Book Review: Cop Watch: Spectators, Social Media, and Police Reform

• DOI: 10.1177/0734016812460245
• Date: 01 June 2013
• Published date: 01 June 2013
• Author: Matthew DeMichele
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

elsewhere in late 18th-century and early 19th-century America. Bessler meticulously pores over

many of the Founders’ own writings and speeches, including those of Madison, William Bradford,

Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, George Mason, and others, in his

quest to document their views about the purposes of criminal punishment and the boundaries

separating permissible and cruel and unusual penal sanctions.

Much in Cruel & Unusual is also forward looking. Bessler makes a persuasive case that the

Framers of the Constitution and its Bill of Rights deliberately chose expansive language in defining

fundamental rights to better ensure that the freedoms enjoyed by future generations of Americans

would not be narrowly cabined by the past. Accepting this premise liberates the Eighth Amend-

ment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments from an interpretation that compels the

conclusion that the death penalty, which of course was widely accepted and practiced when that

amendment and the others comprising the Bill of Rights were ratified, must necessarily be consti-

tutional. Social conceptions of ‘‘cruelty’’ change over time and those changes invite, if they do not

demand examination of whether the practice of capital punishment remains consistent with contem-

porary societal ‘‘standards of decency.’’

This foray into evolving cultural understandings of the meaning of cruel and unusual punishments

includes a somewhat obligatory analysis of well-known competing schools of thought regarding

constitutional interpretation, particularly those distinguishing ‘‘originalists’’ or ‘‘strict construction-

ists’’ from those who advocate on behalf of a ‘‘living Constitution’’ that was designed to grow and

adapt in response to evolving societal needs and circumstances. The discussion further embraces

Supreme Court case law interpreting the Eighth Amendment, focusing particularly on the justices’

death penalty jurisprudence. It also locates the United States as an outlier among its contemporary

peers in the international community, almost all of whom have repudiated capital punishment.

Bessler is not a dispassionate historian. He unabashedly celebrates the progressive, antideath

penalty bent of the late 18th-century writings of Cesare Beccaria and Benjamin Rush, to whom

he dedicates the book. He unapologetically yearns for the day when their views are rediscovered,

emerge triumphant, and the nation’s death penalty jurisdictions are relegated to graveyards of their

own making. The partisanship evidenced in his writing threatens to tinge some of the interpretations

he impresses on the Founders’ ruminations about punishments and the characteristics defining them

as cruel and unusual. At the same time, it imbues the volume with refreshing candor and poses no

barrier to readers being able to draw their own conclusions from the documentary evidence that is so

expansively and carefully presented. Cruel & Unusual shines new light on issues that have long been

debated and it brings attendant clarity to them. It is not always an easy read, but it is a worthwhile

and thought-provoking one.

H. Toch

Cop Watch: Spectators, Social Media, and Police Reform Washington, DC:

American Psychological Association, 2012. 184 pp. $49.95. ISBN: 1433811197

Reviewed by: Matthew DeMichele, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016812460245

In Cop Watch, Hans Toch provides a social psychological view of police–citizen interactions. His

approach incorporates Goffman, Muir, and others to propose that police practices and citizen

responses are shaped through an intersubjective feedback process. By looking at the relationship

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