Policing The World On Screen

This book analyzes Hollywood storytelling that features an American crimefighter—whether cop, detective, or agent—who must safeguard society and the nation by any means necessary. That often means going “rogue” and breaking the rules, even deploying ugly violence, but excused as self-defense or to serve the greater good. This ends-justifies-means approach dates back to gunfighters taming the western frontier to urban cowboy cops battling urban savagery—first personified by “Dirty” Harry Callahan—and later dispatched in global interventions to vanquish threats to national security. America as the world’s “policeman often means controlling the Other at home and abroad, which also extends American hegemony from the Cold War through the War on Terror. This book also examines pioneering portrayals by males of color and female crimefighters to embody such a social or national defender, which are frustrated by their existence as threats the white knight exists to defeat.

American police departments have presided over the business of motion pictures since the end of the nineteenth century. Their influence is evident not only on the screen but also in the ways movies are made, promoted, and viewed in the United States. Screening the Police explores the history of film's entwinement with law enforcement, showing the role that state power has played in the creation and expansion of a popular medium. For the New Jersey State Police in the 1930s, film offered a method of visualizing criminality and of circulating urgent information about escaped convicts. For the New York Police Department, the medium was a means of making the agency world-famous as early as 1896. Beat cops became movie stars. Police chiefs made their own documentaries. And from Maine to California, state and local law enforcement agencies regularly fingerprinted filmgoers for decades, amassing enormous records as they infiltrated theatres both big and small. As author Noah Tsika demonstrates, understanding the scope of police power in the United States requires attention to an aspect of film history that has long been ignored. Screening the Police reveals the extent to which American cinema has overlapped with the politics and practices of law enforcement.

From the Cold War through today, the U.S. has quietly assisted dozens of regimes around the world in suppressing civil unrest and securing the conditions for the smooth operation of capitalism. Casting a new light on American empire, Badges Without Borders shows, for the first time, that the very same people charged with global counterinsurgency also militarized American policing at home. In this groundbreaking exposé, Stuart Schrader shows how the United States projected imperial power overseas through police training and technical assistance—and how this effort reverberated to shape the policing of city streets at home. Examining diverse records, from recently declassified national security and intelligence materials to police textbooks and professional magazines, Schrader reveals how U.S. police leaders envisioned the beat to be as wide as the globe and worked to put everyday policing at the core of the Cold War project of counterinsurgency. A “smoking gun” book, Badges without Borders offers a new account of the War on Crime, “law and order” politics, and global counterinsurgency, revealing the connections between foreign and domestic racial control.

Policing the Media is an investigation into one of the paradoxes of the mass-mediated age. Issues, events, and people that we "see" most on our television screens are often those that we understand the least. David Perlmutter examined this issue as it relates to one of the most frequently portrayed groups of people on television: police officers. Policing the Media is a report on the ethnography of a police department, derived from the author′s experience riding on patrol with officers and joining the department as a reserve policeman. Drawing upon interviews, personal observations, and the author′s black-and-white photographs of cops and the "clients," Perlmutter describes the lives and philosophies of street patrol officers. He finds that cops hold ambiguous attitudes toward their television comrades, for much of TV copland is fantastic and preposterous. Even those programs that boast gritty realism little resemble actual police work. Moreover, the officers perceive that the public′s attitudes toward law enforcement and crime are directly (and largely nefariously) influenced by mass media. This in turn, he suggests, influences the way that they themselves behave and "perform" on the street, and that unreal and surreal expectations of them are propagated by television cop shows. This cycle of perceptual influence may itself profoundly impact the contemporary criminal justice system, on the street, in the courts, and in the hearts and minds of ordinary people.

