Human Rights Policing: Reimagining Law Enforcement in the 21st Century

Relying on intense ethnographic research and extensive experiences teaching human rights policing to police officers, this book teaches law enforcement professionals how to apply human rights to their everyday interactions with community members. The data collected throughout this research process offers the reader first-hand accounts of police officers addressing the most important human rights as they relate to policing, telling stories of using their human agency while on the job, and providing insights into their discussions with community members on human rights, among other important topics.

Human rights remain a relatively new concept in human civilization, but one largely unrealized at this point in history. Can police officers serve as the harbingers of human rights in a world that desperately needs them? We say yes. It starts with applying human rights to police work. But this book does more than teach police officers how to apply human rights to their careers. It reimagines the institution of law enforcement as we push toward the later stages of modernity.

Refusing to tell readers what to think, this book provides intellectual tools on how to think about policing in new and creative ways. It seeks to bring out the readers’ full creative potential as law enforcement agents, police officers, and criminal justice professionals and activists. This book advances new ideas throughout each chapter on how to make human rights policing a reality.

The ideas in each chapter build on each other, offering a small piece of the puzzle and all the steps necessary to advance the goals of human rights policing. The book (1) analyzes the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and how it applies to policing, (2) develops a three-fold typology called “Human Rights Policing Social Interactions,” (3) discusses the relationship between the use of power and human rights, (4) explains the power of human agency to transcend the ordinary, (5) uncovers the creation of folk devils that threaten human rights, (6) describes how to use the sociological imagination to understand community members, (7) reveals the importance of storytelling to see the world from the actor’s point of view, (8) discusses the double consciousness and the creation of the “other,” (9) describes what we call “soulful policing” and engaging with the community— Chicago style, and (10) provides social policy suggestions at both the national level and local policing level.

This book will challenge the reader in fascinating and highly surprising ways to think about, and, further, reimagine policing as we push toward the future. It will appeal to professionals at all levels of law enforcement and will be useful in programs offering degrees and/or certificates to students of criminal justice.