Stop & Frisk and the Politics of Crime in Chicago

Stop & Frisk and the Politics of Crime in Chicago PDF

Author: Wesley G. Skogan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-12-05

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0197675085

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A comprehensive analysis of the stop & frisk policy, its origins as Chicago's predominant strategy for responding to violence, and its impact on crime and public opinion. Stop & frisk has drawn a great deal of attention--and heated criticism--in recent years, for racial bias in its application and for the often violent and sometimes fatal nature of these encounters. In Stop & Frisk and the Politics of Crime in Chicago, Wesley G. Skogan offers a comprehensive analysis of the stop-and-frisk policy, its origins as Chicago's predominant strategy for responding to violence, and its impact on crime and public opinion. Drawing on a crime database of over 14 million incidents, interviews with 1,450 Chicagoans and 714 police officers, and the author's 30 years of studying, talking to, and riding along with Chicago police officers, Skogan looks at the inner workings of police departments and the history and politics of crime prevention that motivate these policies. Rather than looking at individual stops and how they are handled, he argues for considering stop & frisk as an organizational strategy, intimately tied to the move from reactive to preventive policing. Examining one of America's predominant crime control strategies, this book provides an essential analysis of the origins, implementation, and effects of stop & frisk in Chicago and on urban policing in general.

Stop and Frisk and the Politics of Crime in Chicago

Stop and Frisk and the Politics of Crime in Chicago PDF

Author: Wesley G. Skogan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0197675050

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"This book examines the role of stop & frisk as one of America's predominant crime control strategies. In the past, policing focused on responding to crimes in progress or (more often) already committed. Beginning in the mid-1990s, American policing moved toward proactive strategies for deterring crime from occurring in the first place. Crime in the United States was dropping, and police leaders claimed responsibility for this success. However, but during the 2010s violent crime began to swing upward again. Police now had responsibility for crime, and this led almost inevitably to more heavily targeted and aggressive police tactics. In theory, stop & frisk promotes deterrence in two ways, by increasing offender's risk of being caught and punished, and by discouraging the general public from even considering offending in the first place. In law, stop & frisk was validated by the Supreme Court as a reasonable compromise between the personal freedoms of Americans and the risks presented by an increasing armed and crime-ridden society. Officers could frisk an individual for a weapon even without the t traditional requirement that there was probable cause to think they had committed a crime. This book takes a third focus, stop & frisk in actual practice. It examines its origins as Chicago's predominant strategy for responding to the turnaround in violent crime. The story includes the political agendas of two mayors and four chiefs of police. Further chapters examined how stop & frisk played itself out on the streets of Chicago, and its impact on public opinion. There are chapters detailing the views of police officers who did the work of stop & frisk, and an analysis of its impact on murders and shootings. A final chapter considers alternatives to stop & frisk as it was practiced in Chicago"--

Chicago's Reckoning

Chicago's Reckoning PDF

Author: John Hagan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0197627862

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"Chicago is confronting a racial reckoning that we explain with an exclusion-containment theory of legal cynicism. Mayors RJ and RM Daley used public and private funds to exclude and contain South and West side predominantly Black neighborhoods where police Detective Jon Burge supervised torture of over 100 Black men. A 1982 case involved Andrew Wilson's tortured confession to two police killings. This case coincided with RM Daley's pursuit of White votes in an early and unsuccessful primary campaign for mayor. Suspicions about Daley's connection to Wilson's confession lasted throughout his career. As State's Attorney, Daley mobilized a massive assault on "gangs, guns, and drugs" by tightening law enforcement methods. An example involved the Automatic Transfer Act used to prosecute 15 year-old Joseph White in adult court for shooting a fellow student. The judge thought White should have sought help from police, but he and his family knew the police as brutal occupiers of local neighborhoods. White was sentenced to 45 years in a maximum-security prison. Jon Burge was finally convicted in 2010-of perjury-but he served only three years, while many of his victims remained on death row. In a sidebar in the Burge trial-unheard by jurors-the judge refused to allow evidence about a racialized code of silence that concealed Burge's torture. Our book ends by explaining how Daley and Burge escaped meaningful punishment through the code of silence and out of court settlements. These remain unrelenting sources of the racial reckoning confronting this quintessential American city"--

Police and Community in Chicago

Police and Community in Chicago PDF

Author: Wesley G. Skogan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-12-01

Total Pages: 531

ISBN-13: 0199889864

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Highly popular with both the public and political leaders, community policing is the most important development in law enforcement in the last twenty-five years. But does community policing really work? Can police departments fundamentally change their organization? Can neighborhood problems be solved? In the early 1990s, Chicago, the nation's third largest city, instituted the nation's largest community policing initiative. Wesley G. Skogan here provides the first comprehensive evaluation of that citywide program, examining its impact on crime, neighborhood residents, and the police. Based on the results of a thirteen-year study, including interviews, citywide surveys, and sophisticated statistical analyses, Police and Community in Chicago reveals a city divided among African-Americans, Whites, and Latinos. By looking at the varying effects community policing had on each of these groups, Skogan provides a valuable analysis of what works and why. As the use of community policing increases and issues related to race and immigration become more pressing, Police and Community in Chicago will serve the needs of an increasing amount of students, scholars, and professionals interested in the most effective and harmonious means of keeping communities safe.

