In the post-Cold War era anarchic conditions within sovereign states have repeatedly posed serious and intractable challenges to the international order. Nations have been called upon to conduct peace operations in response to dysfunctional or disintegrating states (such as Somalia, Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia). Among the more vigorous therapies for this kind of disorder is revitalizing local public security institutions --the police, judiciary, and penal system. This volume presents insights into the process of restoring public security gleaned from a wide range of practitioners and academic specialists.

W. C. Handy waking up to the blues on a train platform, Buddy Bolden eavesdropping on the drums at Congo Square, John Lomax taking his phonograph recorder into a southern penitentiary - in Disturbing the Peace, Bryan Wagner revises the history of the black vernacular tradition and gives a new account of black culture by reading these myths in the context of the tradition's ongoing engagement with the law.

The purpose of Policing Peace--What America Can Do NowTo Avoid Future Tragedies is to give perspective and understanding to peace officers and the people they police in the hopes that the estrangement and division between races can be overcome. This book is addressed both to peace officers and community members. Peace officers need to treat people fairly with deference and respect. Community members need to understand more about the law and police procedure. Overcoming disparity includes education: knowing the law, knowing the facts of the case, and knowing the laws that apply. Often the public is unaware of the law and police policy which results in misconceptions and unfair judgments of police actions which might be completely justified under circumstances present and the law. Reasonable expectations fairly evaluate police actions and performance fairly.

This book investigates the Youth Police Initiative (YPI) intervention with a comprehensive look at its effects in Boston as well as Brownsville, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that has both rich community networks as well as the highest crime rate in New York City. Based on a phenomenological approach, The Case for Youth Police Initiative: Interdependent Fates and the Power of Peace offers first-person narratives of youth, police, and community members in Brownsville as the YPI program was put into action Police shootings and other negative exchanges between community members and the police have brought heightened awareness to the volatile relations between communities and police. The North American Family Institute began the YPI in Baltimore in 2003 with the ambition of keeping vulnerable youth away from arrests, gangs, guns, violence, and death. The program has been replicated in several communities in the United States and beyond. The focus of YPI training is to address the dual challenge of teaching youth the skills to resolve daily conflicts with authority while also teaching police officers to have meaningful dialogue with young people. The voices of the stakeholders reveal changes in attitudes and actions from before, during, and after YPI’s implementation. A comprehensive illustration of the intervention’s arc provides the reader with an in-depth, textured perspective of what it takes to prevent pernicious eruptions of tension between police and the community they are charged to serve and protect. YPI’s success in addressing tensions between youth and police in Boston and Brownsville, Brooklyn, maps out a blueprint for progress in other communities. Suitable for scholars and researchers in juvenile justice, law enforcement, psychology, and social work as well as practitioners on the front lines, The Case for Youth Police Initiative will provoke dialogue on best practices for changing the volatile climate between police and the youths in their communities.

In this book seven authors examine the legal and political implications, the training of international police in a multinational and multicultural context, the use of community policing, the crucial issue of cooperation between the military and the civilian police components, and what has been learned about planning for the handover to local authority.

In communities plagued by conflict along ethnic, racial, and religious lines, how does the representation of previously-marginalized groups in the police affect crime and security? Drawing on new evidence from policing in Iraq and Israel, Policing for Peace shows that an inclusive police force provides better services and reduces conflict, but not in the ways we might assume. Including members of marginalized groups in the police improves civilians' expectations of how the police and government will treat them, both now and in the future. These expectations are enhanced when officers are organized into mixed rather than homogeneous patrols. Iraqis indicate feeling most secure when policed by mixed officers, even more secure than they feel when policed by members of their own group. In Israel, increases in police officer diversity are associated with lower crime victimization for both Arab and Jewish citizens. In many cases, inclusive policing benefits all citizens, not just those from marginalized groups.

A history of the early years of the Irish police force.

From the late ’90s to the mid-2010s, American cities experienced an astonishing drop in violent crime, dramatically changing urban life. In many cases, places once characterized by decay and abandonment are now thriving, the fear of death by gunshot wound replaced by concern about skyrocketing rents. In Uneasy Peace, Patrick Sharkey, “the leading young scholar of urban crime and concentrated poverty” (Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis) reveals the striking effects: improved school test scores, because children are better able to learn when not traumatized by nearby violence; better chances that poor children will rise into the middle class; and a marked increase in the life expectancy of African American men. Some of the forces that brought about safer streets—such as the intensive efforts made by local organizations to confront violence in their own communities—have been positive, Sharkey explains. But the drop in violent crime has also come at the high cost of aggressive policing and mass incarceration. From Harlem to South Los Angeles, Sharkey draws on original data and textured accounts of neighborhoods across the country to document the most successful proven strategies for combating violent crime and to lay out innovative and necessary approaches to the problem of violence. At a time when crime is rising again, the issue of police brutality has taken center stage, and powerful political forces seek to disinvest in cities, the insights in this book are indispensable.

"Through poetry and art, [this book] tells the story of hundreds of artists and volunteers who turned boarded up windows into works of art with messages of hope, healing and unity"--

From a Harvard scholar and former Obama official, a powerful proposal for curtailing violent crime in America Urban violence is one of the most divisive and allegedly intractable issues of our time. But as Harvard scholar Thomas Abt shows in Bleeding Out, we actually possess all the tools necessary to stem violence in our cities. Coupling the latest social science with firsthand experience as a crime-fighter, Abt proposes a relentless focus on violence itself -- not drugs, gangs, or guns. Because violence is "sticky," clustering among small groups of people and places, it can be predicted and prevented using a series of smart-on-crime strategies that do not require new laws or big budgets. Bringing these strategies together, Abt offers a concrete, cost-effective plan to reduce homicides by over 50 percent in eight years, saving more than 12,000 lives nationally. Violence acts as a linchpin for urban poverty, so curbing such crime can unlock the untapped potential of our cities' most disadvantaged communities and help us to bridge the nation's larger economic and social divides. Urgent yet hopeful, Bleeding Out offers practical solutions to the national emergency of urban violence -- and challenges readers to demand action.