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The use of body-worn cameras (BWCs) by police has raised numerous questions and current political controversies, including those related to privacy issues, race relations, police legitimacy and discretion, evidentiary value of BWC footage, and the access, retention, and potential tampering of the information it contains, among others. This dissertation examines BWC controversies through a sociological lens. It aims to: (1) document the emergence and evolution of police BWC controversies; (2) delineate the main arguments, major narratives, and underlying sociological issues in BWC debates; (3) identify specific social problems collectively defined through BWC debates and (re)construct the social processes of these collective definitions; (4) understand the social processes from recognition of social problems to collective actions taken to address them, (5) explore the social processes of struggles for social control among different political actors, and (6) propose an integrative theoretical framework drawing from theories in multiple areas of sociological inquiry to explain the social construction of BWC controversies. To accomplish these tasks, this project examines national and local debates on BWCs as presented in the media and in the weekly police-community meetings in the City of Los Angeles. Within the study period (December 1, 2011 through November 30, 2017), data were collected from (1) media reports on BWC issues that were published in a number of mainstream national media outlets and local newspapers based in California municipalities and (2) videotapes of the above-mentioned weekly police-community meetings. The newspaper articles and video transcripts were first open coded to discern the development of narratives and to capture changes in the discourses of BWC controversies. The data were then analyzed through both quantitative and qualitative methods. In addition to the analysis of the narratives around BWC issues, the project also tracks the ri

It has been a century since Frederic Thrasher researched his pioneering text on youth gangs in Chicago. In it he depicts gangs as a street-based phenomenon that emerged from the combined forces of urbanization, migration, and industrialization—with new migrant groups seeking to find a toehold on the American Dream. Gangs were discrete and highly localized, drawing on names from popular culture and the neighborhood, seeking ways to survive and thrive amid the disorganization of the emerging city. In the 21st century, street gangs have been identified in urban contexts all over the world and have become increasingly viewed as a transnational phenomenon that is qualitatively different from Thrasher’s neighborhood groups. Processes of globalization have created a degree of flow and connectedness to urban life that is unlike any other stage in human history. Yet a close reading of Thrasher shows that some of the key themes in the study of gangs in a global context—urban exclusion, grey economies, human mobility, and cultural flow—were presaged in Thrasher’s work. In a global era, however, these processes have intensified, amplified, and extended in ways that could not have been predicted. We elaborate the spatial, economic, social, cultural, and technological implications of globalization for gangs across five principle areas: (1) Gangs in the Global City; (2) Gangs, Illicit Markets, and the Global Criminal Economy; (3) Mobility, Crimmigration, and the “Transnational Gang”; (4) Gangs and Glocalization; and (5) The Gang Mediascape. Taken together, these themes seek to offer both a conceptual vocabulary and empirical foundation for new and innovative studies of gangs and globalization. Empirical evidences from Europe, the United States, and beyond, emphasize the uneven impacts of globalization and the ways in which national and cultural dynamics are implicated in the study of gangs in the 21st century.

The study of white-collar and corporate crime has long been focusing mainly on its economic consequences, due to its connection with legitimate professional and business activities. Yet, even since E.H. Sutherland’s seminal studies, there has been a lingering sense of the broader scope of harmful consequences of corporate crime. This essay focuses on the social ‘anomic’ harm related to an ingrained feature of abuse of trust, typical of corporate crimes, as well as the increasing awareness of the ever growing spread and negative impact on human life and health of offences falling under the definition of ‘corporate violence’.