Exposing the carceral webs and weaponized data that shape Chicago’s police wars
 

Chicago is a city with extreme concentrations of racialized poverty and inequity, one that relies on an extensive network of repressive agencies to police the poor and suppress struggles for social justice. Imperial Policing examines the role of local law enforcement, federal immigration authorities, and national security agencies in upholding the city’s highly unequal social order.

Collaboratively authored by the Policing in Chicago Research Group, Imperial Policing was developed in dialogue with movements on the front lines of struggles against racist policing in Black, Latinx, and Arab/Muslim communities. It analyzes the connections between three police “wars”—on crime, terror, and immigrants—focusing on the weaponization of data and the coordination between local and national agencies to suppress communities of color and undermine social movements. Topics include high-tech, data-based tools of policing; the racialized archetypes that ground the police wars; the manufacturing of criminals and terrorists; the subversion of sanctuary city protections; and abolitionist responses to policing, such as the Erase the Database campaign.

Police networks and infrastructure are notoriously impenetrable to community members and scholars, making Imperial Policing a rare, vital example of scholars working directly with community organizations to map police networks and intervene in policing practices. Engaging in a methodology designed to provide support for transformative justice organizations, the Policing in Chicago Research Group offers a critical perspective on the abolition of imperial policing, both in Chicago and around the globe.

The Policing in Chicago Research Group is an activist research collective composed primarily of current and former graduate students at the University of Illinois at Chicago whose work is committed to supporting abolitionist movements, transformative justice organizations, and policed communities. The members of PCRG are Andy Clarno, Enrique Alvear Moreno, Janaé Bonsu-Love, Lydia Dana, Michael De Anda Muñiz, Ilā Ravichandran, and Haley Volpintesta.

"The Policing in Chicago Research Group exemplifies how abolitionist practitioners can and must strive to create autonomous collective approaches to research and praxis. Crucially, Imperial Policing models a form of scholarship that decenters ‘the academy’ and exposes the repressive tendencies of its supervisory apparatus: universities, liberal foundations, and the state. Chapter by chapter, this book radically deepens abolitionist analyses of U.S. domestic warfare, reminding us once again that to police Chicago is to police the world (and vice versa)." —Dylan Rodríguez, author of White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide

"Imperial Policing is an intellectual, methodological, and political tour de force in abolitionist sociology. With historical depth, empirical richness, and theoretical heft, it interrogates a critical but still underexamined feature of contemporary carceral politics and state repression: the racialized production and mobilization of data. A must-read for scholars and activists alike!" —Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, author of Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change