The New Policing
Edition: 1st
Author: Eugene McLaughlin
ISBN: 9780803989054
Publishers: Sage Publications Ltd
Price £20.99
Publication Date: 4th
Dec 2006
Publisher’s Title
Information
Description:
The New Policing provides a
comprehensive introduction to the critical issues confronting policing today.
It incorporates an overview of traditional approaches to the study of the
police with a discussion of current perspectives. The book goes on to examine
key themes, including:
The core purpose of contemporary policework.
The reconfiguration of police culture.
Organizational issues and dilemmas currently confronting the police.
The managerial reforms and professional innovations that have been
implemented in recent years.
The future of policing, security and crime control.
In offering this discussion of the nature and role of the police, The
New Policing illustrates the need to re-examine and re-think the
theoretical perspectives that have constituted policing studies. Examining
evidence from the UK, the USA, and other western societies, the book promotes
and enables an understanding of the cultural and symbolic significance of
policing in society.
This ground-breaking text has been constructed to ensure that it touches on all
the key issues that any course on police and policing will cover. It will be an
essential purchase for all students of policing and criminal justice, and
academics and professionals working in this field.
Review
A young lady named Warner
was about to select the forename Jack for her new born son when her mother
informed her that such a name would identify him with the actor Jack Warner
(1896-1981) who played the part of PC George Dixon murdered in the film The
Blue Lamp (1949): the first film to receive the full co-operation of the Metropolitan
Police. Later BBC TV resurrected him for the series Dixon of Dock Green
(1955-1976). The programme was a reassuring and nostalgic series in which
honest copper PC Dixon emphasised that crime did not pay.
This historical period is referred to in Eugene
McLaughlin’s book The New Policing as the Dixonian era: a time when police
constables patrolled the streets, criminals went in fear of arrest and
virtually all murders were solved. Today police officers patrol in motor
vehicles, carry a multitude of equipment, often including firearms and
criminals (allegedly) no longer fear the prospect of arrest. Perhaps not
unexpectedly the older generation hanker for the bygone days of George Dixon
(myth or not) and constantly demand more police protection from criminals. But those halcyon days have gone forever: in
some cases helmets have been discarded for flat caps and regulation boots for
lightweight shoes when appropriate.
Policing has changed every
decade since its inception in 1829 but Professor McLaughlin commences his book
at a sensible post-war period by describing the background of the legendary
Jack Warner George Dixon and how London’s 1950s East End bobby differed from
New York’s city cops. He subsequently examines the police in the community,
policing society, multicultural problems with quotes and references from the
Scarman and Macpherson reports, police accountability, terrorist crises and
looking to the future. Each subject is examined in great detail with quotes
from many of the 400 plus publications listed as references and conclusions
drawn on each of the chosen subjects.
The author admits in his preface that the book is from
a British prospective but it also "touches upon much broader shifts that are
restructuring the Anglo-American policing model". But why was it necessary to
compare British policing with that of Americans? It is questionable whether there is so much common ground between
the two nations as to warrant comparisons. While the several police forces in
the UK work on parallel lines the US consists of a number of States which are
not necessarily comparable with each other let alone the UK. It would have been
more thought-provoking to compare like with like such as policing in Paris,
Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, etc. especially in view of the recent European Crime
and Safety Survey that revealed the percentage of households burgled were
higher in the UK than in any other EU country, the percentage of population who
were exposed to crime placed the UK second in the table, etc.
Although written by an academic for (possibly) other
academics the history and analysis of the vast number of subjects from a
criminologist’s point of view as opposed to that of a practising police
officer, the book would sit comfortably on the shelf of several police
officers’ libraries; especially those who may not be conversant with the
Dixonian period and subsequent changes in policing over the past fifty
years. In addition, it would enable
them to appreciate the concern of their parents and/or grand parents for the
return of Dixonian community policing (myth or not).
