Includes section "Reviews."

Policing as a global form is often fraught with excessive violence, corruption, and even criminalization. These sorts of problems are especially omnipresent in postcolonial nations such as India, where Beatrice Jauregui has spent several years studying the day-to-day lives of police officers in its most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. In this book, she offers an empirically rich and theoretically innovative look at the great puzzle of police authority in contemporary India and its relationship to social order, democratic governance, and security. Jauregui explores the paradoxical demands placed on Indian police, who are at once routinely charged with abuses of authority at the same time that they are asked to extend that authority into any number of both official and unofficial tasks. Her ethnography of their everyday life and work demonstrates that police authority is provisional in several senses: shifting across time and space, subject to the availability and movement of resources, and dependent upon shared moral codes and relentless instrumental demands. In the end, she shows that police authority in India is not simply a vulgar manifestation of raw power or the violence of law but, rather, a contingent and volatile social resource relied upon in different ways to help realize human needs and desires in a pluralistic, postcolonial democracy. Provocative and compelling, Provisional Authority provides a rare and disquieting look inside the world of police in India, and shines critical light on an institution fraught with moral, legal and political contradictions.

Calls for police reform have always emphasised the material -- higher salaries, more equipment, better training and leadership. The essays collected by David Bayley approach this issue from a different viewpoint: How much does the social environment affect police behaviour? The reciprocal nature of social expectations of and constraints on police activity and the influence on the police of these social patterns is examined, emphasising the need to consider these patterns in attempting to modify police behaviour.

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1. Police: Nexus Crimes and Organized Criminality 2. Police: Nexus Crimes and White Collar Criminality 3. Police: Nexus Crimes and Enforcement Criminality 4. Police: Organized, White Collar, Enforcement and Nexus Crimes 5. Police: Nexus Crimes and Causes 6. Police: Subculture of Nexus Crimes 7. Nexus Crimes: Socialization and Policization 8. Nexus Crimes: Push-Pull Factors of Causation 9. Nexus Crimes: Pull and Push Factors 10. Nexus Crimes: Police Conscience in Conflict 11. Nexus Crimes: Effects, Impacts and Prevention Bibliography Index