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Book Review
| Dangerous Strangers: Minority Newcomers and Criminal Violence in the Urban West, 1850–2000. By Kevin J. Mullen. (New York: Algrave MacMillan, 2005. xii + 203 pp. Charts, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $69.95.)
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This book contributes to the on-going debate about how violent the late-nineteenth-century American West really was. In the relatively recent past, scholars such as Roger McGrath, Robert Dykstra, and Clare McKanna, among others, have examined the occurrence of violent criminal behavior in specific places at specific times, case studies, in essence, of specific mining camps, urbanizing areas, or cow towns. Kevin Mullen, a retired San Francisco deputy police chief, adopts this case study approach by focusing on the violence perpetrated by and against immigrant groups primarily in nineteenth-century San Francisco. As such, the title of this work is something of a misnomer as it is neither an exhaustive and sweeping view of the entire urban West, nor does the twentieth century receive quite the coverage in this work as does the nineteenth century. |
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Nevertheless, Mullen takes an imaginative approach to understanding how the San Francisco police force did or did not respond to immigrant violence, to violence perpetrated by the dominant Anglo culture against various waves of newcomers, and to the levels of immigrant-against-immigrant violence. He provides discreet chapters on Latino, Chinese, Irish, Italian, Australian, and African American criminality. Mullen asks whether their respective experiences and their ingrained cultural habits they brought with them to San Francisco led them to become more or less violent among themselves and against others. What were the homicide rates back in their respective homelands compared to that in San Francisco? Mullen also examines criminality among second- and third-generation immigrants in San Francisco (and hence provides some information about the later twentieth-century immigrant experience). As the author states at the outset, this "study offers no new tradition-shattering paradigm" (p. 12). Yet he concludes that the various immigrant groups were violent to themselves (more violent in most cases than they were back in their homelands), were violent towards newcomers, were preyed upon by the dominant culture and by the police, and that their successive generations of children had higher rates of delinquency than other groups. One gets the sense that ethnic neighborhoods in San Francisco were—and remain—relatively violent places. |
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As Mullen notes, early San Francisco criminal statistics are sketchy at best. As such—and impressively—he has sifted through hundreds of coroners' registers, newspaper accounts, and municipal and police reports to compile a database of the over seven thousand known homicides that occurred in San Francisco between 1849 and 2000. This is a well-researched, provocative, little book. It is written by someone whose professional life and first-hand experience are interwoven with the subject matter at hand. As a result it has an authenticity to it that perhaps more detached scholarly endeavors lack. |
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| Keith Edgerton
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| Montana State University-Billings |
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ISSN 1939-8603
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