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An interdisciplinary group of borderlands scholars provide the first expansive comparative history of the way North American borders have been policed—and transgressed—over the past two centuries.

An extensive history examining how North American nations have tried (and often failed) to police their borders, Border Policing presents diverse scholarly perspectives on attempts to regulate people and goods at borders, as well as on the ways that individuals and communities have navigated, contested, and evaded such regulation.

The contributors explore these power dynamics though a series of case studies on subjects ranging from competing allegiances at the northeastern border during the War of 1812 to struggles over Indian sovereignty and from the effects of the Mexican Revolution to the experiences of smugglers along the Rio Grande during Prohibition. Later chapters stretch into the twenty-first century and consider immigration enforcement, drug trafficking, and representations of border policing in reality television. Together, the contributors explore the powerful ways in which federal authorities impose political agendas on borderlands and how local border residents and regions interact with, and push back against, such agendas. With its rich mix of political, legal, social, and cultural history, this collection provides new insights into the distinct realities that have shaped the international borders of North America.

Each year, gun homicides kill over ten thousand people in the United States. While most guns are initially purchased legally, many enter the underground market and end up in the hands of dangerous offenders, such as gang members and convicted felons. This issue of RSF, edited by public policy scholars Philip J. Cook and Harold A. Pollack, brings together eight articles exploring the markets for guns, both legal and illegal. The contributors draw from new datasets and interviews with inmates to examine how offenders obtain guns. By turning a spotlight on these little-understood supply chains, these chapters provide guidance for stemming the flow of guns to the underground market.
 
Cook and Pollack initiate the discussion with a comprehensive introduction that includes an original framework for understanding the legality of transactions that arm dangerous offenders.  Several contributors review trends in gun ownership across the nation and investigate how guns enter the underground market. Deborah Azrael and coauthors conduct a comprehensive survey of gun owners and find 270 million guns in private circulation. They estimate that 70 million firearms changed hands during a recent five-year period.  Most of those transactions were sales by licensed dealers; Garen Wintemute  reports on a survey of dealers that assesses the wide disparities among them as sources of guns to offenders.  Charles Wellford and coauthors use trace data and prison interviews to study how criminals obtain their guns in three jurisdictions that differ widely with respect to gun regulations and culture. 
 
Other contributors explore the effects of gun regulations and legislation on illegal supply chains. Daniel Webster and coauthors study the effects of Maryland’s 2013 Firearm Safety Act, which required all handgun purchasers to obtain a license. They find that 41 percent of surveyed parolees reported that it was more difficult to obtain a handgun after the law passed due to increased cost, lack of trusted sources, or people being less willing to buy handguns on their behalf. Analyzing over three decades of data on handguns recovered in Boston, Anthony Braga shows that fewer guns are illegally obtained from states that adopt legislation restricting buyers to one gun per month.  George Tita and coauthors  report the results of an inmate survey in Los Angeles in which they explored respondents’ knowledge of gun laws.  These findings suggest that laws aimed at legal gun transactions may also decrease the entry of guns into the underground market. 
 
The rate of gun violence in the U.S. surpasses that of any other advanced nation. This issue of RSF offers new empirical research on the underground market that arms dangerous criminals and provides a rich foundation for policies designed to curb gun violence.

A revelatory look at how the NYPD has resisted change through strategic and selective community engagement.
 
The past few years have seen Americans express passionate demands for police transformation. But even as discussion of no-knock warrants, chokeholds, and body cameras has exploded, any changes to police procedures have only led to the same outcomes. Despite calls for increased accountability, police departments have successfully stonewalled change.  
 
In The Policing Machine, Tony Cheng reveals the stages of that resistance, offering a close look at the deep engagement strategies that NYPD precincts have developed with only subsets of the community in order to counter any truly meaningful, democratic oversight. Cheng spent nearly two years in an unprecedented effort to understand the who and how of police-community relationship building in New York City, documenting the many ways the police strategically distributed power and privilege within the community to increase their own public legitimacy without sacrificing their organizational independence. By setting up community councils that are conveniently run by police allies, handing out favors to local churches that will promote the police to their parishioners, and offering additional support to institutions friendly to the police, the NYPD, like police departments all over the country, cultivates political capital through a strategic politics that involves distributing public resources, offering regulatory leniency, and deploying coercive force. The fundamental challenge with police-community relationships, Cheng shows, is not to build them. It is that they already exist and are motivated by a machinery designed to stymie reform.
 

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

A revelatory look at how the NYPD has resisted change through strategic and selective community engagement.
 
The past few years have seen Americans express passionate demands for police transformation. But even as discussion of no-knock warrants, chokeholds, and body cameras has exploded, any changes to police procedures have only led to the same outcomes. Despite calls for increased accountability, police departments have successfully stonewalled change.  
 
In The Policing Machine, Tony Cheng reveals the stages of that resistance, offering a close look at the deep engagement strategies that NYPD precincts have developed with only subsets of the community in order to counter any truly meaningful, democratic oversight. Cheng spent nearly two years in an unprecedented effort to understand the who and how of police-community relationship building in New York City, documenting the many ways the police strategically distributed power and privilege within the community to increase their own public legitimacy without sacrificing their organizational independence. By setting up community councils that are conveniently run by police allies, handing out favors to local churches that will promote the police to their parishioners, and offering additional support to institutions friendly to the police, the NYPD, like police departments all over the country, cultivates political capital through a strategic politics that involves distributing public resources, offering regulatory leniency, and deploying coercive force. The fundamental challenge with police-community relationships, Cheng shows, is not to build them. It is that they already exist and are motivated by a machinery designed to stymie reform.