Leanne Weber and Ben Bowling (eds), Stop and Search: Police Power in Global Context
| Author | Abby Peterson |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474513496956 |
| Published date | 01 October 2013 |
| Date | 01 October 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
bring justice to victims; but the author seems aware that such measures are unlikely
to happen anytime soon.
In this, the book does seem to reflect the genuinely contradictory current state of
affairs with respect to penal treatment of Wall Street fraud perpetrators. However,
the book provides an excellent tool with which to situate such phenomena within
the criminological and criminal justice field. With a better understanding of just
how these financial frauds fit within the wider universe of US crime and criminal
justice, perhaps the will to meaningfully regulate them will finally emerge.
Reference
Ferguson CH (2012) Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and
the Hijacking of America. New York: Crown Publishing Group.
Paul R. Schupp
Niagara University, New York, USA
Leanne Weber and Ben Bowling (eds), Stop and Search: Police Power in Global Context,
Routledge: Oxon, UK and New York, 2013; 140 pp. with index: 13:9780415631006
In the mid-1990s I was a guest professor at the university in Kaunus, Lithuania.
Navigating in a new city, in a new country, I quickly trained my suspicious eyes to
sort out my environment and the people that moved within it. I was wary of men
between the ages of 20 and 50 wearing track suits. They usually moved in pairs or in
groups. In the streets I was watchful of their movements and I avoided restaurants,
cafe
´s and bars in which they sat. I categorized this group of men as the suspect
‘criminal other’ and adjusted my movements to theirs. A suspicious gaze is finely
tuned among women more generally and among police globally. Obviously there is a
fundamental difference in how these two groups act upon their suspicions. Women
adjust their movements to help insure their safety; they avoid categories of people
that they perceive as threats to their security. In contrast, the police mandate is to
confront threats to the social order. The editors of the volume Stop and Search:
Police Power in Global Context claim that the practice of stop and search ‘is a visceral
manifestation of coercive and intrusive power and the most publically visible inter-
action between state agent and citizens or, increasingly, between state agent and non-
citizen’ (p. 1, emphasis in original). Globally the police have the discretionary power
to stop and search suspect populations. How they construct the categories of suspect
populations, how they conduct stop and search encounters, and why they exercise
stop and search powers, varies within local and national contexts. The anthology,
which includes well-integrated chapters from different countries, critically engages
with the similarities and differences in the use of stop and search thereby raising key
issues for policing research more generally.
The chapters on England and Wal es, Canada and the Netherlands fo cus on
ethno-racial profiling, which disproportionately targets young people (mostly
Book reviews 429
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