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"In Before Lawrence, Wesley Phelps recounts the legal challenges to discriminatory Texas sodomy laws before the major breakthrough in the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas. While most scholars and activists recognize the Lawrence decision to be the foundation for all subsequent gains for gay and lesbian equality in the twenty-first century, Phelps argues that the earlier legal challenges laid the necessary groundwork for the modern movement for queer civil rights. By probing the fascinating human stories behind these cases, this book offers a rare glimpse into an important component in the movement for gay and lesbian equality and constitutional reform in the United States. The main contribution of the book is to challenge the widely held assumption that the Lawrence v. Texas decision came out of nowhere in 2003. In reality, over several decades grassroots activists had been busy building the organizational groundwork and legal strategies necessary for this final victory over archaic sodomy laws in the United States. In the process, these activists played significant roles in creating and shaping our modern gay and lesbian rights movement"--

In Stop & Frisk and the Politics of Crime in Chicago, Wesley G. Skogan offers a comprehensive analysis of the stop & frisk policy, its origins as Chicago's predominant strategy for responding to violent crime, and its impact on public opinion. Drawing on a crime database of over 14 million incidents, interviews with 1,450 Chicagoans and 714 police officers, and the author's 30 years of studying, talking to, and riding along with Chicago police officers, Skogan looks at the inner workings of police departments and the history and politics of crime prevention that motivate these policies. Rather than looking at individual stops and how they are handled, he argues for considering stop & frisk as an organizational strategy, intimately tied to the move from reactive to preventive policing.

In A People's War on Poverty , Wesley G. Phelps investigates the on-the-ground implementation of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty during the 1960s and 1970s. He argues that the fluid interaction between federal policies, urban politics, and grassroots activists created a significant site of conflict over the meaning of American democracy and the rights of citizenship that historians have largely overlooked. In Houston in particular, the War on Poverty spawned fierce political battles that revealed fundamental disagreements over what democracy meant, how far it should extend, and who s

The first comprehensive evaluation of Chicago's community policing initiative, examining its impact on crime, neighborhood residents, and the police. By looking at the varying effects community policing had on each of these groups, Skogan provides a valuable analysis of what works and why.

1. Introduction -- 2. Chicago's model for problem solving -- 3. Organizational desing for problem solving -- 4. Training the public and the police -- 5. Neighborhood problems -- 6. Community capacity for problem solving -- 7. The police and problem solving -- 8. Conclusions and recommendations.