Twentieth-century influences on twenty-first-century policing : continued lessons of police reform /

Cooper (criminology and criminal justice, Indiana Univ. of PA; In Search of Police Legitimacy, 2014) argues that certain seminal events in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s had a profound and lasting effect on the organization and behavior of police forces in the US. The Supreme Court's rulings on due process challenged police procedures; race riots highlighted long-standing and widespread antagonisms between the police and minorities; and rising crime rates, lawsuits, and social science research revealed police inefficacy and corruption. Cooper provides a lucid synthesis of existing scholarship detailing these important developments. However, his brief concluding chapter covering the subsequent directions in policing does not adequately explore or explain the impact of the past on the present. The inconsistent and desultory reforms he outlines seem unequal to the momentous crisis described. Moreover, though recent events in Ferguson and Baltimore seem to confirm the continued importance of issues of race and police isolation from the community, Cooper gives little attention to other circumstances that contribute to current tensions, such as record-high levels of incarceration, the militarization of police, and local governments' reliance on civil forfeiture and nuisance fines to balance their budgets. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above. --Padraic C. Kennedy, York College of Pennsylvania