ICONOCLAST
Cybercrime and
Society
Author: Majid
Yar
ISBN: 1412907543
Publishers: Sage Publications Ltd
Price £18.99
Publication
Date: April 2006
Publisher’s Title Description:
`Criminology has been rather slow to
recognise the importance of cyberspace in changing the nature and scope of
offending and victimisation, and a comprehensive introductory textbook on
cybercrime and its social implications is long overdue. One of the many
strengths of Majid Yar's book is that it avoids 'techy' jargon and unites
criminological and sociological perspectives in discussions of cybercrime,
cyber-deviance and cyber-freedoms. Yar successfully de-mystifies a subject that
causes many criminologists to feel out of their depth (or at least their
comfort zone). Cybercrime & Society should be the first point of reference
for any student of new media and crime' - Dr Yvonne Jewkes, Reader in
Criminology, The Open University
`An engaging book full of lively discussion
and careful explanation of the issues. Majid Yar manages to achieve the seemingly
impossible task of balancing theory with action. I shall certainly recommend it
to my own cybercrime students' -Professor David S. Wall, Head of University of
Leeds Law School, Professor of Criminal Justice and Information Technology
Cybercrime and Society provides a clear,
systematic, critical introduction to current debates about cybercrime. It
locates the phenomenon in the wider contexts of social, political, cultural and
economic change. It is the first book to draw upon perspectives spanning criminology,
sociology, law, politics and cultural studies to examine the whole range of
cybercrime issues, including:
* computer hacking
* cyber-terrorism
* media 'piracy'
* financial fraud and identity theft
* online stalking
* hate speech
* pornography
* surveillance
The book takes an international perspective,
drawing on research, case studies and examples from the UK, the US, Europe and
beyond. It includes chapter outlines and summaries, further reading and a
glossary. The book is an essential resource for all students and academics
interested in cybercrime and the future of the Internet.
Title:
Penal Systems - A Comparative Approach
Authors:
Michael Cavadino and James Dignan
ISBN:
0-7619-5202-9
Publishers:
Sage Publications
Price
£24.99
Publication
Date: 2006
Much as the title states this book is a comparative approach to the study of punishments in various countries. Twelve countries are represented and a comparison is attempted as to the penology in each of these countries. Chapters on comparative youth justice and the privatisation of prisons are also presented. The comparison of penal systems in various parts of the world, (by no means all countries are represented, in fact twelve are) makes interesting reading.
The foreword by David Downes
of the Manheim Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice of the London School
of Economics.
The book is divided into
four parts. The initial part deals with
introducing the reader to comparative penology. The main section is part two which deals with the different countries
represented for the assessment of their penal approach. It begins with the American system followed
by England and Wales, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Germany,
Netherlands, France, Italy, Sweden, Finland and Japan. Each approach has been labelled to some
degree in the chapter headings, the United States being seen as
hyper-incarceration oriented. England and Wales have a somewhat different
approach called a "stop and go, and upward zig zag". Australia and New Zealand have a "neo liberal" punitive method
for dealing with criminals. When
speaking of the Netherlands there is the title "A beacon of tolerance dimmed".
Countries are considered
from the point of view of social democracy and its impact on penology. Japan on the other hand is viewed as "a fist
in a velvet penal glove". Countries seem to differ in their penal culture.
Among the approaches which
are prevalent in the different countries are those that are concerned with
reforming criminals and their re-socialisation. Others tend to emphasise retributionist philosophies of punishment,
that is, getting the criminal to suffer for his offences.
Another approach or strategy
is that of using extremely harsh and punitive methods to emphasise law and
order, while a second seeks to use a managerial approach to punishment. A third considers the importance of the
human rights of individuals even when incarcerated.
A country’s stance on
penology is often considered to be based on the imprisonment rate per one
hundred thousand of the population.
There are certain errors in this approach as it depends very much on
which crimes are being considered predominantly. There have been considerable
changes in recent years. The
Netherlands were at one time a "beacon of enlightenment" but it appears that
the prison population is fast escalating there. Finland was remarkable in slashing imprisonment from 118 per one
hundred thousand population in 1976 to 46 in 1999, but there has in recent
times been an increase again.
The authors’ views are that
excessive punishment remains not only inhuman but demonstrably inefficient and
ineffective as a means of controlling crime in any kind of political
economy. The authors view the
importance of pursuing a policy which fosters a rational discussion and
deliberation in how best to respond to crime.
Popular pressure is that one must be firm with criminals and this
populist approach has tended to increase the prison population in such
countries as Sweden, Finland and Japan.
The effect of privatisation
of the prison system has also brought about an increase in the prison
population but not exclusively in the United States. Both Holland and France have resisted to some degree the
privatisation of prisons.
The latter part of the book
is concerned with youth justice in different countries with different sentences
often being provided for youth offenders.
There appear to be some similarities with youth justice in Finland and
Sweden. Youth justice in Britain has
been transformed since the 19th century when young people received
similar punishments as adults including the death penalty.
One of the lowest
imprisonment rates is that of Japan which is 53 per hundred thousand as
measured in 2002. In contrast in the
United States the prison population has risen dramatically. It has the highest imprisonment rate of all
the countries covered in the book. In
addition to the death penalty in the Unites States there is currently, and has
been for some time, the war on drugs, with many offenders being imprisoned for
offences related to drug addiction. As
one who visits prisons regularly in Britain, alcohol and drug use is a
confirmed accompaniment to crime in many British prisons.