From the Roman Praetorian Guard to the English shire-reeve to the U.S. marshals, lawmen have a long and varied history. At first, such groups were often corrupt, guilty of advancing a political agenda rather than protecting citizens. It was about the turn of the twentieth century that police officers as we know them came into being. At this time, a number of police reforms such as civil service and police unions were developed. Citizen committees were formed to oversee police function. About this same time, the technology of motion pictures was being advanced. Movies evolved from silent films with a limited budget and short running time to films with sound whose budget was ever rising and whose audience demanded longer, more complex story lines. From the infancy of moviemaking, lawmen of various types were popular subjects. Bounty hunters, sheriffs, private eyes, detectives and street officers--often portrayed by some of Hollywood's biggest names--have been depicted in every conceivable way. Compiled from a comprehensive examination of the material in question, this volume provides a critical-historical analysis of law enforcement in American cinema. From High Noon to The Empire Strikes Back, it examines the police in their many incarnations with emphasis on the ways in which lawmen are portrayed and how this portrayal changes over time. Each film discussed reveals something about society, subtly commenting on social conditions, racial issues and government interventions. Major historical events such as the Great Depression, World War II and the McCarthy trials find their way into many of these films. Significant film genres from science fiction to spaghetti western are represented. Films examined include Easy Street (1917), a nominal comedy starring Charlie Chaplin; Star Packer, a 1934 John Wayne film; The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart; Dirty Harry, a 1971 Clint Eastwood classic; Leslie Nielsen's spoof Naked Gun (1988); and 1993's Tombstone featuring Kurt Russell. The filmography contains a synopsis along with information on director, screenplay, starring actors and year of production. Photographs and an index are also included.

This book offers a critical survey of film and media representations of black masculinity in the early twenty-first-century United States, between President George W. Bush’s 2001 announcement of the War on Terror and President Barack Obama’s 2009 acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. It argues that images of black masculine authority have become increasingly important to the legitimization of contemporary policing and its leading role in the maintenance of an antiblack social order forged by racial slavery and segregation. It examines a constellation of film and television productions—from Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day to John Lee Hancock’s The Blind Side to Barry Jenkin's Moonlight—to illuminate the contradictory dynamics at work in attempts to reconcile the promotion of black male patriarchal empowerment and the preservation of gendered antiblackness within political and popular culture.

This book offers a sociological analysis of the history of international police cooperation in the period from the middle of the 19th century until the end of World War II. It is a detailed exploration of international cooperation strategies involving police institutions from the United States and Germany as well as other European countries.

Policing and firearms: it is a crucial relationship. Should police be routinely armed? If so, what restrictions should be imposed on the use of firearms? Where police are not routinely armed, there is still a need for specialist armed police: how do these units operate, and are they effective? This ground-breaking edited book explores the nexus between policing and firearms with a genuinely international focus. Contributors from Ireland, Germany, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Mexico, the United States, Venezuela, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada explore the issues from a range of perspectives, including human rights, militarization, police legitimacy, and the risks police firearms pose to the community and to police themselves. This thought-provoking collection is an indispensable resource for law enforcement policymakers and students of policing and criminal justice.

Policing the Open Road examines how the rise of the car, that symbol of American personal freedom, inadvertently led to ever more intrusive policing--with disastrous consequences for racial equality in our criminal justice system. When Americans think of freedom, they often picture the open road. Yet nowhere are we more likely to encounter the long arm of the law than in our cars. Sarah Seo reveals how the rise of the automobile transformed American freedom in radical ways, leading us to accept--and expect--pervasive police power. As Policing the Open Road makes clear, this expectation has had far-reaching political and legal consequences.--

Democratic policing today is a widely used approach to policing not only in Western societies but increasingly around the world. Yet it is rarely defined and it is little understood by the public and even by many of its practitioners. Peter K. Manning draws on political philosophy, sociology and criminal justice to develop a widely applicable fundamental conception of democratic policing. In the process he delineates today's relationship between democracy and policing. Democratic Policing in a Changing World documents the failure of police reform, showing that each new approach - such as crime mapping and 'hot spots' policing - fails to alter any fundamental practice and has in fact increased social inequalities. He offers a new and better approach for scholars, policy makers, police, governments and societies.