Racism, Crime and Justice offers a broad overview of this challenging and underexplored field. The book synthesises a great deal of empirical research evidence, documentary accounts and illustrative examples in order to give a minority perspective on the race and crime debate. The book looks systematically at the influence of race in determining the prison population, in influencing decisions by the courts, in the function and behaviour of the police, in the extent and nature of crime committed (both by and against ethnic minorities). The book ends by discussing policy issues, and explores the options open in seeking to combat discrimination on racial grounds within the criminal justice system following the findings of the Lawrence Inquiry.Although specialist studies have appeared and there have been general texts containing chapter length summaries of the area, there is no up-to-date textbook on this important theme.

The fifth edition of the popular and highly acclaimed The Politics of the Police has been completely revised, expanded, and updated to take in recent changes in the law, policy, and organization of policing. Benjamin Bowling, Robert Reiner, and James Sheptycki, regarded as leading figures in the field, draw upon the findings of police research to provide readers with a stimulating and insightful discussion of the debates and controversies that surround the police, and analyse the proposals for reform. Covering a wide range of empirical and theoretical issues, this book is transnational in scope and reflects the growing diversity of policing forms in today's globalized world.

This work documents the everyday abuse, assault and intimidation that is suffered by black and Asian people in Great Britain every day, using information gathered in an East London case study. The author explains and analyzes the process through which violence is targeted at these minorities, and the role that the ideas and language of racial exclusion take in this process. The failure of the police to respond to this problem is then looked at in depth. This book is based on detailed analysis of official documents, a victimization survey, interviews and direct observation, seen in the overall context of the history of race relations in Britain. The author describes many of the thousands of racist attacks that have occurred in recent years and the events in the last two decades that have shaped English racism, and the political response to it. In this edition Ben Bowling's Preface examines the racist murder of the black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, whose killing in cold blood on an ordinary English street in April 1993 did not hit the headlines until February 1999, causing reverberations across the whole body of British politics and beyond.