Policing Empires

by Go

The police response to protests erupting on America's streets in recent years has made the militarization of policing painfully transparent. Yet, properly demilitarizing the police requires a deeper understanding of its historical development, causes, and social logics. Policing Empires offers a postcolonial historical sociology of police militarization in Britain and the United States to aid that effort. Julian Go tracks when, why, and how British and US police departments have adopted military tactics, tools, and technologies for domestic use. Go reveals that police militarization has occurred since the very founding of modern policing in the nineteenth century into the present, and that it is an effect of the "imperial boomerang." Policing Empires thereby unlocks the dirty secret of police Police have brought imperial practices home to militarize themselves in response to perceived racialized threats from minority and immigrant populations.

Genres: History, Police, Sociology, Nonfiction

392 pages, Paperback

First published August 22, 2023

Reviews

[Marc Motter · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly useful piece of historical sociology which situates modern western policing in historical and spatial context. Perhaps the most interesting revelation is that policing, based on its imperial roots and reinforcements, is necessarily and inherently racialized and militarized, such that changes conscious of these two deficiencies cannot be done either independently or without attacking the structural root of policing, and hence empire.

Mechanically, the book was a little repetitive, with the same story of racialized panics of crime and insurgency (unsurprisingly titled "the war on X") and the return of the imperial boomerang to the metropole repeating in different cities and at different times. However, the repetitiveness is part of the argument: the police learned from imperial counterparts in waves, informed by the extent crime and insurgency were present and racialized. The last chapter and conclusion effectively breaks from this pattern, pointing out how, in the age of the American neoliberal empire, the boomerang effect is not as imperial as it once was. Instead, insurgency in response to policing at home leads to greater counterinsurgenization of police forces, which contributes to anti-policing insurgency. The boomerang is less dependent on empire when this cycle exists in the metropole. I was a little bothered by this repetitiveness until reaching this break (which was annoying), but I understood the organizational choice at the end.

Overall, a useful shift and broadening in frame in thinking about policing, especially when modern manifestations of empire and imperial struggle in Palestine mark the possibility of additional boomerang effects on policing in the years to come.

[Thomas Harte · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently attended a lecture by Julian Go where he outlined the main arguments in this fascinating book. He talks about the imperial boomerang whereby the militarisation associated with colonial regimes comes home and is applied to local policing organisations. It is more than guns and equipment he argues that is also and more importantly about ethos, culture and values. He traces the militarisation of the London Met from its formation in 1829 and has a chapter on post 1981 militarisation after the Brixton riots of that year. This is a really thought provoking work. His essential thesis is that policing developed in response to a racialised imperial logic. The other of the colonies came to the metropolis and police armed themselves to the teeth in response to this perceived threat. One note of great interest is the fact that both the Met and early US police forces militarised in response to the perceived threat of the Irish. Not only were we Irish the laboratory for the export of colonial policing through the British Empire we were also the racialised other that prompted the ‘warrior mentality’ in early police forces.

[ia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hate star ratings so much because I enjoyed Policing Empires and 4 stars seems a little too low but I also don't want to give it a full 5 because reasons!

We talked about this in class but there is a lot of discussion about the selection of archives for this book, which can be found in the Notes section. Most, if not all, of the archives used were from the metropole. I would like to have seen a move to also represent the feedback loop mechanisms that also exists in the colonized spaces. Even though the role of the Philippines in the book was crucial in the theory of imperial boomerang, the act of domesticating colonial and racialized policing in the Philippines could have been also an interesting chapter in thinking about the scope of the theory of imperial boomerang.

[44444444444 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Partial read for thesis. Good and worth revisiting.