Data obtained in 2002
indicates that the imprisonment in the United States is 701 per one hundred
thousand general population. During the
latter part of 2002, 2,330, 331
individuals were incarcerated.
This may be contrasted with the British population of prisoners in 2004
of 74, 488. Each of the countries
mentioned falls somewhere between the United States and Japan in their rate of
imprisonment.
"Penal Systems - A
Comparative Approach", is a complex book which provides a considerable amount
of information and comparisons between countries. The book is likely to be of interest to Prison Officers, Forensic
Psychologists and Psychiatrists, as well as Universities training those likely
to be involved with penal policy and practice. The book may best be read in
parts as are required by the interest of the individual rather than read from
page 1 to the end. It is a
comprehensive and up-to-date book and should serve as a staple textbook for use
in law and social science courses dealing with penal policy and practice.
Dr L F Lowenstein
Extreme
Killing, Understanding Serial and Mass Murder
Authors:
James
Alan Fox and Jack Levin
ISBN:
0761947558
Publishers:
Sage
Price
£19.99 RRP UK
Publication
Date: 2005
Publisher’s Description:
Extreme Killing provides a comprehensive, fascinating
overview of multiple homicide, including both serial and mass murder. Adopting
a unified conceptual framework for understanding these divergent forms of
extreme killing, this book illustrates the many violent expressions of power,
revenge, terror, greed, and loyalty using contemporary and classic case studies
in multiple murder.
Publisher’s Description:
In Extreme Killing, renowned experts James Alan Fox andJack Levin examine the theories of
criminal behaviour and apply them to a multitude of well-known and lesser-known
cases from around the world. The authors draw upon research from two large data
sets - one comprised of serial killers and the other of those who have
committed massacres. The book presents the many commonalities among multiple
murders and also focuses on the varieties of serial and mass killing. The
authors address the characteristics of both killers and their victims, and, in
their concluding chapter, discuss the special concerns of multiple murder
victims and their survivors.
Understanding
Homicide
Author:
Fiona Brookman
ISBN:
0-7619-4755-8
Publishers:
Sage Publications
Price
£19.99
Publication
Date: January 2005
Publishers
Information on the Book
Why
do people kill?
What
are the patterns and characteristics of UK homicide? How is homicide
investigated?
How
can it be prevented?
Understanding
Homicide is a comprehensive and stimulating text that unravels the phenomenon
of homicide.
The
book bridges a major gap in criminological literature. Brookman combines
original analysis with a lucid overview of the key theories and debates in the
study of homicide and violence. She introduces the broad spectrum of different
features, aspects and forms of homicide.
Topics
covered include:
The
killing of children
Multiple
homicide (including serial and mass murder, terrorism and corporate homicide)
Domestic
homicide
Female
killers
Homicide
among men
Features
to aid the student include study tasks, review questions and annotated
suggested further reading, including internet resources.
Understanding
Homicide is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of
criminology, criminal justice, psychology, sociology and forensics. It' will
also be invaluable to academics, researchers and practitioners interested in
the phenomenon of homicide and the broader issue of violence.
'A
very significant contribution to the available literature on violence
generally, and Homicide in particular.'
Kenneth Polk, Professor of Criminology, University of Melbourne
'This
is a thoughtful, lively and informative book which helps to fill a surprising
gap in the recent criminological literature. Mike Maguire, Professor of
Criminology, Cardiff University
Fiona
Brookman is Principal Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Glamorgan
Preface
Despite
its continued prominence in the media, homicide has received surprisingly
little serious analytical attention from criminologists in recent years,
especially in Britain. As Rock (1998:
9) puts it, homicide has suffered from 'intellectual neglectfulness'. Fiona
Brockman, whose excellent doctoral thesis on the subject I supervised when she
was at Cardiff University during the 1990s, has taken some important steps
towards ending this neglect, and I am pleased to accept her invitation to
write a brief preface to this very welcome book.
The
book is a substantial contribution to the recent academic literature on homicide,
at the same time being written in a reader-friendly manner which will help it
reach a wider audience, including students of criminology and criminal
justice. It is informed throughout by
the author's now considerable research and teaching experience in this
area. Her doctoral work was concerned
with explanations of different kinds of homicide, especially those committed
by men, and she explored and developed theories around the concept of
'masculinities' and issues of control.
She also considered the extent to which homicide should be regarded as a
unique kind of crime, deserving of its own theoretical explanations, or whether
it should primarily be regarded as the extreme end of the spectrum of violent
behaviour (the death of the victim often being the result of behaviour not
initially aimed at killing, and to some extent contingent upon fortune - as it
were, the difference between a knife hitting the heart or an arm) and hence
explicable in the same ways as serious violence in general. In exploring such questions, she undertook
extensive analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data, including details
of all cases recorded in England and Wales on the Homicide Index and a
considerable number of police files.
