Includes bibliographical references (in Notes, pages 215-280) and index.
Contents:
Introduction : Built on women's bodies -- Prologue : White purity and the progressive origins of police power -- Making the modern city : sexual policing and Black segregation from Prohibition to the Great Depression -- Bad girls and the good war : the nationalization of sexual policing in World War II -- Los Angeles, land of the white hunter : legal liberalism, police professionalism, and Black protest -- Boston, the place is gone! : policing Black women to redevelop downtown -- Atlanta, from the prostitution problem to the sanitized zone : broken windows policing and gentrification -- Taking back the night : feminist activisms in the age of broken windows policing -- Epilogue : These streets belong to all of us.
Summary:
"Police power was built on women's bodies. Men, especially Black men, often stand in as the ultimate symbol of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States. Women are treated as marginal, if not overlooked altogether, in histories of the criminal legal system. In The Streets Belong to Us - the first history of women and police in the modern United States - Anne Gray Fischer narrates how sexual policing fueled a dramatic expansion of police power. The enormous discretionary power that police officers wield to surveil, target, and arrest anyone they deem suspicious was tested, legitimized, and legalized through the policing of women's sexuality and their right to move freely through city streets. Throughout the twentieth century, police departments achieved a stunning consolidation of urban authority through the strategic discretionary enforcement of morals laws, including disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and other prostitution-related misdemeanors. Between Prohibition in the 1920s and the rise of 'broken windows' policing in the 1980s, police targeted white and Black women in distinct but interconnected ways. These tactics reveal the centrality of racist and sexist myths to the justification and deployment of state power. Sexual policing did not just enhance police power. It also transformed cities from segregated sites of 'urban vice' into the gentrified sites of Black displacement and banishment we live in today. By illuminating both the racial dimension of sexual liberalism and the gender dimension of policing in Black neighborhoods, The Streets Belong to Us illustrates the decisive role that race, gender, and sexuality played in the construction of urban police regimes"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.