Democracy and the Police (Critical Perspectives on Crime and Law)
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: November 12, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 280
ISBN-13: 9780804755641
Subjects: Criminal law; Police & security services; Law; Legal Reference / Law Profession; Politics / Current Events; USA; Political Freedom & Security - Law Enforcement; Political Ideologies - Democracy; Law / Criminal Law; Criminal Law - General; Police; Police-community relations; Rule of law; United States
Description: Everyone is for "democratic policing"; everyone is against a "police state." But what do those terms mean, and what should they mean? The first half of this book traces the connections between the changing conceptions of American democracy over the past half-century and the roughly contemporaneous shifts in ideas about the police--linking, on the one hand, the downfall of democratic pluralism and the growing popularity of participatory and deliberative democracy with, on the other hand, the shift away from the post-war model of professional law enforcement and the movement toward a new orthodoxy of community policing. The second half of the book explores how a richer set of ideas about policing might change our thinking about a range of problems and controversies associated with the police, ranging from racial profiling and the proliferation of private security, to affirmative action and the internal governance of law enforcement agencies.