This chapter tests cycles of silence in Lagos to evaluate its applicability in a Global South context where, unlike Baltimore, the state and the police have limited resources. The chapter’s results come from an original survey of shopkeepers, paired with interviews and observation, in the city’s expansive markets, pockets in which “area boy” crews engage in violence and extortion. Consistent with the patterns found in Baltimore, area boy violence reduces cooperation by boosting perceived retaliation risk and making cooperation norms appear to be weaker than they are. Underlying cooperation support exists among shopkeepers, the chapter’s final section explains, in part, because the area boy crews have largely failed to gain legitimacy with Lagosians.

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 tests cycles of silence theory in Baltimore to evaluate its applicability in a Global North context where the state and the police are well resourced. It provides background on how Baltimore residents become exposed to violence by drug crews and details the results from an original survey of residents in the city’s violence- affected communities. Violence heightens perceived retaliation risk, and the heightened risk perception in turn pushes residents who support cooperation to keep that support private. As result, residents share less information than they otherwise would in absence of this norm suppression. The chapter’s final section explains that the underlying cooperation support exists, because the drug crews have largely failed to gain legitimacy in eyes of residents.

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.

This chapter details cycles of silence theory explaining how criminal groups constrain citizen cooperation with the police. Criminal group violence not only reduces cooperation by heightening retaliation risk to cooperators but also by making community norms favoring cooperation appear weaker than they are to citizens. Due to violence- induced retaliation risk, citizens who support cooperation are forced to keep that support private. The potency of social norms in driving human behavior means that this suppression of norms that favor cooperation ultimately reduce witnesses’ willingness to come forward with information. The chapter also interrogates the theory’s central premise that underlying support for cooperation exists in communities. Perceptions of police and criminal group legitimacy are an important driver of support, so cycles of silence dynamics primarily operate in communities where criminal groups have failed to gain legitimacy. The chapter then theorizes why criminal groups’ primary goal of illicit economic gain undermines their legitimization efforts.

This chapter shows how the ties between office and household were loosened from the early seventeenth century by a new legal approach to officeholding. The authority of certain officers began to be treated as separable from their personal identity, meaning they no longer had to be ‘independent’ heads of household. MPs passed statutes to protect officers from lawsuits, providing they acted in accordance with the authority granted to them by higher powers. Judges developed a distinction between ‘judicial’ and ‘ministerial’ officers: the first required personal qualities associated with independence, the second did not. ‘Ministerial’ officers wielded an impersonal form of authority which had nothing to do with their individual identities. In interactions with other people, they conjured this authority with an array of special words and props, which granted them legal protection as servants of the state. This was especially clear in homicide law, where the question of whether or not an officer had properly conjured authority could determine the outcome of a trial. The impersonal model of official authority laid the foundations for a new style of masculine officeholding.

The Dongo massacre, the backstories of the perpetrators, and the execution of Aldama, Quintero, and Blanco offer the most famous examples of how violence and entertainment intertwined in late eighteenth-century Mexico City. Texts dating to this era chronicle the multitude of other spectacles which displayed the viceroys’ vindictive justice in the form of corporal punishment and executions. These spectacles sent out a strong message from the authorities regarding the values that they wished to promote. They expected the urban crowds to watch, hear, and smell the consequences of lawbreaking in New Spain.

Many of the formulas dealing with conflict highlight formal courts and judicial processes. Others represent extrajudicial settlements. In this respect they match, though in an entirely lay context, the picture of early medieval dispute settlement visible in other sources. They make particularly clear, however, that judicial and extrajudicial settlements were points on a complex and intertwined continuum. They also tell us that people – both litigants and authority figures – could manipulate and abuse judicial processes for their own purposes. The formulas are particularly interested in interpersonal violence. We find men assaulting each other on the road and taking each other’s property. We find men killing others for a variety of reasons. Those who committed homicide not only negotiated the payment of the required blood price, but actually paid it – and had their payment recorded in a security that protected them from any further trouble. Women too are accused of homicide, sometimes by poison or sorcery but sometimes by more active means. In the end, the formulas suggest that a culture assuming a right to personal violence was alive and well in the Carolingian period, despite strenuous efforts especially by Charlemagne and Louis the Pious to regulate it.

This chapter argues that we can consider policing either a primary good, subject to the requirements of distributive justice, or a feature of the democracy necessary for creating and distributing primary goods secure from threats of populism, majoritarianism, and crime. It uses historical examples of failed states and states in transition to observe that a reduction in government to policing actions and the emergence of a dominant protective association demarcate transitions between states, and become the overriding priority in cases where states falter or fail, highlighting policing as a necessary, core feature of the conception of the state itself, regardless of how minimal that state may be (or how extensive it may become). The chapter closes by considering the potential for a Rawlsian difference principle to guide the distribution of police resources to benefit the least well off, and the utilization of public health metrics and outcomes to ensure policing delivers practical justice by seeking equitable population-level reductions in morbidity and mortality, and increases in health and resilience, rather than relying on crime rates or police productivity as surrogate indications that policing has positively impacted communities and their most vulnerable members.

The many ingredients that fed Mass Incarceration, including racism, populism, media sensationalism, and political opportunism, are long-standing features of the American landscape. What changed that made these factors particularly salient and channeled them into a transformation of the criminal justice (and legal) system? The best answer is a crime surge.