Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2013
Abstract
This chapter tells the story of policing, crime, and the search for legitimacy over the past two decades in Los Angeles and New York City. Throughout this complex political, normative, and legal landscape, crime rates dropped dramatically in each city to levels not seen since the early 1960s. The chapter begins with a discussion of the evolution of policing in the two cities, assessing reciprocal and dynamic changes that reflected both the crises of crime epidemics and crises within the police. Next, it examines the role of litigation on the evolution of policing. Policing regimes in each city were challenged in federal courts, as well as by elected officials in local investigations. The outcomes of litigation in the two cities were starkly different, a reflection in part of the structure of the litigation itself, as well as the posture of each city toward the links between scandal and reform. The third section considers the historic transformations in crime itself. The fourth section examines basic changes in the structures of the cities, looking closely at factors that were implicated in the boom-and-bust cycles of crime that characterize the past half century. It locates crime trends in these larger structural transformations of the cities, and contextualizes policing in what seems to be an historic and evolutionary cycle.
Disciplines
Criminal Law | Law | Law Enforcement and Corrections | Urban Studies
Recommended Citation
Jeffrey Fagan & John MacDonald,
Policing, Crime, and Legitimacy in New York and Los Angeles: The Social and Political Contexts of Two Historic Crime Declines,
New York and Los Angeles: The Uncertain Future, David Halle & Andrew A. Beveridge (Eds.), Oxford University Press
(2013).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/1761