and ethnosectarian discord by the state security apparatus. Situating Turkish policing within a global context and combining archival work and oral history narratives with ethnographic research, Yonucu demonstrates how counterinsurgency strategies from the Cold War and decolonial eras continue to inform contemporary urban policing in Istanbul. Shedding light on counterinsurgency's affect-and-emotion-generating divisive techniques and urban dimensions, Yonucu shows how counterinsurgent policing strategies work to intervene in the organization of political dissent in a way that both counters existing alignments among dissident populations and prevents emergent ones. Yonucu suggests that in the places where racialized and dissident populations live, provocations of counterviolence and conflict by state security agents as well as their containment of both cannot be considered disruptions of social order. Instead, they can only be conceptualized as forms of governance and policing designed to manage actual or potential rebellious populations.

Police Work and Identity

Download Police Work and Identity PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1315309831
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (153 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Police Work and Identity by : Andrew Faull

Download or read book Police Work and Identity written by Andrew Faull and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about the men and women who police contemporary South Africa. Drawing on rich, original ethnographical data, it considers how officers make sense of their jobs and how they find meaning in their duties. It demonstrates that the dynamics that lead to police abuses and scandals in transitional and neo-liberalising regimes such as South Africa can be traced to the day-to-day experiences and ambitions of the average police officer. It is about the stories they tell themselves about themselves and their social worlds, and how these shape the order they produce through their work. By focusing on police officers, this book positions the individual in primacy over the organisation, asking what policing looks like when motivated by the pursuit of ontological security in precarious contexts. It acknowledges but downplays the importance of police culture in determining officers’ attitudes and behaviour, and reminds readers that most officers’ lives are entangled in, and shaped by a range of social, political and cultural forces. It suggests that a job in the South African Police Service (SAPS) is primarily just that: a job. Most officers join the organisation after other dreams have slipped beyond reach, their presence in the Service being almost accidental. But once employed, they re-write their self-narratives and enact carefully choreographed performances to ease managerial and public pressure, and to rationalize their coercive practices. In an era where ‘evidence’ and ‘what works’ reigns supreme, and where ‘cop culture’ is often deemed a primary socializing force, this book emphasises how officers’ personal histories, ambitions, and vulnerabilities remain central to how policing unfolds on the street.

Provisional Authority

Download Provisional Authority PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022640384X
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (264 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Provisional Authority by : Beatrice Jauregui

Download or read book Provisional Authority written by Beatrice Jauregui and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-28 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Policing as a global form is often fraught with excessive violence, corruption, and even criminalization. These sorts of problems are especially omnipresent in postcolonial nations such as India, where Beatrice Jauregui has spent several years studying the day-to-day lives of police officers in its most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. In this book, she offers an empirically rich and theoretically innovative look at the great puzzle of police authority in contemporary India and its relationship to social order, democratic governance, and security. Jauregui explores the paradoxical demands placed on Indian police, who are at once routinely charged with abuses of authority at the same time that they are asked to extend that authority into any number of both official and unofficial tasks. Her ethnography of their everyday life and work demonstrates that police authority is provisional in several senses: shifting across time and space, subject to the availability and movement of resources, and dependent upon shared moral codes and relentless instrumental demands. In the end, she shows that police authority in India is not simply a vulgar manifestation of raw power or the violence of law but, rather, a contingent and volatile social resource relied upon in different ways to help realize human needs and desires in a pluralistic, postcolonial democracy. Provocative and compelling, Provisional Authority provides a rare and disquieting look inside the world of police in India, and shines critical light on an institution fraught with moral, legal and political contradictions.

Police in Africa

Download Police in Africa PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190676639
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (96 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Police in Africa by : Jan Beek

Download or read book Police in Africa written by Jan Beek and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: State police forces in Africa are a curiously neglected subject of study, even within the framework of security issues and African states. This work brings together criminologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, political scientists and others who have engaged with police forces across the continent and the publics with whom they interact to provide street-level perspectives from below and inside Africa's police forces.

