Results by title

In recent years, people across the world have protested the violence of policing and its intrusion into everyday lives, and the close timing of these global movements is no coincidence. As Imperial Entanglements of Policing shows, a central reason for the remarkable similarities of policing around the globe is empire. Across the entire sweep of modern policing, there have been strong, mutual connections among police forces via tactics, training, technology, and ideology. Contributors investigate these imperial entanglements in diverse sites around the world, from cities like New York, Santiago, and Johannesburg to countries like the Philippines, Algeria, United Kingdom, and Iraq. Together, they examine a range of policing practices and tactics, such as the impact of American, German, and United Nations policing consultants being employed across the world and the influence of technology and ideology on these encounters. They highlight the ways imperial power was and continues to be perpetrated through police power, how it has evolved in service of imperial goals, and its connection with sites of imperial control.

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.