Police Abuse and Reform in America

James J. Nolan is an Associate Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University, USA. His research focuses on crime and neighborhood dynamics, police procedures, crime measurement, and hate crimes. A former police officer, Nolan is also a 1992 graduate of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) National Academy, where he worked as a unit chief in the agency's Crime Analysis, Research and Development Unit. He is co-editor of Policing in an Age of Reform: An Agenda for Research and Practice (2020).

How to Use This Book

Introduction

1: A Sociological Perspective on Police Abuse and Reform

Q1. Is there an official mandate in American policing? If so, what is it?
Q2. Are the police effective in carrying out its mandate?
Q3. Does the mandate contribute to the problem of abuse in policing today?
Q4. Is it possible to change the mandate?

2: Police Abuse

Q5. Do police officials regularly use physical force in performing their duties?
Q6. Are there legal and ethical limits in the use of force in American policing today?
Q7. Is it more dangerous to be a police officer today than in years past?
Q8. Why is it so hard to eliminate the “bad apples” from policing?

3. Equity and Discrimination in American Policing

Q9. Do police officers hold implicit biases that affect who is arrested and how they are arrested?
Q10. Are American police addressing racial and ethnic bigotry in law enforcement?
Q11. How does male-dominated policing affect female officer recruitment, employment, and advancement?
Q12. Are male or female police officers more likely to use excessive force?
Q13. Does police diversity help address or fix biases in American policing?

4. First Reforms in American Policing

Q14. How did the police in America actually begin?
Q15. What problems in law enforcement prompted the first police reforms in the United States?
Q16. Who were the early reformers?

5. War on Poverty, Law and Order, and the Turbulent Sixties

Q17. What factors drove the urban disorders—riots and rising crime—of the sixties?
Q18. What remedies did liberal leaders advance?
Q19. What remedies did conservative leaders advance?
Q20. What historic lessons from the sixties have been offered about policing and social policy?

6. Rodney King and the Rise of DOJ Pattern-or-Practice Investigations

Q21. From the Watts/L.A. uprising of 1965 to the Rodney King/L.A. uprising of 1992, did patterns of police conduct change?
Q22. Have the DOJ investigations into local police agencies, and court-ordered consent decrees, aided reform?
Q23. How does the DOJ model fall short as a response to police abuse?

7. Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, and the Obama Policing Task Force

Q24. What were the strengths and limitations of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the Ferguson protests?
Q25. What were the strengths and limitations of the Obama reforms?
Q26. Can evidence-based policing produce a systemic remedy to police abuse?

8. George Floyd and the Rise of Police Abolitionism

Q27. What did the Floyd murder indicate about the state of police reform?
Q28. Is defunding the police the same as police abolitionism?
Q29. What do the police abolitionists want?
Q30. Why do the abolitionists oppose reforms such as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act?

9. The Future of American Police Reform

Q31. What common themes persist in the history of police reform in the United States?
Q32. What insights from previous reform efforts should inform contemporary police reform efforts?

Index

About the Authors