This paper analyzes the roles of the New Orleans police in the slave order, and attempts to delineate the various opportunities for police autonomy. I also consider the laws of slavery that the police were expected to enforce, and the viability of actively enforcing them. I conclude that the police had opportunities to create autonomy for themselves through the reality of slave and city life.

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Through an analysis of four major riots in New Orleans between 1854 and 1874, this paper examines the central role of local police forces in the violent New Orleans political culture. Through this analysis, the paper questions the extent to which not just exclusion, but political violence, is embedded in American republicanism. From the re-integration of the city in 1852 well into the Jim Crow era, police forces served as party operatives in New Orleans, insuring through violence that their party won majority on the city council or losing their positions, en masse, if they did not. These patterns of mob violence highlight the remarkable extent to which majority approval figured over rule of law in mid-nineteenth century republicanism.

This paper examines the treatment of the police in the Los Angles Times between 1996-2006 through content analysis and supplemental interviews of police officers as well as reporters from print, radio and television media. After a brief review of the history of the fortunes of the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Times during the years under study, the paper describes patterns of police coverage. The content analysis revealed an increase in international stories, a decrease in stories of local interest and a dearth of articles that applied critical analysis of, or skeptical regard to, police actions. The content analysis and interviews revealed that police departments and the news industry were undergoing opposing shifts: while there was a rise in the tendency of police departments to professionalize their communications (with departments' Public Information Officers increasing dramatically in stories over the years of study), there was also a steep decline in the resources news outlets were devoting to coverage of the police. These opposing tendencies, when correlated with the shifts in police reporting revealed in content analysis of the Times, can help explain why the paper provides its readers with less sophisticated and political police coverage. In effect, police are more often used as "witnesses" of fact rather than objects of analysis. This lack of vigilance over police actions hinders improvement in police/community relations in Los Angeles.Keywords: police, Los Angeles Times, reporting, professionalizing police communications IntroductionMost Americans get their information about police activities from media sources. This is true despite the reality that policing is the most intimate of state interventions into private life. Moreover, when surveying people as to their impressions of the police and their day-to-day work, people are much more influenced by the notion of policing presented to them in fictionalized portrays in television and film than by any real-life exposure. While procedurals may taint public understanding of the police, one of the primary sources of "reliable" information about police actions is local media. (Dowler 2003) Furthermore, the struggle of American newspapers to stay solvent since the late 1990s has had yet to be understood consequences to local governance. This is a time of changing priorities and new challenges to popular media and local police forces. This paper seeks to understand this changing landscape of media consumption and police media sophistication by tracking police coverage in the LA Times from 1996-2006.There are several reasons for this period of study. First, this ten-year time frame includes the rise of the Internet as the ascendant source of news and devastating competition for print press in particular. Second, initially I partook this study to understand the role of 9/11 in coverage of policing and while it was in some ways overshadowed by changes in reporting, there are still patterns that can be seen in press coverage in the ye...

This essay examines the current state of the field of criminology and argues that by under-representing corporate violence, over-representing street crime, and not often addressing political crime, criminology as a field is doing a disservice to our students. Further, the study of group violence and "new wars" could be enriched by the viewpoint of sociologists and criminologists.Academics are not known for clarity. Indeed, many within and outside of the field complain about the obfuscation of sociological writing and ponder whether the field makes common sense needlessly complex and revelatory (at least according to some of my Introduction to Sociology students). However, in this essay, I argue for simplification: Violence is violence. Specifically, by conceptualizing criminology, the study of "new wars," and political crime as wholly different fields of inquiry, we create pillars of knowledge, theories, and information that are insulated from one another to the detriment of understanding the fundamental human problem of violence. The method and type of violence are important and need examination, but not to the point where specialization has made it so people from various fields who are studying violence in whatever form are not aware of or communicating their theories, research, and findings.By focusing on the phenomenon of violence as a point of inquiry more broadly -and not getting bogged down by the method of the violence or the field of study, be that sociology, criminology, psychology, or political science -we can achieve two worthy goals. First, white-collar crime 1 has consistently not been treated as a serious problem, and looking at the violence in its wake may help correct that. This tendency continues to go on despite the fact that white-collar crime kills and injures many times more people a year than street crime. This is a problem on the policy front (lack of enforcement or sometimes even laws to combat it) and also within the field of sociology and criminology. Because we do not tend to conceptualize corporate crime as violence, at least on the curricular and research level, we continue to ignore a pervasive and devastating social problem and do nothing to help people understand it or fight it. Further, what we do focus on is street crime, a type of violence believed to be to be a bigger problem within poor communities and people of color. We, as scholars, consistently reproduce the racism that led to both the structured inequality and the stereotyping in the first place. By putting so much of our research and teaching into street crime, we reify the destructive narrative that people of color and poor people are dangerous and responsible for their problems even while we often critique the school-to-prison pipeline and other features of the "New Jim Crow" (Alexander 2010).Second, sociologists and criminologists have something to offer those who study political violence, while those who are interested in street crime could better understand growing globalization and the intersection of "crime" and ...