Danger, Duty, and Disillusion

Download Danger, Duty, and Disillusion PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Waveland Press
ISBN 13 : 1478607939
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (786 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Danger, Duty, and Disillusion by : Joan C. Barker

Download or read book Danger, Duty, and Disillusion written by Joan C. Barker and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 1998-11-07 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insider view of an urban subculture! While much of the literature on police analyzes critically what they do, few works address issues of how police officers feel about their chosen profession, their worldview, or their visions. This refreshingly original and unique ethnographic contribution by anthropologist Joan Barker exposes the human elementone rarely seen by non-policeof officers working for the often-controversial L.A.P.D. During her twenty years of fieldwork, Barker gathered valuable information through formal, in-depth interviews and firsthand experiences, distilling her findings into an illuminating, coherent account. She discovers that five phases of occupational socialization normatively mold officers experiences and perceptions. Fleshing out her discussion is the compelling narrative of Fred, a traditional officer whose authentic voice reveals feelings and attitudes that manifest the essence of the human who does the job of policing. An insider view of an urban subculture usually known only from its public presentation.

From Family to Police Force

Download From Family to Police Force PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501759566
Total Pages : 109 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis From Family to Police Force by : Farhana Ibrahim

Download or read book From Family to Police Force written by Farhana Ibrahim and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Family to Police Force illuminates the production and contestation of social, familial, and national order on a South Asian borderland. In the borderland that divides Kutch, a district in the western Indian state of Gujarat, from Sindh, a southern province in Pakistan, there are many forces at work: civil and border police, the air wing of the armed forces, paramilitary forces, and various intelligence agencies that depute officers to the region. These groups are the major actors in the field of security and policing. Farhana Ibrahim offers a bird's-eye view of these groups, drawing on long-standing anthropological engagement with the region. She observes policing on multiple levels, showing in detail that the nation-state is only one of the scales at which policing is enacted at a borderland. Ibrahim draws on multiple sources and forms of policing structure to illuminate everyday interaction on the personal scale, bringing families and individuals into the broader picture. From Family to Police Force looks beyond the obvious sites, sources, and modes of policing to show the distinctions between the act of policing and the institution of the police.

Sentiment, Reason, and Law

Download Sentiment, Reason, and Law PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501740067
Total Pages : 186 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Sentiment, Reason, and Law by : Jeffrey T. Martin

Download or read book Sentiment, Reason, and Law written by Jeffrey T. Martin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if the job of police was to cultivate the political will of a community to live with itself (rather than enforce law, keep order, or fight crime)? In Sentiment, Reason, and Law, Jeffrey T. Martin describes a world where that is the case. The Republic of China on Taiwan spent nearly four decades as a single-party state under dictatorial rule (1949–1987) before transitioning to liberal democracy. Here, Martin describes the social life of a neighborhood police station during the first rotation in executive power following the democratic transition. He shows an apparent paradox of how a strong democratic order was built on a foundation of weak police powers, and demonstrates how that was made possible by the continuity of an illiberal idea of policing. His conclusion from this paradox is that the purpose of the police was to cultivate the political will of the community rather than enforce laws and keep order. As Sentiment, Reason, and Law shows, the police force in Taiwan exists as an "anthropological fact," bringing an order of reality that is always, simultaneously and inseparably, meaningful and material. Martin unveils the power of this fact, demonstrating how the politics of sentiment that took shape under autocratic rule continued to operate in everyday policing in the early phase of the democratic transformation, even as a more democratic mode of public reason and the ultimate power of legal right were becoming more significant.