These theoretical interests have been complemented more recently by
policy focused research on behalf of the Home Office, in which she has both
examined police investigations and has explored possible ways in which levels
of homicide might be reduced in the UK.
This book draws on all the above work, bringing together the theoretical
with the practical to present a comprehensive overview of the subject. It gives
a clear and well evidenced picture of patterns and forms of homicide, discusses
competing explanations of why it occurs, outlines key issues in police
investigations, and considers the possibilities of reduction and
prevention. Whilst focused mainly on
the UK, it deals with literature, research and debates from other parts of the
world; especially North America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
In
short, this is a thoughtful, lively and informative book which helps to fill a
surprising gap in the recent criminological literature in Britain. It deserves
wide readership among students of the subject and non-specialists alike, and I
wish it every success.
Mike
Maguire
Professor
of Criminology, Cardiff University
The first two books in this
trilogy under review tell us much about the current state of academic
criminology in the UK and in North America, especially in relation to how it is
taught. Brookman’s Understanding Homicide, for example,
positively screams ‘based on a PhD thesis’, and ‘even though this is a textbook
can it still count for the Research Assessment Exercise?’ As such it covers almost every theoretical
perspective related to, or even semi-related to murder, and any undergraduate
that ploughs their way through to the end, will undoubtedly be better informed
about murder as a result. On the other
hand Fox and Levin, who both teach at Northeastern University, have produced in
Extreme Killing a rather lazy hybrid between a "true crime" expose and a magazine article, with an occasional nod to the academy thrown in for good measure. Theirs is a book about entertaining students, rather than teaching them,
and seems much more to do with keeping them occupied with a steady diet of
horror, rather than questioning why those horrors exist in the first
place. Any undergraduate ploughing
their way through Extreme Killing
-and unfortunately more will undoubtedly read this rather than Understanding Homicide, is not necessarily going to learn anything at all, but is simply going to have
nightmares. So, having revealed my preference for Brookman, what do we learn about murder and serial murder?
Brookman, Principal Lecturer
at the University of Glamorgan, sets out to provide an "accessible and
comprehensive yet challenging overview of homicide for both teaching and
research purpose" (p.1). In doing so
she returns to cover some of the territory that she occupied in her PhD, but
offers more besides. In particular she
provides a lively and readable overview of biological, psychological and
cultural approaches to understanding the phenomenon of homicide, whilst
reminding her readers "we have yet to discover one single coherent theory that
is capable of explaining homicide" (p.98).
So too she presents a wealth of valuable statistical information that
throws some light onto the minutiae of murder, and even throws in a chapter
about serial killing for good measure.
Indeed, in linking the first two books that are being reviewed here,
Brookman’s Table 2.14 on page 50 demonstrates that between 1997 and 2001 there
were some 4,123 murders in England and Wales and that 80 of these -or 1.9 per
cent of the total could be attributed to serial killers.
Fox and Levin have
previously written about serial and mass murder, and they suggest that Extreme Killing is an "opportunity to
reassess some of the prevailing notions about these crimes -most notably, the
artificial and often problematic distinctions between serial and mass murderers
based primarily on the timing, and the uncritical embrace of sociopathy as an
explanation" (p.ix). And, if they had
stuck to their plan, then Extreme
Killing would indeed have been useful in attempting to unravel the
supposed differences between serial killers, spree killers and mass murderers. However, Fox and Levin are too aware that
this essentially academic interest would lose them readers, and so they are
seduced into "true crime" very quickly to keep their audience hooked. For example, discussing Leonard Lake and
Charles Ng, Fox and Levin suggest that their "torture tapes revealed the
vicious rapes that the gruesome twosome perpetrated" (p.57), and that Jeffrey
Dahmer "liked them young -or small, especially with dark skin -and he surely
liked Tracy Edwards" (p.82). Extreme Killing is filled with this
type of extreme prose and lurid description, and when Fox and Levin pose
interesting questions -such as why the numbers of serial killers quadrupled in
the 1970s and 1980s, but declined in the 1990s, or why some groups -such as
the elderly, the young and prostitutes are targeted by serial killers they
rarely provide an answer. So, for
example, they suggest that "cultural diversity and economic competition have
together produced a pervasive sense of resentment and close-minded, twisted logic
in the hearts and heads of many hateful Americans" (p.234), this explanation -
which hints at structural causes for the phenomenon of serial killing, is never
pursued, but is merely left on its own as a conclusion with no further analysis
offered.
To Brookman’s great credit,
she also theorises about the homicides committed by corporations and by the
state.
David Wilson