Stop and Frisk

Stop and Frisk PDF

Author: Michael D. White

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2019-07-01

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1479857815

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Winner, 2019 Outstanding Book Award, given by the American Society of Criminology’s Division of Policing Section The first in-depth history and analysis of a much-abused policing policy No policing tactic has been more controversial than “stop and frisk,” whereby police officers stop, question and frisk ordinary citizens, who they may view as potential suspects, on the streets. As Michael White and Hank Fradella show in Stop and Frisk, the first authoritative history and analysis of this tactic, there is a disconnect between our everyday understanding and the historical and legal foundations for this policing strategy. First ruled constitutional in 1968, stop and frisk would go on to become a central tactic of modern day policing, particularly by the New York City Police Department. By 2011 the NYPD recorded 685,000 ‘stop-question-and-frisk’ interactions with citizens; yet, in 2013, a landmark decision ruled that the police had over- and mis-used this tactic. Stop and Frisk tells the story of how and why this happened, and offers ways that police departments can better serve their citizens. They also offer a convincing argument that stop and frisk did not contribute as greatly to the drop in New York’s crime rates as many proponents, like former NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have argued. While much of the book focuses on the NYPD’s use of stop and frisk, examples are also shown from police departments around the country, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Newark and Detroit. White and Fradella argue that not only does stop and frisk have a legal place in 21st-century policing but also that it can be judiciously used to help deter crime in a way that respects the rights and needs of citizens. They also offer insight into the history of racial injustice that has all too often been a feature of American policing’s history and propose concrete strategies that every police department can follow to improve the way they police. A hard-hitting yet nuanced analysis, Stop and Frisk shows how the tactic can be a just act of policing and, in turn, shows how to police in the best interest of citizens.

"The Law Has a Bad Opinion of Me"

Author: Simon Balto

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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This dissertation is about policing in Chicago's black community, and black Chicagoans' relationships with the police, from 1919 through the mid-1970s. Its central explorations revolve around black communities' dual experiences of being both under-protected and over-policed by the Chicago Police Department (CPD). On the one hand, it shows the degree to which the CPD and urban policymakers corralled criminal activity into black communities at various junctures, withheld police protection at others in order to extract political or economic favors, and consistently failed to respond effectively to black demands for protection from vice, crime, and white racist violence. On the other hand, it documents the many ways that racial suspicion contoured police actions toward black Chicagoans as early as the 1910s, and the many resulting abuses and harassments that followed. In so doing, it argues that the extreme racial disparities witnessed in the modern mass incarceration crisis originate not in the post-Civil Rights Wars on Crime and Drugs, as many scholars and citizens have assumes, but in local policing practices and traditions that have been extant and growing for a century. Racial disproportion in arrests (from which convictions and incarceration stem) is a very old tradition in Chicago, and was a feature of the city's law enforcement culture that nonpartisan observers began acknowledging a hundred years ago. Even when black people were not being arrested, they were frequently subject to an intensifying surveillance apparatus, and to mechanisms of control such as stop-and-frisk, harassment, and torture. To be sure, when the federal government unleashed the drug and crime wars beginning in the mid-1960s, they exacerbated the disparate ways that black people would be freighted with the weight of the criminal justice system. But those wars did not create such disparities, and their foundational logics when it came to treating black communities with suspicion and force were, at the wars' inceptions, already heavily engrained in law enforcement cultures, both locally and across the country. Those dual experiences - over-policed, under-protected - have sat at the heart of police-community dynamics for roughly a century. They continue to pose intense challenges for urban communities to this day.

Occupied Territory

Occupied Territory PDF

Author: Simon Balto

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2019-03-05

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1469649608

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In July 1919, an explosive race riot forever changed Chicago. For years, black southerners had been leaving the South as part of the Great Migration. Their arrival in Chicago drew the ire and scorn of many local whites, including members of the city's political leadership and police department, who generally sympathized with white Chicagoans and viewed black migrants as a problem population. During Chicago's Red Summer riot, patterns of extraordinary brutality, negligence, and discriminatory policing emerged to shocking effect. Those patterns shifted in subsequent decades, but the overall realities of a racially discriminatory police system persisted. In this history of Chicago from 1919 to the rise and fall of Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s, Simon Balto narrates the evolution of racially repressive policing in black neighborhoods as well as how black citizen-activists challenged that repression. Balto demonstrates that punitive practices by and inadequate protection from the police were central to black Chicagoans' lives long before the late-century "wars" on crime and drugs. By exploring the deeper origins of this toxic system, Balto reveals how modern mass incarceration, built upon racialized police practices, emerged as a fully formed machine of profoundly antiblack subjugation.

Cop in the Hood

Cop in the Hood PDF

Author: Peter Moskos

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-08-03

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1400832268

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When Harvard-trained sociologist Peter Moskos left the classroom to become a cop in Baltimore's Eastern District, he was thrust deep into police culture and the ways of the street--the nerve-rattling patrols, the thriving drug corners, and a world of poverty and violence that outsiders never see. In Cop in the Hood, Moskos reveals the truths he learned on the midnight shift. Through Moskos's eyes, we see police academy graduates unprepared for the realities of the street, success measured by number of arrests, and the ultimate failure of the war on drugs. In addition to telling an explosive insider's story of what it is really like to be a police officer, he makes a passionate argument for drug legalization as the only realistic way to end drug violence--and let cops once again protect and serve. In a new afterword, Moskos describes the many benefits of foot patrol--or, as he calls it, "policing green."