The specter of racism: exploring White racial anxieties in the context of policing

The connection between policing and whiteness remains an undertheorized area of police studies. In this article, I explore ordinary policing behaviors through the lens of critical whiteness studies in an effort to understand how White police officers actively make, or fail to make, meaning of race in the context of their work. Drawing on ethnographic work with three police departments in the Midwest, I describe the racial anxieties and insecurities White officers express at the possibility of being viewed as engaging in racializing behaviors. Of particular interest is the power of the crime control focus orienting everyday policing practice in displacing attention from the many ways race, and particularly whiteness, matters in policing. I conclude by discussing the implications this line of inquiry holds for making discussions about the role of white privilege in policing more productive.     

Servants of Empire: An Imperial Memoir of a British Family

This article assesses three recently published books on various aspects of Afghanistan:-

- A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan by Artemy M. Kalinovsky, an assistant professor of history at the University of Amsterdam;

-The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan by Francis J. West, a US Marine combat veteran;

-Vulcan's Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan. by Dov S. Zakheim, a US Government official;

The background and training of these authors largely shape their viewpoints. However a careful reading of their books can sharpen our understanding of how the Soviet and US wars resembled and differed from each other, particularly with respect to nation-building, decision making, use of technology, and conflict termination. For the Russians, the similarities outweigh the differences, but there are still Americans who want to prove that they can win a war that the Soviets lost. From their perspective, the differences between the wars outweigh the similarities. The international context is completely different, the US has spent fifty times more money than the Russians and has deployed far more most sophisticated technology. Equally important, the outcome of the end-game is, as yet, unknown. But to most Afghans, comparisons are pointless; the Soviets and Americans both equally deserve to be labelled imperialists.     

An elusive transition: The slow motion demise of authoritarian dominant party rule in Mexico

Mexico's authoritarian dominant party regime is a curious hybrid.¹ The 1917 Constitution is an advanced liberal charter and some basic rules of political procedure ‐ such as the fixed timetable for federal elections and the no re‐election rule ‐ are strongly institutionalised. Yet for over 60 years the regime was also clearly authoritarian, deriving its legitimacy from the revolution rather than the electorate. This article analyses the sui generis nature of the Mexican authoritarian regime, tracing the way formal constitutional rules were supplemented (or displaced) by a coherent and relatively flexible set of informal understandings perpetuating one party dominance. It counterposes these country‐specific characteristics to comparative accounts of how authoritarian regimes ‘break down’, or introduce a ‘political liberalization’ which perhaps opens the way to a ‘transition’ to democracy. Under each of these headings Mexican reality demands significant adaptations to the standard account. During 1994 Mexico underwent severe upheavals without a ‘breakdown’ of the regime. Instead the 1994 presidential election provided a reasonably authentic electoral mandate to the current administration ‐ and yet the process of ‘transition’ to democracy in Mexico remains elusive. This article uses the current Mexican process to probe the scope and limitations of the comparative democratization literature.     

Family law

In response to the Legal Education Training Review (LETR) the professional bodies have revisited the competencies required for legal practice. The SRA has prepared a draft competency statement for day one solicitors which focuses on the “key activities required for effective performance as a solicitor”. The impact of this more comprehensive competency statement on legal education is not yet clear, but one option is that it opens up a route to qualification where competency is achieved in the workplace or other non-academic settings and assessed outside the educational establishments. This article considers how to assess competency in legal education in both educational and work based settings. It charts the development of an outcomes orthodoxy in legal education in England and Wales and in other jurisdictions and draws on research in medical education to identify key principles in the design of an assessment methodology for professional education. The article takes a broad “view from the bridge” and reviews a range of assessment methods already in use in legal education and in other professions such as accountancy, medicine and conservator restorers. It argues that a move to a complex competency orientated training system will require a different approach to both the method of assessment and its programming.     

Identification of Crystals Forming on Porcine Articular Cartilage: A New Method for the Estimation of the Postmortem Interval

Articular cartilage was examined to determine its decomposition sequence and its potential for assessing the postmortem interval. Scanning electron microscopy of articular cartilage from buried porcine trotters showed the presence of microcrystals on the synovial surface. These orthorhombic pyramidal or “coffin”‐shaped crystals, appeared at 3 weeks (22 days) after interment and disappeared after 6 weeks. The disappearance of these crystals was linked to decompositional changes to the integrity of the synovial joint. The formation and disappearance of these crystals was associated with a pH change at the cartilage surface. Scanning electron microscopy–energy‐dispersive X‐ray (SEM‐EDX) analysis showed that the five main elements contained within these crystals were carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, magnesium, and phosphorous. Such elemental analysis suggested the crystals may be struvite (MgNH₄PO₄6(H₂O)). Bacteria cultured from the cartilage synovial surface produced struvite crystals when grown in suitable media and were identified by DNA analysis to be Comamonas sp.