This chapter is about how police officers in China enforce anti-prostitution laws. These regulations outlaw the exchange of sex for money or other material goods in all of its forms, and for all individuals who engage in it. Yet in practice, police enforcement primarily targets low-tier sex workers. Of the array of possible sanctions, these women are more likely incarcerated than fined, and they are placed in institutions with a rehabilitative mission that, in practice, is not met. In addition, law enforcement officials often engage in illegal and abusive practices when arresting sex workers. Clients are not completely immune from punishment, but they are less likely to be arrested than are the women they solicit. The major exception to that pattern involves high-profile men whose actions have crossed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Their cases are taken out of the hands of street-level police officers and into the world of elite politics, with prostitution charges used to help secure their downfall.

What does Chinese law have to say about people who are involved in sex work and the places where it occurs? Prostitution control is a universal problem for which states have adopted a variety of policies to address the public order, public health, and commercial challenges that it presents. This chapter describes that range of regulatory possibilities. It then explains the official choices that China has made, through discussions of the policing, health, and taxation rules and institutions that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has adopted to regulate prostitution.

This chapter is about how police officers engage with sex workers when they are not enforcing anti-prostitution laws against them. By focusing their enforcement efforts on low-tier sex workers, the police help create a space for the middle tier of China’s sex industry – entertainment venues and their hostesses—to thrive. I find that law enforcement officers engage actively and in myriad ways with the sex industry when they are not focused on arresting sex workers. Some of their actions are purely extractive interactions. Yet other police behavior, while still self-serving, also benefits sex workers. Making sense of police actions in this context requires shifting our framework from exclusively viewing police as powerful figures in relation to sex workers to also viewing them as street-level bureaucrats who are accountable to the local government and the vast police bureaucracy of which they are at the forefront. This approach provides a different perspective on police officers, underscoring their weakness within China’s bureaucratic system rather than their strength in relation to the sex workers. Their vulnerability vis-à-vis the state even affects how they engage with sex workers and underscores conditions under which the job security of frontline police officers in fact depends on a cooperative local sex industry.

Although in all of the EU member states, law enforcement institutions have to adhere to European standards of facial recognition technology (FRT) usage, each country has local national standards that transpose these requirements into the framework of FRT in practice. However, recognising that each society has an important role in controlling the implementation of legal acts, especially where they relate to human rights, society and related interest groups have to regard the proper implementation of FRT regulation as necessary; otherwise it remains declarative and void. If public awareness and pressure to have a law implemented properly are high, the implementing institutions are forced to take action.

This chapter analyses the regulation of FRT usage by Lithuanian law enforcement institutions. Public discussion relating to FRT usage in the media, the involvement of non-governmental organisations, and other types of social control are also discussed. Finally, the chapter considers the changes that may be brought to national regulation of FRT by the EU Artificial Intelligence Act.

This chapter discusses the current state of laws regulating facial recognition technology (FRT) in the United States. The stage is set for the discussion with a presentation of some of the unique aspects of regulation in the United States and of the relevant technology. The current status of FRT regulation in the United States is then discussed, including general laws (such as those that regulate the use of biometrics) and those that more specifically target FRT (such as those that prohibit the use of such technologies by law enforcement and state governments). Particular attention is given to the different regulatory institutions in the United States, including the federal and state governments and federal regulatory agencies, as well as the different treatment of governmental and private users of FRT. The chapter concludes by considering likely future developments, including potential limits of or challenges to the regulation of FRT.

This chapter examines the contextual elements of article 2(4) of the UN Charter and the requirement that a prohibited ‘threat or use of force’ be in ‘international relations’. It analyses the meaning of this term and whether it requires that the object of a prohibited use of force be another State and draws conclusions about the types of acts that fall within and outside the scope of this term (and thus the scope of article 2(4)). The type of acts discussed include use of force on another State’s territory or against its extraterritorial sovereign manifestations, to reclaim disputed territory not within de facto control, those in violation of international demarcation lines, those directly arising from a political dispute between States, use of force by a State within its own territory against its own population, in the exercise of law enforcement jurisdiction against private foreign actors, against entities falling short of Statehood, those with no nexus to another State (such as against an international organisation or on terra nullius) and the use of force within a State’s own territory against small-scale incursion by another State’s armed forces.

