Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Studying the Police Response to Gangs
- 2 Setting and Methods
- 3 Historical Analysis of Gangs and Gang Control
- 4 Scope and Nature of the Current Gang Problem
- 5 Form, Function, and Management of the Police Gang Unit
- 6 The Gang Unit Officer
- 7 On the Job
- 8 Policing Gangs in a Time of Community Policing
- 9 Conclusion and Implications
- References
- Index
2 - Setting and Methods
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Studying the Police Response to Gangs
- 2 Setting and Methods
- 3 Historical Analysis of Gangs and Gang Control
- 4 Scope and Nature of the Current Gang Problem
- 5 Form, Function, and Management of the Police Gang Unit
- 6 The Gang Unit Officer
- 7 On the Job
- 8 Policing Gangs in a Time of Community Policing
- 9 Conclusion and Implications
- References
- Index
Summary
Ultimately, my sense of the report is that the Board of Inquiry was created by the management of the Los Angeles Police Department to study the Rampart Scandal and it is the management account: it minimizes the problem and spares management of criticism. What is desperately needed is external investigations and accounts to learn the full magnitude of the problems and to propose the needed comprehensive reforms to ensure that this never happens again.
– Erwin Chemerinsky, Independent Auditor of the Los Angeles Police Department Board of Inquiry Report on the Rampart Scandal 2000b, 11.This chapter describes the methodological strategies used in our study of police gang units. In particular, we describe the settings in which the study took place, explain the characteristics of the police departments and the gang units that were examined, and discuss the approaches that were used to collect data.
STUDY SETTING
Data for the study were gathered in four cities located in the Southwestern region of the United States: Albuquerque, New Mexico; Inglewood, California; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Phoenix, Arizona. We selected these cities for our study for two major reasons. First, although police departments across the country claim to have gang problems, researchers have found that police departments in the Southwestern United States have been significantly more likely than others to respond to the problem by establishing specialized police gang units (Curry et al. 1992, 65).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Policing Gangs in America , pp. 23 - 41Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006