Race and Policing in America
Conflict and Reform

This book is about relations between police and citizens, with a focus on racial differences.

Ronald Weitzer (Author), Steven A. Tuch (Author)

9780521616911, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 12 June 2006

238 pages, 13 tables
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.355 kg

"...Race and Policing in America is a significant work and it does contribute well to the literature on policing and race. It is clearly the best book published on public opinion about the police."
- Contemporary Sociology

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.

1. Police-minority relations in America
2. Police misconduct
3. Racially biased policing
4. Reforming the police
5. Conclusion: the continuing racial divide.

Subject Areas: Sociology & anthropology [JH]