The effect of individual governmental drug policies and regulations has, in many cases, been the main driving force behind the direction the opioid epidemic has taken in the United States and many countries around the world. Unfortunately these policies have sometimes had dramatically different effects than were initially intended. Changes in policy which allowed for increased availability of opioid medications had the unintended consequence of widespread opioid addiction and overdose deaths. Policies which aimed to crack down on the diversion of these medications from legitimate medical use resulted in the spike in heroin use as those people who were now addicted to opioids had to turn elsewhere. As demand for heroin surged, so too did manufacturing and sales, and as law enforcement targeted illicit heroin trafficking, cartels turned to the more potent and easier to hide synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and carfentanil. It seems that every governmental policy change or new regulation intended to stop the opioid epidemic is met with a creative solution by the people profiting to keep the opioid trade open.

To test the hypothesis of policing as a function of regime type, this chapter focuses on the evolutions of political policing in light of recent Thai political developments – as only political policing is expected to be affected by democratization. Indeed, whether in times of full-fledged military dictatorship or in times of electoral democracy, routine service-oriented, law-enforcement type of policing remains relatively constant. This chapter argues that post-1970s democratization in Thailand had minimal effects on the entrenched practices of authoritarian policing. Democratization did not put an end to these practices but instead correlated with their legalization through the enactment of a set of empowering legislations. This empirical finding invites reconsideration of the hypothesis of a covariation of regime type and policing practices.

South Korea’s past offers an example of an authoritarian context in which police roles proliferated. Besides maintaining order, police officers in Seoul were deployed for all sorts of purposes. Police were positioned as representatives of a state that had, in the 1960s and 1970s, ambitious plans for remaking society. Seoul’s large underclass posed, in the visions of City Hall and the central government, challenges to those plans. The policing of vagrancy in this period serves as a window onto the interface between state and society. Despite impressive coercive resources, police struggled to impose the state’s demands in managing the streets of Seoul. Instead, they made compromises. In order to attend to their many tasks, police relied on delegates with no formal authority and on irregular procedures. These observations point to a situation of unrestrained power that was also, effectively, limited.

This chapter discusses the process leading up to, during, and after the execution of the three perpetrators of the Dongo killings. Information about the preparations which took place during the few days between the sentencing and the executions comes from a final accounting of the costs of the trial process. Lucero and other court officials made a special point of acknowledging the difficult work accomplished by a number of people over the course of the two weeks between the crime and the execution. Many worked through “sleepless nights” on this “anguishing process.”

The eighteenth century saw a series of reforms in judicial structures and practices, including the creation of the Acordada and the division of the capital city into cuarteles. These reforms may have contributed to more draconian approaches to justice in New Spain, as evidenced by an increasing number of corporal punishment sentences in the late 1780s and a peak in executions in 1790. This year also represents a watershed in the history of the Novohispanic judiciary due to the creation of Mexico’s first salaried corps of nightwatchmen. Arguably, the shock of the Dongo massacre motivated Revillagigedo to create this new institution.

This conclusion ranges across time, but focuses on the theme of death as carried out as a state-sanctioned public spectacle in one space – the Sacred Precinct/Plaza Mayor/Zócalo of Mexico City. The association between Mexico and death grows steadily with images seen in popular culture and the ever-increasing interest in the Day of the Dead – to the point that Posada-style calavera makeup has become a tired cliché like so many other Halloween costumes. This book has attempted to analyze death in Mexico to juxtapose criminalized murders with ceremonial killing rituals.

We conclude our book by summarizing our findings and discussing their implications. We circle back to where we began: violence against women remains a significant and serious impediment to achieving equal status for women in all dimensions of their lives. We offer suggested reforms for improving domestic violence laws and policy implementation at the federal and state levels while recognizing the limits of the federal government in dealing with what is essentially a very localized problem. The reality is that federalism creates unequal conditions for the human security of women across state lines. We end this chapter with proposed avenues of future research that explore more holistically the ways that communities deal with domestic violence. In expanding attention to domestic violence as a source of suppressed citizen participation by women in the United States, we hope to encourage the discipline of political science as well as policymakers and practitioners to address it more consistently and effectively.