Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES AMERICAN JOURNAL of LAW and EQUALITY David Alan Sklansky* Over the course of the past half century, policing in the United States has gone from an institution in deep crisis and a flashpoint in the country’s culture wars to a widely admired example of innovative, bipartisan reform—and then back again. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, police forces were overwhelmingly white, male, and politically reactionary. Liberals saw the police as racist, violent, and ineffective and blamed them, with justification, for the hundreds of riots that convulsed American cities under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. At the same time, conservatives rallied around the police as symbols of “law and order”—the cause that, more than any other, won Nixon the White House in 1968. By the late 1990s, however, the police had become far more diverse and far less insular, and new approaches to law enforcement, especially “community policing” and “problem-oriented policing,” had won remarkably broad respect across lines of race, class, and ideology. Enthusiasts of “new governance” regularly pointed to police departments as models of the kind of pragmatic reform other public sectors could profitably emulate. The pitched battles over the police in the Johnson and Nixon years, http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png American Journal of Law and Equality MIT Press

POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

Download PDF
33 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/mit-press/police-reform-in-divided-times-OOmS2NnRRb
Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2022 David Alan Sklansky. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND).
eISSN
2694-5711
DOI
10.1162/ajle_a_00036
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AMERICAN JOURNAL of LAW and EQUALITY David Alan Sklansky* Over the course of the past half century, policing in the United States has gone from an institution in deep crisis and a flashpoint in the country’s culture wars to a widely admired example of innovative, bipartisan reform—and then back again. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, police forces were overwhelmingly white, male, and politically reactionary. Liberals saw the police as racist, violent, and ineffective and blamed them, with justification, for the hundreds of riots that convulsed American cities under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. At the same time, conservatives rallied around the police as symbols of “law and order”—the cause that, more than any other, won Nixon the White House in 1968. By the late 1990s, however, the police had become far more diverse and far less insular, and new approaches to law enforcement, especially “community policing” and “problem-oriented policing,” had won remarkably broad respect across lines of race, class, and ideology. Enthusiasts of “new governance” regularly pointed to police departments as models of the kind of pragmatic reform other public sectors could profitably emulate. The pitched battles over the police in the Johnson and Nixon years,

Journal

American Journal of Law and Equality – MIT Press

Published: Aug 15, 2022

There are no references for this article.