Police In The Hallways

Exposing the deeply harmful impact of street-style policing on urban high school students

Urban ethnography is the firsthand study of city life by investigators who immerse themselves in the worlds of the people about whom they write. Since its inception in the early twentieth century, this great tradition has helped define how we think about cities and city dwellers. The past few decades have seen an extraordinary revival in the field, as scholars and the public at large grapple with the increasingly complex and pressing issues that affect the ever-changing American city-from poverty to the immigrant experience, the changing nature of social bonds to mass incarceration, hyper-segregation to gentrification. As both a method of research and a form of literature, urban ethnography has seen a notable and important resurgence. This renewed interest demands a clear and comprehensive understanding of the history and development of the field to which this volume contributes by presenting a selection of past and present contributions to American urban ethnographic writing. Beginning with an original introduction highlighting the origins, practices, and significance of the field, editors Mitchell Duneier, Philip Kasinitz, and Alexandra Murphy guide the reader through the major and fascinating topics on which it has focused -- from the community, public spaces, family, education, work, and recreation, to social policy, and the relationship between ethnographers and their subjects. An indispensable guide, The Urban Ethnography Reader provides an overview of how the discipline has grown and developed while offering students and scholars a selection of some of the finest social scientific writing on the life of the modern city.

Schools under Surveillance gathers together some of the very best researchers studying surveillance and discipline in contemporary public schools. Surveillance is not simply about monitoring or tracking individuals and their dataùit is about the structuring of power relations through human, technical, or hybrid control mechanisms. Essays cover a broad range of topics including police and military recruiters on campus, testing and accountability regimes such as No Child Left Behind, and efforts by students and teachers to circumvent the most egregious forms of surveillance in public education. Each contributor is committed to the continued critique of the disparity and inequality in the use of surveillance to target and sort students along lines of race, class, and gender.

Twelve-year-old Griff Carver knows a thing or two about fighting crime. Because Griff?s not just any kid?he?s a kid with a badge. And if you are a criminal, he?s your worst nightmare. Griff might be the new kid on the Rampart Jr. High Patrol squad, but he?s no rookie. And he?ll do whatever it takes to clean up the mean hallways of his middle school?even if it lands him in hot water. But when Griff links cool kid Marcus ?The Smile? Volger to a counterfeit hall pass ring, can he and his friends close the case? Or will Griff let down the force?and lose his badge?for good?

In the last decade, more than 300 violent deaths have occurred in or near school campuses. The killers, their motivations and backgrounds, and levels of damage inflicted vary, but our response and our goal remains singular: to protect our schools and keep those within them safe. This handbook seeks to help administrators, school boards, contractors, teachers_anyone connected with the design, construction, or administration of schools_achieve this goal by providing easy-to-follow guidelines for building safer school environments. Drawing from various government resources, including the Centers for Disease Control, Department of Education, Department of Defense, and Department of Health and Human Services, this one-of-a-kind handbook takes a two-part approach to protecting schools from threats. The first part addresses how to design and build a safe school. It provides a basic security overview and discusses how to identify critical assets and conduct risk-threat assessments. The second part of the book shifts from infrastructure to inhabitants. Here, you'll learn how to produce a detailed crisis management plan to help your facility prevent incidents from happening and to deal with them swiftly and effectively should one occur. You'll also learn various 'people' policies and practices you can implement to reduce drug and alcohol abuse, bullying, vandalism, and other violence and crime.

