Police History

During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance under the shroud of impenetrable secrecy. And curiously, in the post-Cold War period there are no signs of this enthusiasm diminishing.

Policing Saigon isn't Platoon or Apocalypse Now, but the story of Loren W. Christensen's experience as a military policeman (MP) in a city of millions at a time when chaos and fear reigned. As a 23-year-old from a small town in Washington State, the author was plunged into a chaotic city of brawling servicemen, prostitutes, racial violence, enemy rockets, riots, and death. It was a place that would give him a unique opportunity to see up close a different side of the Vietnam War and its effect on the human condition.

A fabulous yellow diamond becomes the dangerous inheritance of Rachel Verinder. Outside her Yorkshire country house watch the Hindu priests who have waited for many years to reclaim their ancient talisman, looted from the holy city of Somnauth. When the Moonstone disappears, the case looks simple, but in mid-Victorian England no one is what they seem, and nothing can be taken for granted.

The police are constantly under scrutiny. They are criticized for failings, praised for successes, and hailed as heroes for their sacrifices. Starting from the premise that every society has norms and ways of dealing with transgressors, A Short History of Police and Policing traces the evolution of the multiple forms of "policing" that existed in the past. Professor Emsley explores the idea and reality of policing, and shows how an institution we now call "the police" came to be virtually universal in our modern world. 

This audiobook presents a fundamental reinterpretation of changes to crime control in the age of the new police. It breaks new ground by providing a highly detailed, empirical analysis of everyday crime control in Victorian provincial cities - revealing the tremendous activity that ordinary people displayed in responding to crime - alongside a rich survey of police organization and policing in practice. 

The ubiquitous nature and political attraction of the concept of order has to be understood in conjunction with the idea of police. Since its first publication, this book has been one of the most powerful and wide-ranging critiques of the police power. Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, able to account for the range of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance and reproduction of order, but with its very fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labor.

The year is 2021. No child has been born for 25 years. The human race faces extinction. Under the despotic rule of Xan Lyppiat, the Warden of England, the old are despairing and the young cruel. Theo Faren, a cousin of the warden, lives a solitary life in this ominous atmosphere. That is until a chance encounter with a young woman leads him into contact with a group of dissenters. Suddenly his life is changed irrevocably as he faces agonising choices which could affect the future of mankind.

There are ghost towns in the world - places where the humans were annihilated in retaliation for the slaughter of the shape-shifting Others. One of those places is Bennett, a town at the Northern end of the Elder Hills - a town surrounded by the wild country. Now, efforts are being made to resettle Bennett as a community where humans and Others live and work together. But as they reopen the stores and the professional offices and start to make lives for themselves, the town of Bennett attracts the attention of other humans looking for profit.

Contrary to competing popular beliefs, police violence against African Americans has neither remained unchanged since the era of slavery nor is it a recent phenomenon disconnected from the past. In Bluecoated Terror, Jeffrey S. Adler draws on rich archival accounts to show how racialized police brutality is part of a larger system of state oppression with roots in the early twentieth-century South, particularly New Orleans.

Iceland, 2017: When a young Italian tourist is found brutally murdered at a sacred church in northern Iceland, Magnus Jonson, newly returned to the Reykjavík police force, is called in to investigate. At the scene, he finds a stunned TV crew, there to film a documentary on the life of the legendary Viking Gudrid the Wanderer. Magnus quickly begins to suspect that there may be more links to the murdered woman than anyone in the film crew will acknowledge.

Drawn from class lectures tested over the past 13 years, Arthur D. Wiechmann, MA, shares an insiders view of the role and responsibilities of the police officer and manager. Wiechmann's 29 years as a police officer, 13 of which were as a Sergeant, provide a rich well of experience to draw from and share with readers. This engaging text is filled with examples that bring theory to life, making learning not only palatable but enjoyable and interesting. Weichmann deftly explores complex issues, bringing in applicable research, theory, and experience. There are many points where such case studies can be used for class discussion.

Shaun Pinner was a retired and decorated British soldier, living a peaceful and happy life in Mariupol with his Ukrainian family. What follows is the true story of his six months spent imprisoned in Russian-occupied Ukraine. After the horrors of frontline fighting, Shaun had to survive his capture by the Russian soldiers, and his removal to a Black Site - an off-the-grid prison untethered to human rights conventions - where he was subjected to a campaign of torture by Putin's secret police.

Chaos and order clash in this riveting exploration of crime and punishment on the Internet. Once considered a borderless and chaotic virtual landscape, the Internet is now home to the forces of international law and order. It's not just computer hackers and cyber crooks who lurk in the dark corners of the Web - the cops are there, too. In The Internet Police, Ars Technica editor Nate Anderson takes readers on a behind-the-screens tour of landmark cybercrime cases, revealing how criminals continue to find digital and legal loopholes even as police hurry to cinch them closed.

More than 175 years of true crimes culled from the city's police blotter, told through an insightful text by two NYPD officers and a NYC crime reporter. From atrocities that occurred before the establishment of New York's police force in 1845 through the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 to the present day, this audio is an insider's look at more than 80 real-life crimes that shocked the nation, from arson to gangland murders, robberies, serial killers, bombings, and kidnappings.

A riveting investigation into how a restive region of China became the site of a nightmare Orwellian social experiment - the definitive police state - and the global technology giants that made it possible.

An eye-opening book about how societies are designed to support the status of those in power at the destructive expense of those without it. From 1958, China declared war on sparrows, contributing to the deaths of more than 10 million people. In the 19th century, the Shuar people of Ecuador were driven by economic need to wage bloody wars to procure shrunken heads for the Western curio market, which nearly destroyed their society. There have been 55 prime ministers of Great Britain, of whom 48 have been privately educated, creating a society built for and by the privileged.

From the Stephen Lawrence case to the murder of Sarah Everard, Tom Harper examines the most notorious cases involving the Met over the past thirty years. The result is a devastating picture of a world-famous police force riven with corruption, misogyny and rank incompetence.

From the beginnings of big-city police work to the rise of the Mafia, Rogues' Gallery is a colorful and captivating history of crime and punishment in the bustling streets of Old New York.

Welcome to Beaumont Cove, a slowly decaying tourist town at the edge of the world, and the place where Maggie James’s worst fears for her estranged twin sister, Lilly, have come true. Lilly is dead, and Maggie has arrived to identify her body. Lilly’s husband, Mike, is in custody for her murder. With the help of the local sheriff, a retired private investigator, and a strange but friendly carnival psychic, Maggie begins to uncover the truth about what really happened to her sister. But the truth comes at a price....

USA, 1958. President Joseph McCarthy sits in the White House, elected on a wave of populist xenophobia and barely‑concealed anti‑Semitism. The country is in the firm grip of McCarthy's Hueys, a secret police force evolved from the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hollywood's sparkling vision of the American dream has been suppressed; its remaining talents forced to turn out endless anti‑communist propaganda.