Book Review: Stratified policing: An organizational model for proactive crime reduction and accountability

• Published date: 01 March 2025
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/07340168221121317
• Author: Allen Copenhaver
• Date: 01 March 2025
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

neither. (Quoted passages from prosecutors’manuals make it clear that prosecutors are encouraged to

wield gang stereotypes in court specif‌ically because of their prejudicial effects on juries.) Hagedorn

makes it abundantly clear that the role of an expert defense witness should not be the dogged pursuit

of acquittals but ensuring that pernicious stereotypes do not prevail in corrupting basic fairness in

determining verdicts and sentences.

Throughout Gangs on Trial, Hagedorn frames gang expert defense work in Sisyphean terms,

encouraging sympathetic readers to “carry on even if defeat is inevitable”(7). Indeed, almost

without exception, the defendants whose stories f‌ill the book’s pages hail from the most deni-

grated, dispossessed, and disaffected segments of society; in a real sense, the mechanisms of

defeat were in motion long before these men and women found their way into a street gang, a

criminal courtroom, or a prison yard. Yet therein lies both the challenge and the hope: that we

might construct a society where no person is made disposable; where the kind of work that

Hagedorn has performed in courtrooms across the country over the last quarter century is not

only made more manageable but is largely unneeded, as the vilif‌ied surplus populations currently

ensnared in the criminal justice system would instead be entitled to dignif‌iedlivesasvalued

members of society.

In the meantime, Hagedorn’s latest book will be a valuable resource for those working on chal-

lenging injustices in court and anyone interested in reprograming their inevitably stereotyped think-

ing. And if we are ever to build a truly just society, Gangs on Trial will be an essential guide in that

journey as well.

ORCID iD

Roberto R. Aspholm https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5500-3346

Santos, R., & Santos, R. (2020).

Stratif‌ied policing: An organizational model for proactive crime reduction and accountability. Lanham, MD: Rowman &

Littlef‌ield, 160 pp. $37.00. ISBN 978-1-5381-2656-1.

Reviewed by: Allen Copenhaver ,Lindsey Wilson College, Columbia, KY, USA

DOI: 10.1177/07340168221121317

Introduction

In 2022, it is no secret that law enforcement leaders face challenges with how best to organize and

utilize departmental manpower to address crime in the most f‌iscally responsible and effective ways

possible. This is not a new challenge for law enforcement leaders, as such trials have existed since the

beginning of policing. However, within the context of national distrust of police legitimacy and neg-

ative media coverage of law enforcement in the United States, creating and implementing effective

policing strategies to address crime is arguably more challenging and important than ever.

To combat crime, Santos and Santos contend that policing agencies across the U.S. should

adopt an organization-wide policing strategy they refer to as “stratif‌ied policing.”Santos and

Santos explain that the purpose of promoting stratif‌ied policing strategies within law enforce-

ment is “to institutionalize proactive crime reduction into police practice following a similar

model police use for calls-for-service response”(p. 4). In general, stratif‌ied policing intends

to go a step beyond traditional community policing strategies that operate from an opportunity

theory approach.

104 Criminal Justice Review 50(1)