Sociology: Inequities in Policing

Profiles in injustice: American life under the regime of racial profiling -- Profiling past and present, and high-discretion police tactics -- Profiling unmasked: from criminal profiling to racial profiling -- The hard numbers: why racial profiling doesn't add up -- The costs of racial profiling: casualties and collateral damage -- It's not just driving while Black: how profiling affects Latinos, Asians, and Arabs --

Contents:
Two tales of stop and frisk -- The historical context -- The contemporary legal context -- Crime-control benefits and collateral consequences -- (with Weston Morrow) -- Beyond a few bad apples -- The future of stop and frisk.

A behind-the-scenes account of the #blacklivesmatter movement shares insights into the young men and women behind it, citing the racially charged controversies that have motivated members and the economic, political, and personal histories that inform its purpose.

Jerome Miller demonstrates in Search and Destroy that an African-American male between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five has an inordinate likelihood of encountering the criminal justice system at some point during those years. In a wide-ranging survey of blacks and the justice system, Miller notes the presence of bias among police officers, probation officers, courts, and even social scientists whose data form the basis for many policies and social workers whose responsibility is allegedly to members of the underclass.

From the nation's beginnings, the law was to be the great equalizer in American life, the guarantor of a common set of rules for all. But over the past four decades, the principle of equality before the law has been effectively abolished. Instead, a two-tiered system of justice ensures that the country's political and financial class is virtually immune from prosecution, licensed to act without restraint, while the politically powerless are imprisoned with greater ease and in greater numbers than in any other country in the world

In this authoritative volume, race and ethnicity are themselves considered as central organizing principles in why, how, where and by whom crimes are committed and enforced. The contributors argue that dimensions of race and ethnicity condition the very laws that make certain behaviors criminal, the perception of crime and those who are criminalized, the determination of who becomes a victim of crime under which circumstances, the responses to laws and crime that make some more likely to be defined as criminal, and the ways that individuals and communities are positioned and empowered to respond to crime