Putting It All Together…. Again

What is the state of relations between the police and minority communities?
What would you recommend as an applied sociologist to address the issues?

Notes:
Our topic for this section is Crime. And if you think about it, crime has been a from the earliest days of the discipline, crime has been a topic that’s interested sociologists. And it makes sense. It’s a natural fit, right? For example, mile Durkheim wrote extensively about crime in society. And today, modern sociologists are very interested in crime and the fundamental causes of crime in the nature of the prison system, and also in the relationship between police and the communities they serve. And the latter is something that’s very much in the news in the last couple of years with Black Lives Matter, the problems of and distance between minority communities and law enforcement officers serving in those communities.

And one of the things I think you’ll see from this reading is the sociologists really have a contribution to make in this area. And the first reading, “If a crime is a problem, is community police-community or problem-solving policing the solution?” talks extensively about ways that the police can interact more effectively with the communities they serve. The second reading talks about something called the Terry Stops, the idea of what’s called street policing. The idea that you can really effectively tackle crime at the street level. One of the classic examples people use is an experiment that was done years ago where people parked a car, an old car on the street that appears to be an abandoned car, and they watched to see what would happen, and not much happened until they broke a window in the car, and then the car began to be vandalized. And the idea is that science of breakdown in order in law and order, actually beget more breakdowns, a low order foster crime.

So you combat crime by really being aggressive at the street level. There are some problems with that initial scene in your readings in that it appears that oftentimes police are more aggressive in minority communities in terms of street policing than they are in other communities. So what does it all come to in terms of sociology and sociologist, Well, I would argue that sociologists are uniquely situated to play a role in this, this area? Because the sociological toolkit: theory, sociological research methods, and the sociological imagination, or three things that are essential to understanding the true nature of crime and how to improve relationships between police departments and the communities they serve.

Terry Stops:
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Einstein On Racial-Bias, 1946:
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References:
Fagan, J., and Geller, A. 2015. Following the Script: Narratives of Suspicion in “Terry” Stops in Street Policing. Preview the document University of Chicago Law Review, 82(1), 51-88

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