Race and Policing in America: Conflict and Reform

Ronald Weitzer · Steven A. Tuch

Jun 2006 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

Race and Policing in America is about relations between police and citizens, with a focus on racial differences. It utilizes both the authors' own research and other studies to examine Americans' opinions, preferences, and personal experiences regarding the police. Guided by group-position theory and using both existing studies and the authors' own quantitative and qualitative data (from a nationally representative survey of whites, blacks, and Hispanics), this book examines the roles of personal experience, knowledge of others' experiences (vicarious experience), mass media reporting on the police, and neighborhood conditions (including crime and socioeconomic disadvantage) in structuring citizen views in four major areas: overall satisfaction with police in one's city and neighborhood, perceptions of several types of police misconduct, perceptions of police racial bias and discrimination, and evaluations of and support for a large number of reforms in policing.

About the author

Ronald Weitzer is professor of sociology at George Washington University, where he has taught since 1988. His primary research interests are in criminology, with specialization in policing. He has published extensively on the issue of police-minority relations in the United States, Northern Ireland, and South Africa. A secondary area of expertise is the sex industry. His books include Current Controversies in Criminology (2003), Deviance and Social Control (2002), Sex For Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry (2000), Policing Under Fire: Ethnic Conflict and Police-Community Relations in Northern Ireland (1995), and Transforming Settler States: Communal Conflict and Internal Security in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe (1990).

Steven A. Tuch is professor of sociology at George Washington University, where he has taught since 1983. His primary research interests are in racial stratification and public opinion. He has published extensively on these topics in such journals as American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Problems, Criminology, Social Psychology Quarterly, Sociological Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, and Social Science Research, among others. He is the coeditor of Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change (1997). In 1997–98 he was a Fulbright Fellow in the Institute of Sociology at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.