Suspect Citizens

The costs of racially disparate patterns of police behavior are high, but the crime fighting benefits are low.

In Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics Janine Larmon Peterson investigates regional saints whose holiness was contested. She scrutinizes the papacy's toleration of unofficial saints' cults and its response when their devotees challenged church authority about a cult's merits or the saint's orthodoxy. As she demonstrates, communities that venerated saints increasingly clashed with popes and inquisitors determined to erode any local claims of religious authority. Local and unsanctioned saints were spiritual and social fixtures in the towns of northern and central Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In some cases, popes allowed these saints' cults; in others, church officials condemned the saint and/or their followers as heretics. Using a wide range of secular and clerical sources—including vitae, inquisitorial and canonization records, chronicles, and civic statutes—Peterson explores who these unofficial saints were, how the phenomenon of disputed sanctity arose, and why communities would be willing to risk punishment by continuing to venerate a local holy man or woman. She argues that the Church increasingly restricted sanctification in the later Middle Ages, which precipitated new debates over who had the authority to recognize sainthood and what evidence should be used to identify holiness and heterodoxy. The case studies she presents detail how the political climate of the Italian peninsula allowed Italian communities to use saints' cults as a tool to negotiate religious and political autonomy in opposition to growing papal bureaucratization.

The declaration of a “War on Terror” in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks brought sweeping changes to the American criminal justice and national security systems, as well as a massive shift in the American public opinion of both individual Muslims and the Islamic religion generally. Since that time, sociologist Saher Selod argues, Muslim Americans have experienced higher levels of racism in their everyday lives. In Forever Suspect, Selod shows how a specific American religious identity has acquired racial meanings, resulting in the hyper surveillance of Muslim citizens. Drawing on forty-eight in-depth interviews with South Asian and Arab Muslim Americans, she investigates how Muslim Americans are subjected to racialized surveillance in both an institutional context by the state and a social context by their neighbors and co-workers. Forever Suspect underscores how this newly racialized religious identity changes the social location of Arabs and South Asians on the racial hierarchy further away from whiteness and compromises their status as American citizens.

The first major qualitative study of “countering violent extremism” in key U.S. cities Suspect Communities is a powerful reassessment of the U.S. government’s “countering violent extremism” (CVE) program that has arisen in major cities across the United States since 2011. Drawing on an interpretive qualitative study, it examines how the concept behind CVEaimed at combating homegrown terrorism by engaging Muslim community members, teachers, and religious leaders in monitoring and reporting on young peoplehas been operationalized through the everyday work of CVE actors, from high-level national security workers to local community members, with significant penalties for the communities themselves. Nicole Nguyen argues that studying CVE provides insight into how the drive to bring liberal reforms to contemporary security regimes through “community-driven” and “ideologically ecumenical” programming has in fact further institutionalized anti-Muslim racism in the United States. She forcefully contends that the U.S. security state has designed CVE to legitimize and shore up support for the very institutions that historically have criminalized, demonized, and dehumanized communities of color, while appearing to learn from and attenuate past practices of coercive policing, racial profiling, and political exclusion. By undertaking this analysis, Suspect Communities offers a vital window into the inner workings of the U.S. security state and the devastating impact of CVE on local communities.

This book covers Suspect Searching issues for law enforcement officer. The goal for officers to understand and be able to perform proper techniques of searching a subject and escorting him to a designated area. A search is a careful, systematic examination of the suspect's person at the scene of a crime, or immediately after apprehension. Body searching is a vague subject. It is very difficult to perform in a proper and effective way. In body searching, there is close contact between the officer and suspect. Being in such close contact sometimes creates a critical situation. Everyone placed under arrest must be searched. There should be no exceptions to this rule. Failure to conduct a proper search could cost an officer's or civilians' life. Generally, there is no legal distinction between searching and handcuffing a man or a woman. Gender should not be an inhibiting factor in the application of proper techniques. However, these techniques should be tempered with the individual officer's good judgment. Police officers should not confuse the object of the search with the application of the search technique. A cooperative suspect should not lull the police officer into a false sense of security. The suspect's attitude is no guarantee that they will not attempt to escape when such an opportunity presents itself. Topics and techniques presented in this book will be of both great interest and great value to trainers and students of law enforcement.

This book covers "Weapon Retention and Gun Disarming, Handcuffing, Conducting Suspect Searches, and Defensive Baton" subjects for law enforcement officer. In some close encounters, a suspect may try to grab the officer's sidearm. Loss of the officer's gun could mean the loss of his/her life. The officer or civilians may be killed or injured by offenders who take and use an officer's firearm. Officers must develop a defensive awareness that their weapon can be snatched. Handcuffs are temporary restraining devices designed to control the movements of a subject. However, they do not entirely immobilize a suspect. Its proper use and application is crucial for the safety of the officer, subject, and public. Body searching is a vague topic. It is a careful, systematic examination of the suspect at the scene of a crime, or immediately after apprehension. Failure to conduct a proper search could cost an officer's or civilians' life. Modern law enforcement tool, baton, has been developed to increase officers' ability to protect themselves, particularly in those cases not justifying the use of deadly force. A trained officer who is proficient in the use of the baton is better able to protect himself and is less likely to resort to the use of his firearm. Topics and techniques presented in this book will be of both great interest and great value to trainers and students of law enforcement.

It's 1953, and the United States has just executed an American couple convicted of spying for the Soviet Union. Everyone is on edge as the Cold War standoff between communism and democracy leads to the rise of Senator Joe McCarthy and his zealous hunt for people he calls subversives or communist sympathizers. Suspicion, loyalty oaths, blacklists, political profiling, hostility to foreigners, and the assumption of guilt by association divide the nation. Richard and his family believe deeply in American values and love of country, especially since Richard's father works for the FBI. Yet when a family from Czechoslovakia moves in down the street with a son Richard's age named Vlad, their bold ideas about art and politics bring everything into question. Richard is quickly drawn to Vlad's confidence, musical sensibilities, and passion for literature, which Richard shares. But as the nation's paranoia spirals out of control, Richard longs to prove himself a patriot, and blurred lines between friend and foe could lead to a betrayal that destroys lives. Punctuated with photos, news headlines, ads, and quotes from the era, this suspenseful and relatable novel by award-winning New York Times best-selling author L.M. Elliott breathes new life into a troubling chapter of our history.