Named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by The Washington Post “Tangled Up in Blue is a wonderfully insightful book that provides a lens to critically analyze urban policing and a road map for how our most dispossessed citizens may better relate to those sworn to protect and serve.” —The Washington Post “Remarkable . . . Brooks has produced an engaging page-turner that also outlines many broadly applicable lessons and sensible policy reforms.” —Foreign Affairs Journalist and law professor Rosa Brooks goes beyond the "blue wall of silence" in this radical inside examination of American policing In her forties, with two children, a spouse, a dog, a mortgage, and a full-time job as a tenured law professor at Georgetown University, Rosa Brooks decided to become a cop. A liberal academic and journalist with an enduring interest in law's troubled relationship with violence, Brooks wanted the kind of insider experience that would help her understand how police officers make sense of their world—and whether that world can be changed. In 2015, against the advice of everyone she knew, she applied to become a sworn, armed reserve police officer with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department. Then as now, police violence was constantly in the news. The Black Lives Matter movement was gaining momentum, protests wracked America's cities, and each day brought more stories of cruel, corrupt cops, police violence, and the racial disparities that mar our criminal justice system. Lines were being drawn, and people were taking sides. But as Brooks made her way through the police academy and began work as a patrol officer in the poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods of the nation's capital, she found a reality far more complex than the headlines suggested. In Tangled Up in Blue, Brooks recounts her experiences inside the usually closed world of policing. From street shootings and domestic violence calls to the behind-the-scenes police work during Donald Trump's 2016 presidential inauguration, Brooks presents a revelatory account of what it's like inside the "blue wall of silence." She issues an urgent call for new laws and institutions, and argues that in a nation increasingly divided by race, class, ethnicity, geography, and ideology, a truly transformative approach to policing requires us to move beyond sound bites, slogans, and stereotypes. An explosive and groundbreaking investigation, Tangled Up in Blue complicates matters rather than simplifies them, and gives pause both to those who think police can do no wrong—and those who think they can do no right.

Foreword: This year's annual conference on criminal justice research and evaluation is a milestone of sorts. Some 30 years ago, the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice noted with alacrity that the revolution of scientific discovery had "largely bypassed the problems of crime and crime control." The method of objective analysis that had been used with stunning success to raise living standards, help people live healthier lives, and explore the heavens had unaccountably failed to be applied to one of the era's most pressing problems. To the great good fortune of succeeding generations, the Commission in its wisdom recommended creation of a Federal research agency dedicated to the scientific study of crime and criminal justice, with the aim of informing and aiding the work of practitioners. The National Institute of Justice, the agency established by Congress to carry out that mission, has for the past three decades been seeing the returns on that investment multiply. Criminology has become a respected field of scholarly inquiry, and we have built an impressive body of knowledge that has helped us better understand criminal behavior and the justice system. More important, the results of scholarly inquiries have been and are being applied to the day-to-day operations of law enforcement, corrections, the courts, and other elements of the justice system. In the conference, which revisited the Commission with the theme "Enhancing Policy and Practice Through Research," we saw how the investment continues to yield returns. The plenary sessions in particular emphasized praxis-research put to the service of real-world situations. Because of the distinctiveness of this year's plenary panels, we decided to publish them in three separate volumes: viewing crime from the street level, addressing school violence through research-based policy developed through an interdisciplinary approach, and understanding the involvement of women and girls in the criminal justice system. Sudhir Venkatesh and Richard Curtis bring the ethnographer's perspective to the analysis of street crime, analyzing, respectively, the financial activity of gangs and recent trends in drug dealing. Their method, distinct from that of conventional quantitative social science, calls for intensive observation over long periods and involves the quest for what is a a iv specific to single places and times and what is generalizable. The close-up, street-level observations of study subjects offer singular insights for practitioners who deal with these individuals as offenders. In this panel, we also benefited from the perspective of Charles Ramsey, Chief of the Metropolitan Police Department, Washington, D.C. His indication that drug trafficking and gang crime persist in his jurisdiction despite the overall drop in crime offers proof of the ethnographer's caution against facile generalization. This year marks the first time the program offices of the Office of Justice Programs (OJP)-the Corrections Program Office, the Drug Courts Program Office, the Executive Office for Weed and Seed, and the Violence Against Women Office-have joined the OJP bureaus as conference sponsors. Because these offices work so closely with the practitioner community, I feel their sponsorship is an added expression of their commitment to research. I think they would endorse Chief Ramsey's succinct assessment of the role of research in affecting crime levels in the years to come as bringing to light findings useful for fashioning real-world solutions. "The best way to predict the future," the Chief said, "is to help create it." Those who wish to read more can find abstracts of the conference sessions on the World Wide Web at http://www.ilj.org. Jeremy Travis, Director National Institute of Justice