An on-the-ground study of junior police academies—contentious school-police partnerships that provide educational resources, career opportunities, and hope for social mobility.
 
Some might see police officers as benevolent sources of protection, but in many communities, they are often perceived as a threat due to a legacy of violent interactions and arrests for arbitrary offenses. How, then, do police sustain their presence in places where people might distrust them? In Kid Cops, sociologist Mai Thai offers one answer: junior police academies, high school programs in which police officers provide courses, mentorship, and job training to students in communities with high rates of juvenile delinquency and poverty. These school-police partnerships have expanded rapidly in the United States over the last few decades, largely in response to political unrest and police violence in the 1990s. Programs vary in their offerings, but they generally aim to ease tensions between communities and law enforcement, while also providing needed resources in neighborhoods where education and job opportunities are scarce.

Kid Cops draws on years of observations and interviews with educators, police officers, and, of course, kids. The junior police programs at each high school may have different emphases, but their common goal is for students to graduate from high school and enter college or the workforce. A second goal of the program is to cultivate a positive image of the police. Ultimately, however, Thai finds that these programs tighten the relationship between marginalized youth, schools, and the criminal justice system and strain the students’ relationships with their peers, families, and each other. These programs also distract residents from systemic issues of policing and suppress opportunities for meaningful change.

Written in an accessible tone that balances the seriousness of inequality with the playfulness of the study’s youth, Kid Cops moves beyond the narrative of detentions, suspensions, and arrests to tell a less conventional story about police in schools. It asks, does good, friendly policing exist—especially if it continues to tether low-income communities of color to the criminal justice system? 
 

In Kids on the Street Joseph Plaster explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States. Tracing the history of the downtown lodging house districts where marginally housed youth regularly lived beginning in the late 1800s, Plaster focuses on San Francisco’s Tenderloin from the 1950s to the present. He draws on archival, ethnographic, oral history, and public humanities research to outline the queer kinship networks, religious practices, performative storytelling, and migratory patterns that allowed these kids to foster social support and mutual aid. He shows how they collectively and creatively managed the social trauma they experienced, in part by building relationships with johns, bartenders, hotel managers, bouncers, and other vice district denizens. By highlighting a politics where the marginal position of street kids is the basis for a moral economy of reciprocity, Plaster excavates a history of queer life that has been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride.