Social disorganization theory focuses on the relationship between neighborhood structure, social control, and crime. Recent theoretical and empirical work on the relationship between community characteristics and crime has led to important refinements of social disorganization theory, yet there remain some substantive and methodological deficiencies in this body of work. This article addresses these problems and charts some promising new directions in social disorganization theory.

Racial profiling by the police has become an increasingly controversial issue in recent years, but we know little about the extent of the problem and even less about public perceptions of profiling. This article analyzes recent national survey data on citizens' views of racial profiling. We find that both race and personal experience with profiling are strong predictors of attitudes toward profiling and that, among blacks, social class affects views of the prevalence and acceptability of the practice. The findings on social class point to the need for further investigation and explanation of class influences on evaluations of the police.

This article examines perceptions of police misconduct in the United States and the factors that influence these perceptions. Using data from a large, nationally representative survey of whites, African Americans, and Hispanics, we examine how citizens' views of four types of police misconduct-verbal abuse, excessive force, unwarranted stops, and corruption-are shaped by race and other factors, including personal and vicarious experiences with police officers, exposure to mass media coverage of police behavior, and neighborhood conditions. Results show that race remains a key factor in structuring attitudes toward police misconduct even after controlling for these other variables. Race is a strong predictor in large part because blacks and Hispanics are more likely than whites to report having negative interactions with police, to be exposed to media reports of police misconduct, and to live in high-crime neighborhoods where policing may be contentious-each of which increases perceptions of police misconduct. The findings are consistent with the group-position model of race relations. Relations between the police and minority groups are a continuing problem in the United States and other multiracial societies. Surveys consistently document racial differences in perceptions of the police, with minorities more likely than whites to harbor negative views. While racial differences have been amply documented, less is known about the sources of these differences. This article explores this question through an examination of citizens' perceptions and reported experiences regarding several types of police misconduct. Theoretical Background The Group-Position Thesis Blacks and whites often perceive American social institutions in starkly different terms, and views of criminal justice are no exception. Indeed, race is one of the most salient predictors of attitudes toward the police and other criminal justice institutions: blacks are more likely than whites to express dissatisfaction with various aspects of policing. Much less is known about Hispanics' views of the police, however, and existing studies are limited either by focusing on Hispanics alone (Carter 1985), by comparing them only to whites (Holmes 1998), or by lumping blacks and Hispanics together as "nonwhite" or "minority." Few studies systematically compare blacks, whites, and Hispanics, and this literature is insufficient to determine whether Hispanic perceptions of the police take the form of a "minority-group" perspective similar to that of blacks, whether their views more closely align with those of whites, or whether they take an intermediate position in a white-Hispanic-African American "racial-hierarchy" model. We also do not fully understand why racial differences exist in citizens' relations with the The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the article.

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The issue of sex trafficking has become increasingly politicized in recent years due to the efforts of an influential moral crusade. This article examines the social construction of sex trafficking (and prostitution more generally) in the discourse of leading activists and organizations within the crusade, and concludes that the central claims are problematic, unsubstantiated, or demonstrably false. The analysis documents the increasing endorsement and institutionalization of crusade ideology in U.S. government policy and practice.