This article is an effort to provide data on racial profiling that are not as easily dismissed as anecdotal accounts of individual motorists. The authors conducted a survey of African American police officers in the Milwaukee Police Department in Wisconsin regarding their personal experiences of having been racially profiled, defining racial profiling as any situation in which race is used by a police officer or agency to determine the potential criminality of an individual. This study was not an investigation of the Milwaukee Police Department or of racial profiling within the department but rather of the extent to which Black police officers perceive they have been subjected to racial profiling by any police officer or agency. Police officers understand the intricacies, strategies, and techniques of lawenforcement. Therefore, the observations of Black police officers on the reasonableness of situations in which they have been stopped by police have exceptional validity.
This study explores the relationship between media portrayal of crime and conditions in the political economy. Based on a content analysis of articles about crime appearing in Time magazine during the post-World War II period, it is argued that news about crime is ideological, that is, it gives an inadequate and distorted picture of the contradictory reality of crime in the context of the capitalist political economy in the United States.
Places recent trends in policing in the USA into historical context, emphasizing the critical importance of political, economic, and social forces on the formation and development of police institutions and practices. Specifically, this paper describes four major developments in policing in relation to the US political economy: pre‐industrial police, industrial police, modern police, and postmodern police. Each of these developments has unique characteristics. At the same time, each retains certain structural imperatives which transcend the particulars and ultimately tend to preserve the police as front line defenders of the status quo. It is through an analysis of historically specific characteristics of, and fundamental structural conditions for policing that this paper contributes to a better understanding of the potential of contemporary police agencies to play a role in achieving either greater social justice or just greater social control.
Abstract. This article explores the relationship between the political economy and the criminal justice system through an analysis of the impact of long economic cycles in the social structure of accumulation on U.S. federal criminal justice legislation from 1948 to 1987. An analysis is conducted which compares both qualitative and quantitative changes in these legislative acts from the period of economic expansion (1948 to 1967) to the period of contraction (1968 to 1987). The research findings of this investigation indicate that mechanisms of social control intensify during periods of prolonged economic contraction; however, the concept of an "exceptional state", with a proportional increase in more coercive crime control strategies, is somewhat challenged.
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