Research Catalog

The streets belong to us : sex, race, and police power from segregation to gentrification

Title

The streets belong to us : sex, race, and police power from segregation to gentrification / Anne Gray Fischer.

Author

Fischer, Anne Gray

Publication

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2022]
©2022

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schomburg Center to submit a request in person.	Text	Use in library	Sc E 22-1009	Schomburg Center - Research & Reference

Details

Description

298 pages : illustrations, maps; 24 cm.

Summary

"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 The Streets Belong to Us - the first history of 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 their 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. By illuminating both the racial dimension of sexual liberalism and the gender dimension of policing in Black neighborhoods, The Streets Belong to Us illustrates the decisive role that race, gender, and sexuality played in the construction of urban police regimes"--

Series Statement

Justice, power, and politics

Uniform Title

Justice, power, and politics.

Subject

Genre/Form

History.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (in Notes, pages 215-280) and index.

Contents

Introduction : Built on women's bodies -- Prologue : White purity and the progressive origins of police power -- Making the modern city : sexual policing and Black segregation from Prohibition to the Great Depression -- Bad girls and the good war : the nationalization of sexual policing in World War II -- Los Angeles, land of the white hunter : legal liberalism, police professionalism, and Black protest -- Boston, the place is gone! : policing Black women to redevelop downtown -- Atlanta, from the prostitution problem to the sanitized zone : broken windows policing and gentrification -- Taking back the night : feminist activisms in the age of broken windows policing -- Epilogue : These streets belong to all of us.

Call Number

Sc E 22-1009

ISBN

9781469665047
1469665042

LCCN

2021049408

OCLC

1244882149

Author

Fischer, Anne Gray, author.

Title

The streets belong to us : sex, race, and police power from segregation to gentrification / Anne Gray Fischer.

Publisher

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2022]

Copyright Date

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Justice, power, and politics

Justice, power, and politics.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (in Notes, pages 215-280) and index.

Chronological Term

1900-1999

Research Call Number

Sc E 22-1009

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