Police Encounters

Download Police Encounters PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804795371
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (47 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Police Encounters by : Ilana Feldman

Download or read book Police Encounters written by Ilana Feldman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-13 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Egypt came to govern Gaza as a result of a war, a failed effort to maintain Arab Palestine. Throughout the twenty years of its administration (1948–1967), Egyptian policing of Gaza concerned itself not only with crime and politics, but also with control of social and moral order. Through surveillance, interrogation, and a network of local informants, the police extended their reach across the public domain and into private life, seeing Palestinians as both security threats and vulnerable subjects who needed protection. Security practices produced suspicion and safety simultaneously. Police Encounters explores the paradox of Egyptian rule. Drawing on a rich and detailed archive of daily police records, the book describes an extensive security apparatus guided by intersecting concerns about national interest, social propriety, and everyday illegality. In pursuit of security, Egyptian policing established a relatively safe society, but also one that blocked independent political activity. The repressive aspects of the security society that developed in Gaza under Egyptian rule are beyond dispute. But repression does not tell the entire story about its impact on Gaza. Policing also provided opportunities for people to make claims of government, influence their neighbors, and protect their families.

Police Culture

Download Police Culture PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781611630473
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (34 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Police Culture by : Eugene A. Paoline

Download or read book Police Culture written by Eugene A. Paoline and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A highly identifiable topic of discussion among scholars and practitioners alike is police culture. Unfortunately, a large degree of vagueness and confusion also comes with this concept, as a variety of definitions, perspectives, and levels of aggregation are used to describe the ways in which officers cope with the problems and conditions faced out on the street and inside the police department. Police Culture: Adapting to the Strains of the Job provides clarity to such discussions by comprehensively organizing the disparate conceptualizations of police culture based on key assumptions, foundational research, primary cultural explanation, and common research methodologies. Based on in-person surveys of patrol officers from seven agencies of varying size, structure, and geographic locale, the book also provides one of the most comprehensive empirical examinations of police culture to date. The findings point to features of the occupation where there is widespread agreement among officers, as well as elements that produce cultural heterogeneity. The implications of these findings for the "homogeneity versus heterogeneity" police culture debate are discussed. The book also uniquely traces the historical context of police culture across five primary policing eras spanning the past several hundred years. The "lessons from the field" section offers several helpful hints for those interested in police research (in general) and survey methodologies specifically. The book is intended for police researchers, students, and practitioners with various interests and knowledge levels. "This is probably one of the most comprehensive studies of what police culture actually entails, delving into the aspects of what officers routinely deal with out in the field on a daily basis...what is so refreshing about this book is that not only is it well written and the subject matter so well researched, it is surprisingly easy to follow about the intentions of the study and the outcome of the findings themselves on police culture." -- Frank Fuller, Criminal Justice Review 39(4)

The Anthropology of Security

Download The Anthropology of Security PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Pluto Press
ISBN 13 : 9780745334585
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (345 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Anthropology of Security by : Mark Maguire

Download or read book The Anthropology of Security written by Mark Maguire and published by Pluto Press. This book was released on 2014-07-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a post-Cold War world of political unease and economic crisis, processes of securitisation are transforming nation-states, their citizens and non-citizens in profound ways. This book shows how contemporary Europe is now home to a vast security industry which uses biometric identification systems, CCTV and quasi-military techniques to police migrants and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. This is the first collection of anthropological studies of security with a particular but not exclusive emphasis on Europe. The Anthropology of Security draws together studies on the lived experiences of security and policing from the perspective of those most affected in their everyday lives. The anthropological perspectives in this volume stretch from the frontlines of policing and counter-terrorism to border control.

