James J. Willis’s research while affiliated with George Mason University and other places

This handbook shows how local police organizations in the United States have been the focus of reform efforts, especially due to a new crisis in the policing environment—terrorism. The problem of terrorism has raised a host of questions about how police should respond to this new threat, and this handbook aims to address these questions. It also discusses the social ill that is the drug market, which is often associated with violence and often occurs in disadvantaged urban communities. Alternative approaches are presented that can be used to address drug crime in these areas, such as problem-oriented policing, which calls for the identification of recurring crime problems; order maintenance policing, which defines and regulates the fair use of public spaces; and community policing, which is considered “a philosophy, not a program.” The rise of zero-tolerance policies in policing has shifted the focus from the problem-solving model to aggressive order-maintenance enforcement. This has led to a call for anti-authoritarian policing; police are urged to use discretion to support their own longstanding institutional interest in plural governance.