This book is important—not as a study of the American police—as for projecting the bias inherent in police-acade¬mic collaboration. Public criticism of police harassment of minorities and dissidents, the failure to con¬trol rising crime, in countered by a better appreciation of police work through research programmes into police per-formance. The influx of uni¬versity graduates into the American police has not changed police behaviour, but made police personnel and their functioning more acces¬sible to academicians. The wide access to official data enjoyed by the authors is mar¬red by an uncritical acceptance of police sources. More seriously, there is a consistent attempt to depoliticize a highly political Institution by the nature of questions asked and the way they are treated.
Race and police shooting is the issue which has raised the maximum controversy in America. While Blacks constituted 46 per cent of police shooting victims in 1975, they constituted only 11.5 per cent of the total population. This dispropor¬tionately high Black death-rate has been previously explained by Takagi in American Journal of Radical Criminology (1974) and others, as police killings which were a ‘manifestation of racism’.