Methods of Desire

Download Methods of Desire PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 0824880471
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (248 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Methods of Desire by : Aurora Donzelli

Download or read book Methods of Desire written by Aurora Donzelli and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-08-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Indonesia has undergone a radical program of administrative decentralization and neoliberal reforms. In Methods of Desire, author Aurora Donzelli explores these changes through an innovative perspective—one that locates the production of neoliberalism in novel patterns of language use and new styles of affect display. Building on almost two decades of fieldwork, Donzelli describes how the growing influence of transnational lending agencies is transforming the ways in which people desire and voice their expectations, intentions, and entitlements within the emergent participatory democracy and restructuring of Indonesia’s political economy. She argues that a largely overlooked aspect of the Era Reformasi concerns the transition from a moral regime centered on the expectation that desires should remain hidden to a new emphasis on the public expression of individuals’ aspirations. The book examines how the large-scale institutional transformations that followed the collapse of the Suharto regime have impacted people’s lives and imaginations in the relatively remote and primarily rural Toraja highlands of Sulawesi. A novel concept of the individual as a bundle of audible and measurable desires has emerged, one that contrasts with the deep-rooted reticence toward the expression of personal preferences. The spreading of foreign discursive genres such as customer satisfaction surveys, training sessions, electoral mission statements, and fundraising auctions, and the diffusion of new textual artifacts such as checklists, flowcharts, and workflow diagrams are producing forms of citizenship, political participation, and moral agency that contrast with the longstanding epistemologies of secrecy typical of local styles of knowledge and power. Donzelli’s long-term ethnographic study examines how these foreign protocols are being received, absorbed, and readapted in a peripheral community of the Indonesian archipelago. Combining a telescopic perspective on our contemporary moment with a microscopic analysis of conversational practices, the author argues that the managerial forms of political rationality and the entrepreneurial morality underwriting neoliberal apparatuses proliferate through the working of small cogs, that is, acts of speech. By examining these concrete communicative exchanges, she sheds light on both the coherence and inconsistency underlying the worldwide diffusion of market logic to all domains of life.

The Gray Zone

Download The Gray Zone PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 1503607666
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (36 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Gray Zone by : Gregory Feldman

Download or read book The Gray Zone written by Gregory Feldman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on rare, in-depth fieldwork among an undercover police investigative team working in a southern EU maritime state, Gregory Feldman examines how "taking action" against human smuggling rings requires the team to enter the "gray zone", a space where legal and policy prescriptions do not hold. Feldman asks how this seven-member team makes ethical judgments when they secretly investigate smugglers, traffickers, migrants, lawyers, shopkeepers, and many others. He asks readers to consider that gray zones create opportunities both to degrade subjects of investigations and to take unnecessary risks for them. Moving in either direction largely depends upon bureaucratic conditions and team members' willingness to see situations from a variety of perspectives. Feldman explores their personal experiences and daily work in order to crack open wider issues about sovereignty, action, ethics, and, ultimately, being human. Situated at the intersection of the EU migration apparatus and the global, clandestine networks it identifies as security threats, this book allows Feldman to outline an ethnographically-based theory of sovereign action.

The Oxford Handbook of Police and Policing

Download The Oxford Handbook of Police and Policing PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199843899
Total Pages : 697 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (998 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Police and Policing by : Michael D. Reisig

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Police and Policing written by Michael D. Reisig and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The police are perhaps the most visible representation of government. They are charged with what has been characterized as an "impossible" mandate -- control and prevent crime, keep the peace, provide public services -- and do so within the constraints of democratic principles. The police are trusted to use deadly force when it is called for and are allowed access to our homes in cases of emergency. In fact, police departments are one of the few government agencies that can be mobilized by a simple phone call, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They are ubiquitous within our society, but their actions are often not well understood. The Oxford Handbook of Police and Policing brings together research on the development and operation of policing in the United States and elsewhere. Accomplished policing researchers Michael D. Reisig and Robert J. Kane have assembled a cast of renowned scholars to provide an authoritative and comprehensive overview of the institution of policing. The different sections of the Handbook explore policing contexts, strategies, authority, and issues relating to race and ethnicity. The Handbook also includes reviews of the research methodologies used by policing scholars and considerations of the factors that will ultimately shape the future of policing, thus providing persuasive insights into why and how policing has developed, what it is today, and what to expect in the future. Aimed at a wide audience of scholars and students in criminology and criminal justice, as well as police professionals, the Handbook serves as the definitive resource for information on this important institution.