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This paper extends the stop and frisk literature from New York City by examining pedestrian stops made by San Jose, California, police officers from January 2013 through March 2016 with a particular focus on benchmarking. Using violent crime suspects and nuisance-related calls for service (CFS) as comparators, we consider whether San Jose Police Department (SJPD) officers disproportionately stopped individuals from the city's dominant racial and ethnic groups citywide and in certain police beats with high levels of nuisance calls. Using violent crime suspects citywide as a benchmark, Whites were significantly overrepresented among those stopped by the police while Hispanics, Asians, and Blacks were underrepresented. The CFS findings at the beat level were consistent with the citywide findings for Blacks but reversed direction for Hispanics and varied for Asians depending upon beat and call type. We discuss possible reasons for this divergence across benchmarks and racial/ethnic groups and consider the implications for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of evidence points to high rates of group disorder in America's high schools. This paper examines several alternative models to account for the distribution of these events in the nation's largest school system. It is the thesis of the paper that while disorders occur in the schools, their roots lie in the larger society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines an anti-homeless visual campaign which appeared in New York City in the summer of 2015, in the midst of a resurgence of public concern over the visibility of homeless New Yorkers. The campaign, produced by a police union and titled “Peek-A-Boo, We See You Too” encouraged police officers and allies concerned with a perceived decline in “quality of life” to photograph homeless people on the street, tagging their locations and uploading the photographs to a website. Using the photographs, concurrent discourses, and evidence from surveys conducted by a homeless-led organization, I argue that this campaign represents more than simply an instance of revenge upon and against the homeless. Rather, I suggest that it represents a moment of what philosopher Kristie Dotson calls “epistemic backgrounding” a case in which the people visually displayed at the center of the pictures are “backgrounded” in the knowledge produced off of their images. Connecting this singular campaign with a broader conception of anti-homeless actions, I suggest that we might understand the relationship of visuality and homelessness as one which relies on revanchism for its political logic but produces the simultaneous absence and presence of homeless people through epistemic backgrounding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) introduced Compstat in 1994. Since then, the NYPD and many other law enforcement agencies which have adopted Compstat, have declared dramatic decreases in reported index crime. Indeed, in New York City the claim is that index crime has decreased over 76 per cent. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, this research examines Compstat's managerial environment. Our main concern in this paper is examining the extent (if any) of pressures which managers believe they are exposed to at Compstat, as well as how those pressures might influence unethical crime reporting. Results indicate that managers perceive that they are subject to significantly greater pressure in the Compstat era especially, but not exclusively, with respect to decreasing index crime. Further, these pressures help explain unethical crime reporting in the Compstat era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foot patrolmen did not have friendly contact with all citizens on their beats. Police-citizen relations were sometimes hostile or simply anonymous. Beats embraced large, socially divided populations, which did not always agree on police priorities. This article explores street-level police-citizen relations in New York City in the early twentieth century using disciplinary records, police-oriented newspapers, autobiographies, and other sources. Police-citizen contacts were selective. Merchants, shopkeepers, watchmen, and janitors shared common interests with police, which were strengthened by exchange of goods, services, the use of space, and sympathy and conversation. Police became especially attentive to their concerns about crime and disorder. Few other citizens could establish such links with beat patrolmen. Officers' relationships on their beats were influential but had significant built-in biases, reinforcing the enforcement of law and control of disorder in ways congruent with the needs and views of neighborhood notables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On Staten Island in the spring of 1945, a small group of white politicians, business owners, and residents began complaining about a "crime wave" that they attributed to black soldiers stationed at the Fox Hills Army facility. Most of these complaints stemmed from vague references to rumors of crimes rather than actual incidents. Black journalists and members of the NAACP refuted these accusations and argued that the real issue was discrimination against the soldiers and racism on the part of white Staten Islanders. These accusations launched a months-long debate about racism, crime, and policing on Staten Island during the war. Ultimately, the mayor and military authorities responded by intensifying policing and surveillance of the soldiers. This article uses the conflicts around policing in wartime Staten Island as a lens to consider the impact of the war on black New Yorkers and black soldiers stationed in New York City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances the concept of the orderly city, which has structural qualities and as a vision has dominated ideas about law and order in New York since the 1980s. The realization of the orderly city depended on the successful implementation of broken windows policing. This implementation required considerable reforms in the criminal justice system and the provision of substantial financial resources. Even then, without a considerable decline in serious crime rates, the city government would be unable to justify a war against minor infractions. The crime decline that occurred in the 1990s allowed the city government to equate the safe city with the orderly city. Moreover, as the economy of New York improved, the orderly city was promoted as a precondition of affluence. This article shows how these correlations are questionable and how the orderly city is based on morally and legally questionable actions such as racial profiling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes an organization innovative? This is an enduring question in literature with a variety of models explaining innovation adoption in public organizations. The study presented here contributes to