Results by title
72 books match the query 'Police' and 3 start with a
A Police State
Politics and Public Safety in Minneapolis, 1945–2020Michael J. Lansing
University of Chicago Press, 2027
How the police in Minneapolis used electoral politics to accrue power and avoid accountability.
The 2020 murder of George Floyd made Minneapolis synonymous with unjust policing and the pain and outrage left in its wake. The city became ground zero for police reform in the United States—even though liberal politicians in Minnesota had promised, and delivered, police reforms for decades. Centered on professionalization, these changes inadvertently exacerbated injustice. Better training and higher standards broadened the influence of the police, who then claimed expertise in public safety. They deployed it to bargain for governmental support, even when they treated residents unfairly. Though Black, Indigenous, and gay residents resisted, the political power amassed by the police rendered real change almost impossible.
In A Police State, historian and fourth-generation Minneapolis resident Michael J. Lansing chronicles how the police became a political force in one of the nation’s most liberal cities. Lansing shows how, in the years after World War II, public safety policies that appealed to voters in the overwhelmingly white city protected and expanded police discretion. As union members, administrators, and citizens, officers shaped these policies to shield themselves and their violent actions from scrutiny. They campaigned for better wages, secured legal safeguards, resisted race-neutral policing, and elected one of their own to the mayor’s office. Ultimately, they used democratic institutions to cultivate and sustain a police state that protected white people and harmed people of color. Lansing uncovers this dysfunctional relationship between a city and its cops while illuminating a larger American story about reform, resistance, and democracy.
A significant exploration of policing politics, this book helps us understand the history that led to George Floyd’s murder—and insists that the future of community safety depends on reenvisioning the role of police in our society.
Archives of Infamy
Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary CitizensNancy Luxon
University of Minnesota Press, 2019
Expanding the insights of Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault’s Disorderly Families into policing, public order, (in)justice, and daily life
What might it mean for ordinary people to intervene in the circulation of power between police and the streets, sovereigns and their subjects? How did the police come to understand themselves as responsible for the circulation of people as much as things—and to separate law and justice from the maintenance of a newly emergent civil order? These are among the many questions addressed in the interpretive essays in Archives of Infamy.
Crisscrossing the Atlantic to bring together unpublished radio broadcasts, book reviews, and essays by historians, geographers, and political theorists, Archives of Infamy provides historical and archival contexts to the recent translation of Disorderly Families by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault. This volume includes new translations of key texts, including a radio address Foucault gave in 1983 that explains the writing process for Disorderly Families; two essays by Foucault not readily available in English; and a previously untranslated essay by Farge that describes how historians have appropriated Foucault.
Archives of Infamy pushes past old debates between philosophers and historians to offer a new perspective on the crystallization of ideas—of the family, gender relations, and political power—into social relationships and the regimes of power they engender.
Contributors: Roger Chartier, Collège de France; Stuart Elden, U of Warwick; Arlette Farge, Centre national de recherche scientifique; Michel Foucault (1926–1984); Jean-Philippe Guinle, Catholic Institute of Paris; Michel Heurteaux; Pierre Nora, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; Michael Rey (1953–1993); Thomas Scott-Railton; Elizabeth Wingrove, U of Michigan.
Ariel and the Police
Frank Lentricchia
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989
In Ariel and the Police, Frank Lentricchia searches through the totalizing desires for power that have built and help to maintain tangible and intangible structures of confinement and purification within, and sometimes as, the house of modernism. And what he finds, in his lyrical effort to redeem the subject for history, is that someone lives there, slyly, sometimes even playfully defiant.