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9781469665047 Academic Inspection Copy

The Streets Belong to Us

Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification
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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 this history-the first on the relationship between 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 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.
Anne Gray Fischer is assistant professor of history at University of Texas at Dallas.
"Revelatory. . . . While movements like SayHerName highlight police violence against Black women today, [Fischer] shows us its deep roots in our history, our laws, and our cities."--The Atlantic Richly detailed and thoroughly researched. . . . It is challenging to take an intersectional lens to historical materials, but Fischer's monograph shows just how valuable that work can be."--American Journal of Legal History [Fischer] shows in stunning detail how American policing has shifted its justifications over time to maintain control of Black people, especially Black women."--Sarah Schulman, New York Review of Books Valuable and necessary . . . . A powerful historical analysis of sexualized policing in the US . . . . Highly recommended."--CHOICE
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