Before gays and lesbians could claim their full rights as Americans, they needed to overcome a host of laws and legal practices that created an imposing barrier to reform. This chapter provides a brief overview of the antiqueer world of mid-century America, detailing the myriad laws and policies that kept gays and lesbians out of public life. It then examines how and why lawmakers began decriminalizing homosexuality, detailing the demise of sexual psychopath, consensual sodomy, and vagrancy laws. It argues that the key to these changes was not lawyers, legislators, or judges, but rather sociologists – more specifically, Alfred Kinsey. His research revealed that same-sex intimacy was far from aberrant, which undermined the assumption on which the laws were based. His work influenced the thinking of leading legal scholars and advocates, who pressed for law reform.

During the 1980s, the AIDS crisis unleashed a torrent of animosity against gays and lesbians. As hatred rose, so too did physical assaults. Most of the perpetrators were teenagers, who did not just torment queer adults – they also directed their anger and hatred at their peers. As a result, a substantial percentage of gay and lesbian youth dropped out of school, abused alcohol and drugs, and attempted suicide. Two types of violence consequently plagued queer life: violence from attackers and self-harm. Some advocates responded by focusing on preventing attacks on the streets. They worked with police to improve their responses and lobbied legislators to enact hate crimes protections, which helped make antiqueer violence visible. Others, typically teachers and parents of queer children, focused on creating support systems in schools, so that gay and lesbian teens would not give up hope for a better future.

The Conclusion first summarizes the study’s findings. It then presents the study’s policy implications that might help inform local actors’ decisions on interventions related to police–citizen cooperation in communities with criminal groups. Additional research questions are also proposed. In particular, how the study’s findings might relate to contexts experiencing political violence such as civil war or insurgency remains an avenue for future research. The final section highlights that populations are projected to grow fastest in countries with strong criminal groups and weak state institutions for fighting those groups. This trend increases the urgency to understand vacuums of justice and how they might be filled.

This chapter lays out the study’s research design. The design aims to enhance cycles of silence theory’s generalizability at two levels. At a macro level, the goal is to increase the potential that, contingent on local factors, the theory applies to as many of the communities facing criminal group violence as possible. It does so by drawing on logic derived from human social psychological dynamics, leveraging a wide range of existing datasets including a global survey of 109,000 citizens, and studying communities both the Global North (Baltimore, Maryland) and Global South (Lagos, Nigeria). At a micro level, the design combines cross-national data with original surveys as well as interviews and first- hand observations in Baltimore and Lagos. This multimethod approach improves the likelihood that the findings from the surveys and interviews in Baltimore and Lagos accurately reflect cooperation dynamics in the cities. Finally, the chapter provides definitions for key terms related to the study’s main actors – criminal groups, police, and citizens – and the main outcome of citizen cooperation with the police.

This chapter presents the results of a survey experiment testing cooperation interventions in Lagos. It provides background information on the relatively limited efforts to date to promote police–citizen cooperation in the megacity. The chapter describes the virtual reality–based survey experiment used to test the interventions in which respondents are shown a hypothetical area boy fight from a shopkeeper’s point of view. The results indicate that respondents who viewed the vignettes with an anonymous tip line and the intervention to raise awareness of cooperation support among shopkeepers boosts information sharing. Exposure to co-ethnic police officers in the vignette, however, shows little effect on information sharing. The chapter also discusses the mechanisms through which cooperation support exists despite widespread distrust of the Nigeria Police Force among Lagosians.

This chapter presents the results of a survey experiment testing cooperation interventions in Baltimore. It describes existing efforts in the city to promote cooperation with the police and how police rely on information from witnesses. The survey experiment entails respondents viewing and responding to a professionally produced fictional news report of a shooting with experimental variations to test the various interventions. The results show police encouraging cooperators to call an anonymous tip line (as opposed to a non-anonymous line) as well as creating awareness of cooperation norms both increase information sharing. The police commander portrayed in the news report being the same race as the respondent does not change the amount information that they are willing to share. The chapter also discusses the mechanisms of how support for cooperation exists in Baltimore despite distrust of the police.

