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The Indian Patrol in Minneapolis: Social Control and Social Change in an Urban Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Fay G. Cohen
Fay G. Cohen*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Extract

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of voluntary citizens' patrols (hereafter called citizens' patrols) in the urban areas of this country (Brown, 1969; Knopf, 1969; Marx and Archer, 1970 and in press). Many of these groups were shortlived responses to situations of social unrest and upheaval. They frequently were based on the premise that community residents could do more to prevent an area from burning to the ground than could the regular police, who were envisioned as an invading army. When the riot or disturbance was over, and the rationale of the citizens' patrol as an agent of social control became less obvious, such groups tended to disappear.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 7 , Issue 4 , Summer 1973 , pp. 779 - 786
Copyright
Copyright © The Law and Society Association, 1973.

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Footnotes

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The names of groups and places have not been changed for this paper. The reason for this somewhat unorthodox procedure is that most of the individuals involved requested that no pseudonyms be used. Written consents were gathered so that individual preferences could be honored. The co-operation of all of the people who participated in this study is gratefully acknowledged. Special thanks go to the AIM Board of Directors for their official approval of the research, and to the Indian Patrollers for their continuous help and their generous gift of time and interest in the study. Financial support was provided by a National Science Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship.

References

BROWN, Richard Maxwell (1969) The American Vigilante Tradition. The American Vigilante Tradition: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. New York: Bantam Books, 154–225.Google Scholar
KNOPF, Terry Ann (1969) Youth Patrols: An Experiment in Community Participation. Youth Patrols: An Experiment in Community Participation: Brandeis University.Google Scholar
LAZERWITZ, Bernard (1966) Sampling Theory and Procedures. In Hubert M. BLALOCK and Ann BLALOCK, Methodology in Social Research. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
MARX, Gary T. and Dane, ARCHER (1970) Citizen Involvement in the Law Enforcement Process: the Case of Community Police Patrols. Paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Los Angeles. (American Behavioral Scientist, in press.).CrossRefGoogle Scholar