Just Policing
2023. Oxford University Press.
Policing is enormously controversial. Police use violence to enforce laws of questionable justice, they fire impact rounds and tear gas to break up political demonstrations, they arrest people knowing that the trial system relies on coercive plea bargaining and that jails and prisons are unsanitary and dangerous places that hold no hope of rehabilitating offenders. The police are on the front lines of the criminal justice system, but often end up as agents of injustice themselves. But it’s not entirely their fault. We ask them to do this stuff; we make them promise to do it; we make their salaries depend on it. And it’s not like we want police officers to simply refuse to follow orders or to pick and choose how and when to enforce the law however they’d like. So, there’s a puzzle here, and it’s a matter of life or death. What are police supposed to do, given the situation we are putting them in? In a society that’s filled with injustice, what does good policing look like? In Just Policing, I clarify the question and develop an answer to it.
contents
1. Questions of just policing
2. Policing in a complex and coupled criminal legal system
3. The problem of police legitimacy
4. Legitimacy-risks and the separation of police powers
5. To protect (and serve), proportionally
6. Maintaining order in the face of disagreement
7. On the democratic authorization of police power
8. The form of police agencies
reviews
David Wolitz in the Rutgers Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books Series.
