Kirk Miller

Racial Profiling and Postmodern Society: Police Responsiveness, Image Maintenance, and the Left Flank of Police Legitimacy

Racial profiling is among the most important challenges to the legitimacy of law enforcement agencies in the United States. In response to concerns about racial profiling, police departments have taken a number of approaches to address the threat to legitimacy that racial profiling poses. Among the most common approaches, and one that citizens, policy makers, and scholars have all supported, is the implementation of data collection programs designed to document the situational characteristics of traffic stops. The consensus is that data collection will provide an empirical basis for determining whether race-based or other biased policing is occurring. This article argues that this approach is limited in its effectiveness. It is argued that police interest in documenting and preventing racial profiling is driven by concerns about developing and maintaining the perception of responsiveness to the public. Police strategy, ironically, uses technology and science to enhance institutional legitimacy.

The Institutionalization of Racial Profiling Policy An Examination of Antiprofiling Policy Adoption Among Large Law Enforcement Agencies

The issue of racial profiling has come to represent one of the key contemporary challenges facing law enforcement agencies in the United States. One way that agencies have responded to this issue is to adopt anti-profiling policies to address concerns about racial disparities in traffic stops and their outcomes. Policy adoption is assumed to encourage more racially equitable policing as well as enhance community relations. While both of these outcomes appear beneficial to law enforcement agencies, there is also good reason to expect that agencies may differ in the extent to which they are likely to implement such policy. This study explores what factors explain the adoption of protocols addressing the racial profiling phenomenon. Using data on large law enforcement agencies from the 2003 LEMAS survey, the findings reveal that both agency organizational characteristics and environmental features of the jurisdiction are associated with the agency’s profiling policy regime.

Traversing the Spatial Divide? Gender, Place, and Delinquency:

This article employs a gender-as-social-practice perspective to explain patterned differences in the situational context of delinquency by sex. Using data on juvenile offenders from the Philadelphia Birth Cohort II study, criminal events, rather than individuals, are used as the unit of analysis. The events approach decenters individuals from the analysis and provides a window through which to explore how gender influences certain characteristics of crime. Findings suggest that male and female juveniles, alone and in groups, become involved in crime that is concentrated in different types of physical space. In particular, boys are more likely to be involved in crimes that occur outdoors and in a larger variety of places than are girls. The context of criminal events provides a place where the practices of gender and the distribution of delinquent opportunities appear to intersect.

POLICING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PIRACY: A STUDY IN CORPORATE CONTROL OF CRIME

ABSTRACT This article seeks to enhance our understanding of private policing by examining the manner in which one association of intellectual property owners polices one form of crime. Specifically, it examines the manner in which the Motion Picture Association of America polices a common form of piracy-the retail distribution of unauthorized videocassettes. In the typical case, an agent of the association learns that a particular dealer may be handling bad tapes and conducts an investigation. Acquiring evidence of wrongdoing, the agent takes any of three courses of action oriented toward disrupting the operation, seizing the tapes, and curbing further offenses. These actions are criminal, civil, and voluntary forfeiture. Which course he takes depends on the intent of the offender, the willingness and capacity of officials to take action, and the cost-effectiveness and feasibility of legal processing. This case of policing is compared to other forms of policing. It departs from the prevailing image of private policing, which depicts the activity as premonitory and nonpunitive in nature. Policing piracy, like constabulary policing, is post-monitory and punitive. At the same time, this case differs from constabulary policing. Agents serve private interests and adopt a relatively aggressive and unyielding posture in doing so.

Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship

Embrick and his colleagues (p. 250) also realize this problem exists: ‘‘Yet, our sociological understanding of people and virtual technologies often lag far behind. Part of the reason is because we are just beginning to develop the methodological and theoretical tools needed to engage as researchers in this still new terrain.’’ Despite these organizational issues, the editors did a great job in assembling a colorful mixture of innovative research and very interesting, well-written articles. Highlights are the semiotic analysis of Elizabeth Erkenbrack (pp. 38ff.) in ‘‘Discursive Engagements in World of Warcraft,’’ in which the author explores ‘‘interactive realities, the multiple orientations of players, and the inter-frame effects’’ of the game ‘‘World of Warcraft,’’ as well as the chapter of J. Talmadge Wright (pp. 81ff.) on the production of place and play in virtual spaces, in which he makes the novel argument that the new technology of representation ‘‘amplifies already existing social relationships.’’ In conclusion, Embrick, Wright, and Lukács’s book is a very innovative collection of essays on virtual culture and online games. They succeed in filling the sociological research gap by issuing broader questions on power, exclusion, and inequalities in a digital and mediatized society. The chapters and authors present the state of the art in this research field. The topics are carefully selected, the chapters are well written, and readers especially benefit from the concise introduction and conclusion.