This chapter theorizes how interventions employed by police and community safety advocates might promote cooperation. The evaluation focuses on two interventions that plausibly reverse cycles of silence: facilitating cooperator anonymity to reduce the risk involved in information sharing and creating awareness of support for cooperation to strengthen the perceived norms favoring information sharing. Given that these interventions do not address distrust in the police, which places a ceiling on cooperation support, the evaluation also includes the trust-based intervention of exposing citizens to police officers of the same race or ethnicity. The chapter concludes with enumerating principles that should be considered when evaluating the appropriateness of implementing interventions to promote cooperation.

This chapter explains the motivation for the study. A stark reality is that states often fail to provide justice in many communities enduring criminal group violence. Deaths from criminal group violence roughly equal deaths from war between states, intrastate conflict (namely, civil war and insurgency), and terrorism combined. Moreover, criminal group affiliates who engage in the violence do so with near impunity in many communities. Criminal groups’ ability to escape accountability means that these communities face what I term vacuums of justice. The chapter goes on to argue that justice provision is a core responsibility of the state and, by failing in this regard, states shirk one of their raisons d’être (reasons for existence) under the social contract. The chapter’s final section explains the link between justice provision and cooperation with the police, positing that the police’s reliance on information from witnesses often makes cooperation a necessary albeit insufficient linchpin for justice provision.

The Introduction previews cycles of silence theory, which seeks to explain how criminal groups constrain citizen cooperation with the police. The Introduction focuses on laying out the book’s central contributions. Theoretically, the book provides a new explanation for how criminal groups prevent cooperation with the police, highlighting the role of their violence in suppressing perceived norms favoring cooperation. The theory speaks to the political science literatures on state-building, political conflict, and criminal governance as well as literatures from other social science disciplines including criminology. Methodologically, the study bridges research divides between the Global North and Global South by testing the theory in both regions. The study also employs realistic survey experiments including a virtual reality–based survey experiment. Finally, the Introduction puts the study into perspective: While the book’s focus may be centered around the effect of violence, the violence should not be interpreted as a defining feature of communities that endure criminal groups.

Eighteenth-century Paris was the site of multiple sexual cultures ranging from permissive to conservative. All these sexual cultures operated within a set of prescriptive legal, religious, and moralistic discourses that prohibited sex outside of marriage while often supporting sexual pleasure within it. Many Parisians ignored these prescriptions, often with impunity. The police concerned themselves with public sex and intervened in private affairs only when asked to do so. Paris was home to a diverse permissive sexual culture. It was comprised of a portion of the financial, social, political, and intellectual elite, often identified as libertines, for whom sex outside marriage was both widespread and widely accepted. It also included men who had sex with each other as part of Paris’s extensive sodomitical subculture, though there is little evidence of a modern homosexual identity. Prostitution was endemic in Paris, encompassing numerous forms of transactional sex that translated into a sort of hierarchy, with women kept as mistresses by men of the elite at the top and those catering to marginal men at the bottom. We know least about the sex lives of other ordinary people, though evidence suggests many had sex outside of marriage and many cared deeply for their spouses.

Two differing ideas characterized the city of Toronto throughout the twentieth century. The first, Toronto the Good, represented the aspirations of religious leaders, reformers, politicians, and police officers to create a city modelled after Christian morality. Sexuality was meant to be expressed in the confines of the private, monogamous, heteronormative family home. Sex was for procreation, not pleasure. Contrary to Toronto the Good was a second idea, Toronto the Gay, a 1950s tabloid reference to the variety of spaces available for sexual exploration and desire. Sex work, queer sex, interracial marriage, divorce, birth control, and abortion endured despite intense enforcement of sexual morality. This chapter explores the tensions between the idealism of Toronto the Good and the sexual opportunities of Toronto the Gay.

Management of the mental health emergency in the community is an emerging specialism in the United Kingdom. It works at the complex interface between the police and ambulance services and mental health system. This chapter provides an account of specialist psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU) experience with the associated skills and knowledge from the inpatient setting for intervening as early as possible in mental health emergencies. By offering solutions which ensure the right help is available as soon as possible, it has been found that the need for more restrictive interventions can be avoided; mental health care being consistent with other branches of clinical services in upholding the maxim that ‘prevention is better than cure’.