Police and security services Books

Book SynopsisThis book provides a unique insight into the way policing is performed. By embracing both organizational management issues as well as operational police business such as crime reduction and detection, firearms, disorder, organised crime and terrorism, it provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary police theory and practice.Trade Review"This is an outstanding and engaging book that should be read by anyone interested understanding and improving policing. The author's background as a career police officer and his extensive discussions with serving police officers ensure that and his conclusions are relevant to the realities of policing [...] What Stuart Kirby produces is a rich account of the complexity and diversity of the policing task and a telling account of how the service might be made better." - Nick Tilley, UCL, UK "We all want our police to be effective, but as Stuart Kirby painstakingly points out in this book, this is far easier said than done. Not only do we also want our police to be efficient with our money and fair in how they treat us all, but we cannot even all agree as to what it means for the police to be effective. Kirby debunks many myths and misconceptions about the police, astutely laying out the enormous challenges faced in policing open and free modern societies. This book is a must-read for all interested in improving policing." - Michael S. Scott, University of Wisconsin Law School, USA "In this timely and important book Stuart Kirby addresses what is now the key issue in policing: how to put into practice the large body of knowledge that has accumulated about best practice. There is much still to be discovered on the topic of effective policing, but we have many answers to essential questions about what constitutes the best strategies and performance measures. The problem is that many, perhaps most, police departments do not take a systematic and comprehensive approach to implementation. This book is therefore highly recommended as a first source for anyone interested in improving policing whether it be in crime reduction, solving crime or wider service delivery." - Tim Prenzler, Griffith University, Australia "Policing has for far too long been largely an oral culture and so Stuart Kirby's book is of itself important. That it tackles the often overlooked problem of implementation failure makes it required reading to those who care about policing. Many initiatives in policing are written off not because they are ineffective but because implementation was partial at best. To those who are serious about policing, read on." - Michael Barton, Chief Constable, Durham Constabulary, UKTable of ContentsPreface 1. 'There are Police and there are Police', Exploring the Complexity of the Police Operating Framework 2. The Fundamental Building Blocks of Police Effectiveness 3. Reducing Crime 4. Investigating Crime and Bringing Offenders to Justice 5. Policing Critical Incidents and the Use of Force 6. Investigating Serious Organised Crime and Terrorism 7. Conclusion

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Book SynopsisMost murderers and rapists escape justice. This horrifying fact has gone largely unexamined until now. In seventeen chapters, this groundbreaking book tours nearly the entire criminal justice system, examining the rules and practices that regularly produce failures of justice in serious criminal cases. Justice-frustrating rules usually exist for a reason, and each chapter outlines the interests at stake and different views on balancing them. It then describes the nature and extent of justice failures in present practice, providing numerous real-world examples of how the existing rules produce damaging results. Finally, each chapter reviews proposed and implemented reforms that could balance the competing interests in a less justice-frustrating manner and recommends onesometimes completely originalreform to improve the system. A systematic study of justice failures is long overdue. As this book discusses, regular failures of justice in serious criminal cases undermine deterrence and the criminal justice system's credibility with the community as a moral authority. The damage caused by unpunished crime is immense and, even worse, falls primarily on vulnerable minority communities. Now for the first time, students, researchers, policymakers, and citizens have a resource that explains why justice failures occur and what can be done about them. The book make no assumption that the reader has a background in criminal law, but it can also serve as the textbook for a course on criminal justice. There are many good books focused on the problem of injustice, when the system punishes wrongly. But there is also a desperate need to examine when and why the system fails to appropriately punish crime and what can be done to reduce such justice failures. Getting away with murder and rape is the norm in America today. This book aims to change that.

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Book SynopsisNo comparable volume collects in one place the various rules, doctrines, policies, and ideological positions that prevent our criminal justice system from pursuing and achieving justice.

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Book SynopsisFrom a prize-winning Harvard legal scholar, "a damning portrait" (New York Review of Books) of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new perspective on inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over thirteen million criminal cases each year, over 80 percent of the national total. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted, it punishes the innocent, and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans-most of them poor and disproportionately people of color-are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of driver's licenses, jobs, and housing. And as the nation learned from the police killings of Eric Garner, George Floyd, and too many others, misdemeanor enforcement can be lethal. Now updated with a new afterword, Punishment Without Crime shows how America's sprawling misdemeanor system makes our entire country less safe, less fair, and less equal.

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Book SynopsisThe police in America belong to the people,not the other way around. Yet millions of Americans experience their cops as racist, brutal, and trigger-happy: an overly aggressive, militarized enemy of the people. For their part, today's officers feel they are under siege,misunderstood, unfairly criticized, and scapegoated for society's ills. Is there a fix? Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper believes there is.Policing is in crisis. The last decade has witnessed a vast increase in police aggression, misconduct, and militarization, along with a corresponding reduction in transparency and accountability. It is not just noticeable in African American and other minority communities,where there have been a series of high-profile tragedies,but in towns and cities across the country. Racism,from raw, individualized versions to insidious systemic examples,appears to be on the rise in our police departments. Overall, our police officers have grown more and more alienated from the people they've been hired to serve.In To Protect and Serve , Stamper delivers a revolutionary new model for American law enforcement: the community-based police department. It calls for fundamental changes in the federal government's role in local policing as well as citizen participation in all aspects of police operations: policymaking, program development, crime fighting and service delivery, entry-level and ongoing education and training, oversight of police conduct, and- especially relevant to today's challenges- joint community-police crisis management. Nothing will ever change until the system itself is radically restructured, and here Stamper shows us how.Trade Review"This is a book America has been waiting for--a top cop's searing expose of corrupt, bigoted, brutal and trigger-happy policing in America and how to fix a broken system. It's the inside story, an MRI from former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, showing good cops taking risks to protect us all, to cities balancing the books with police fines, militarization run amok, and a police culture off the rails. Now, says Stamper, the mindset behind the badge has to focus first on public safety, crime, and collaboration not confrontation, with communities asserting control and clear federal standards to insure accountability. And he shows how it can be done." --Hedrick Smith, author of Who Stole the American Dream? and Executive Editor of Reclaim The American Dream "Most of the nation's approximately 18,000 police departments receive scathing criticism from one of their own... A vivid, well-written, vitally important book." --Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review "A blistering structural critique of U.S. law enforcement... By emphasizing institutional change, Stamper makes a brave attempt to answer the common question (one asked whenever another unarmed African-American is shot by police), where are all the good cops?" --Publishers Weekly

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