this research by introducing substandard performance as a determinant of innovation adoption, using the example of the adoption of CompStat systems in U.S. police departments. CompStat is a significant innovation in policing that was first operationalized by the New York Police Department in the mid-1990s and is consistently gaining popularity among police departments in the United States and abroad. This study uses a survival analysis of 362 small to midsized U.S. police departments over a 14-year period. Event history and Cox proportional hazards modeling show that poor preadoption performance for violent crime is significantly related to CompStat adoption, and the weaker a department's preadoption performance, the earlier it adopts CompStat. Property crime, on the contrary, is not found to have a significant impact on the adoption of CompStat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Troubling partnerships between the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and criminal informants during the mid-1920s adversely impacted urban African American women’s daily lives. Part of multiple hierarchies of municipal corruption, undercover surveillance operations represented one of many apparatuses law enforcers employed to criminalize black women’s ordinary behavior, to reinforce Progressive era images of black female criminality and promiscuity, and to deny women of their personhood and civil rights. Black New Yorker and criminal informant Charles Dancy, identified by local black newspapers as a vicious con artist and serial rapist, figured prominently in undercover police operations. Dancy falsely identified black women as sex workers and had them arrested, and in the process sexually assaulted women. New York blacks were outraged by some NYPD members’ use of informants as well as black women’s erroneous legal confinement. Situating informant work within the context of police brutality, racial inequity, and the denial of American citizenship, New York African American race leaders, newspaper editors, and ordinary folks devised and took part in resistance strategies that contested police surveillance operations and spoke on behalf of those who were subjected to state sanctioned violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the rise of the Guardian Angels, a community patrol organization founded in 1979 in New York City by Curtis Sliwa and composed mainly of black and Latino youths. The group emerged in an era of economic restructuring coupled with a rising fear of crime. The Guardian Angels merit attention because of their peculiar relationship to the rise of law and order politics. They demonstrate that the fear of crime was neither the monopoly of the white middle class nor merely a construction of politicians. Black and Latino Guardian Angels were agents of community crime control who drew on existing customs of self-determination and distrust of the police. Ultimately, however, the activities and the rhetoric of the Guardian Angels contributed to the rise of a conservative discourse that justified the strengthening of the police state, anxiety about crime, and the gentrification of neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past several decades, research on immigrant adaptation and incorporation experience within different host societies has proliferated. Nevertheless, studies comparing how immigrants interact with law enforcement in the largest cities, respectively, in the United States and Canada do not seem to exist. In an attempt to bridge the gap in past literature, this study examines the differences of Chinese immigrants’ perceptions of the police in New York City and Toronto. Analyzing data gathered from 444 Chinese immigrants (151 from New York City and 293 from Toronto), this study compared Chinese immigrants’ attitudes toward police efficacy and their overall perceptions in both cities. The findings indicated that Chinese immigrants in Toronto held more positive overall perceptions of the police than did their counterparts in New York City. With regard to police efficacy in dealing with crime, there were no significant attitudinal differences in Chinese immigrants between New York City and Toronto. Policy implications were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A controversial issue of policing is the alleged use of racial profiling by police to stop, search, question, or frisk citizens. Currently, only a small amount of empirical research exists concerning the practice of racial profiling. The empirical evidence that does exist has shown substantial minority overrepresentation in both police stops and searches. Moreover, almost all studies to dote have focused on empirical study of police practices, thus leaving out one crucial element--the perspective of citizens. In this study, the authors use data from a random sample of New York City residents to study their perceptions of--and experiences with--racial profiling. In particular, factors are examined that relate to the perception that racial profiling is widespread, justified, and the extent of direct experience that citizens have had with racial profiling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that beginning in the late nineteenth century, New York City's black population experienced targeted harassment and abuse from the city's police officers. Antiblack prejudice proved to be fundamentally different from the Progressive Era attitudes about other ethnic groups who often faced scorn but who were still considered to be capable of reform. Blacks were perceived to be innately immoral and therefore irredeemable. Consequently, white reformers and policemen alike sought to limit the impact of black people on the (white) city, while permitting vice and crime to flourish in black neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the widespread popularity enjoyed by labeling theory less than a decade ago, it is now commonly asserted that societal reaction has little etiological impact on future deviance/crime. The present study challenges this view and suggests that an accurate assessment of the perspective awaits the systematic investigation of the various contingencies involved in the labeling process. Using a random sample of Manhattan youths, a longitudinal analysis of the impact of formal intervention on juvenile delinquency/deviance was undertaken in which the relevance of two such contingencies was examined: types of reaction and types of deviance. The data revealed (1) that police and mental health intervention had both independent and interactive effects in increasing juvenile deviance and (2) that the impact of these various modes of reaction differed according to the form of juvenile deviance (delinquency, anxiety, general psychological impairment) being examined. It was thus concluded that it would be premature to discard the labeling perspective as an etiological theory of deviant/criminal behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]