Book review: Cops, Cameras, and Crisis: The Potential and the Perils of Police Body-Worn Cameras
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480620973775 |
| Author | Justin Nix |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
352 Theoretical Criminology 25(2)
been different. I do not think the book has demonstrated this. There may be an alterna-
tive explanation that better explains why the USA is an outlier in its practices with
detainees. Older than neoliberalism are the political structures of federalism and
American wariness of strong central government. These systems of thinking will have
structured behaviour and interactions between the police and the public far longer and
more directly than will have neoliberalism.
Where Police Powers and Citizens’ Rights was particularly strong was in the discus-
sion of ‘custodial citizens’, drawing on the concept originated by Lerman and Weaver
(2014). This term refers to those individuals who have multiple contacts with the crimi-
nal justice system throughout their lives. Skinns draws on the concept throughout the
text, but in particular in Chapter 7 to describe how these individuals become socialized
into accepting their situation when they enter custody. The effects of this socialization
were most pronounced with African American men, and reflect not only long-established
systems of poverty but also systems of coercive control throughout US history. It is
unfortunate that this concept and an analysis of how it structured encounters in custody
was not developed in more detail.
Overall, I would recommend Police Powers and Citizens’ Rights to readers as a well-
argued and well-researched text, which presents a detailed comparative analysis of police
custody. Skinns has shown the value of international comparative analysis in crimino-
logical research to highlight particular relationships between the state and its citizens.
This examination of a common police practice across four nations throws into sharp
relief the lived outcome of particular political and cultural assemblages. This level of
scholarship, conducted over a series of years with rich description and well informed by
a diverse range of academic subjects, is unusual in contemporary police research, let
alone on a topic as under-studied as police custody. Skinns invites us to consider more
deeply the effects of macro-level structures in policing on micro-level encounters. This
is indeed a bold challenge, but is one to which more of us could rise.
References
Ericson RV (2007) Rules in policing: Five perspectives. Theoretical Criminology 11(3): 367–401.
Lerman AE and Weaver VM (2014) Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of
American Crime Control. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Packer H (1968) The Limits of the Criminal Sanction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Michael D White and Aili Malm, Cops, Cameras, and Crisis: The Potential and the Perils of Police
Body-Worn Cameras, NYU Press: New York, 2020; 200 pp.: 9781479850150, $25 (pbk),
9781479820177, $89 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Justin Nix, University of Nebraska Omaha, USA
Police body-worn cameras (BWCs) have proliferated rapidly throughout the USA since
2014, when several controversial police killings of Black citizens sparked demand for
police reform. BWCs featured prominently among the recommendations made by
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