Jeffrey S Adler, Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing
| Date | 01 October 2020 |
| Published date | 01 October 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520915747 |
| Author | Randolph Roth |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
at making police less lethal “aided and abetted the continually rising levels of
killing by police” and lent them an air of legitimacy.
Ultimately, Badges Without Borders shows that “foreign” and “domestic” on
the one hand and “military” and “police” on the other must be held in a singular
frame in order to fully grasp the logics of security that undergird the state. Until we
take these connections seriously, we will fail to fully address the shared violence at
the core of U.S. policing that encircles the globe and makes itself felt in the lives of
America’s most vulnerable.
Marisol LeBr
on
University of Texas at Austin, USA
ORCID iD
Marisol LeBr
on https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4976-8657
Jeffrey S Adler, Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing,
University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2019; 256 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-
64331-1.
Jeffrey Adler has written an illuminating book on one of America’s most extraor-
dinary, yet troubled cities. It is two books in one: a history of homicide and a
history of the dramatic changes in policing and criminal justice that occurred in
New Orleans between 1920 and 1945, an era that scholars might have assumed was
unchanging, because the Jim Crow justice system took shape so rapidly during the
last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, and
appeared to be fully formed by the end of the First World War. The changes in
policing and criminal justice in the 1920s and 1930s had little to do with the
character or incidence of homicide. Paradoxically, Jim Crow policing became
harsher, and courts and jurors less forgiving toward African Americans, as the
city became less violent.
Adler’s story begins with a surge in homicide in New Orleans in the first half of
the 1920s, a surge that occurred in a number of cities in the South and Midwest.
The nation’s homicide rate rose by a fifth, but in New Orleans by nearly half. Adler
argues that the Great Migration during and after the First World War—the mass
exodus of African Americans from the rural South—caused the homicide rate to
spike in New Orleans and other destination cities. The Great Migration inundated
those cities with poor young men, black and white. It skewed sex ratios, intensified
competition for jobs, and caused housing shortages, intense in New Orleans
because the city’s growth was constricted by swamps and Lake Pontchartrain.
Nearly 90% of the homicides in New Orleans were intra-racial. But the frustration
of young men, their thirst for respect from their peers, and their demands for
558 Punishment & Society 22(4)
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