Book Review: Karen S. Glover Racial Profiling: Research, Racism, and Resistance New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. 173 pp. $26.95 ISBN 978-0-7425-6106-9

• Author: John Liederbach
• Published date: 01 December 2010
• Date: 01 December 2010
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0734016810373074
• Subject Matter: Articles

communities through dominant cultural processes and illustrates its use as a mechanism to gain and

maintain both the social and demographic control of American Indian communities. Perry provides

succinct and pointed examples of how racial and cultural stereotypes are typified by those who

police American Indian communities and demonstrates how American Indians are ‘‘kept in their

place’’ both socially and geographically. The themes that develop from the interviewees reveal how

stereotypes from the 19th century continue to be perpetuated into present-day perceptions of

American Indians in contemporary society. Perry’s analysis exposes how American Indians and

their communities are left reeling from the vestiges of the western expansionist ideology and points

out cultural and technological differences, which are seen as racial differences, a view overlooked by

many.

Perry’s discussion on cross-cultural training and community policing are very straightforward.

Cross-cultural training does little in the way of fostering large-scale understanding by police gener-

ally; or individual officers, specifically. Ironically, in talking with American Indian police managers,

it has been stated that American Indians have practiced community policing before it became in

vogue. Although anecdotal at best, one needs only to look at the U.S. Department of Justice to see

how lucrative it can be to obtain a COPS grant, thus stifling the philosophy of community policing

and overlooking the pragmatic approach of its original intent.

Barbara Perry has provided us with a solid foundation to further both our interest and understand-

ing in several areas. First, the nature and practice of policing in and around American Indian

communities should be explored further. Second, the disparate treatment between and among groups

could be examined, which could assist in a greater understanding of policy development and

implementation toward American Indian communities. Finally, the stated criminogenic nature of

American Indian communities continues to feed off long-standing stereotypes of American Indians

creating a vacuum where over- and under-enforcement by dominant Western ideological thought

will continue its control of American Indian people, communities, and nations.

Karen S. Glover

Racial Profiling: Research, Racism, and Resistance New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. 173 pp. $26.95

ISBN 978-0-7425-6106-9

Reviewed by: John Liederbach, Bowling Green State University, OH, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016810373074

Racial profiling endures as an important public and political issue. Profiling emerged as a

controversy during the 1980s as police cracked down on the street-level drug trade in the ‘‘war

on drugs.’’ Public discourse intensified during the subsequent decade fueled by the iconic 1991 beat-

ing of Rodney King and the controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding the legality of pre-

text traffic stops in Whren v. US (1996). Research on racial profiling surged during the mid-1990s, so

much so that empirically based studies designed to investigate police decision making during traffic

stops became common in the academic literature. Racial profiling retained significance in the after-

math of the 9/11 attacks and the struggle to adapt to a ‘‘new normal’’ marked by lingering public

malaise and the need to balance the interests of security against the protection of civil liberties. The

continued strength of the issue was once again demonstrated by the media coverage devoted to

President Obama’s hosting of an informal ‘‘beer summit’’ between a prominent African American

professor and the White police sergeant who arrested him.

In Racial Profiling: Research, Racism, and Resistance, Glover provides an ‘‘alternative por-

trait’’ of the phenomenon that both challenges existing research on the topic and encourages the

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