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High-profile killings by police in Ferguson, Cleveland, Baltimore, New York City, Louisville, Minneapolis, and elsewhere have sparked protests and exposed deep discontent over police practices, especially in communities of color. Investigations of US police departments came to a number of troubling findings—patterns of excessive force, enforcement activities aimed at generating revenue from low-income residents, and persistent racial disparities. These findings cast doubt on the legitimacy of policing in its current form and raise pressing questions about its proper role in a democratic society. The Ethics of Policing offers a wide-ranging analysis of the current ethical challenges facing police and the institutions that oversee them. In particular, its chapters address competing understandings of the role of police, concerns about police use of force, racial bias in police practices, the legacy of policing’s past, and how new technology is transforming policing. Given the complexity of these challenges, making progress on them requires insights from various perspectives. With that goal in mind, this volume takes an interdisciplinary approach that features leading experts in Black studies, criminology, history, law, philosophy, political science, and sociology.

Bringing together prominent early contributions from this emergent perspective, the volume traces the origins, theory, and method of ghost criminology. From the powers of exorcism and erasure marshalled by state agents, street-level struggles over memorialization and memory, to the lingering violence of crime scenes and the ghostly traces of outlaw artists, Ghost Criminology is a volume attuned to that which is well-theorized in other disciplines—the spectral, hauntological, apparitional. Each of the writers assembled here shares, as Mark Fisher (2017) put it, a fascination for the outside, “that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience.”  Assembling an arsenal of cutting-edge social and cultural theory, the volume tangles with some of criminology’s most stubborn revenants—the politics of criminalization, the commodification of crime and violence, the haunting power of the image, as well as the unheard and disregarded cries of the dead.

To greater and lesser degrees, we rely on our memories to give us an accurate portrayal of the past. The potential consequences of failing to live up to this ideal are minimal in many circumstances but can become critical in others, such as remembering a crime that one has witnessed. How can we discriminate between memories that are an accurate reflection of a prior experience and those that are not? This book attempts to answer this question by considering basic behavioral and neuroscientific research on perception and memory and its relevance for understanding how errors might occur when remembering complex events such as those experienced by eyewitnesses. The book is organized around six key questions: (1) How do we perceive and remember faces? (2) How do differences in basic executive processes (e.g., working memory) place limits on what we remember? (3) How do we monitor and control our memories (metacognition)? (4) How do we distinguish between false and genuine memories in ourselves and others (personal and interpersonal source monitoring)? (5) How does emotional arousal and stress affect what we remember? and (6) How does the act of remembering change what we can later recall? Each chapter discusses how basic research in a given area, highlighting factors influencing the accuracy of memory and how this understanding relates to applied research on eyewitness testimony. Finally, this book explores the implications of this synthesis for helping real-world eyewitnesses.