Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (American Crossroads)

by Stuart Schrader

From the Cold War through today, the U.S. has quietly assisted dozens of regimes around the world in suppressing civil unrest and securing the conditions for the smooth operation of capitalism. Casting a new light on American empire, Badges Without Borders shows, for the first time, that the very same people charged with global counterinsurgency also militarized American policing at home.
 
In this groundbreaking exposé, Stuart Schrader shows how the United States projected imperial power overseas through police training and technical assistance--and how this effort reverberated to shape the policing of city streets at home. Examining diverse records, from recently declassified national security and intelligence materials to police textbooks and professional magazines, Schrader reveals how U.S. police leaders envisioned the beat to be as wide as the globe and worked to put everyday policing at the core of the Cold War project of counterinsurgency. A "smoking gun" book, Badges Without Borders offers a new account of the War on Crime, "law and order" politics, and global counterinsurgency, revealing the connections between foreign and domestic racial control.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Police, American History, Sociology, School

413 pages, Paperback

Published October 15, 2019

Reviews

[Merricat Blackwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Five stars for content, zero stars for bad academic prose. If you can dig through it, though, there are some great insights. One is that, during the middle of the 20th century, overt racial justifications for suppression and empire fell out of favor, but the fundamental forms of suppression and empire didn’t change much. Schrader writes that, both before and after that shift, some people existed outside of the protection of the law; they could only be punished, never protected. Before the shift away from explicit racial thinking, those people were defined hereditarily. Some ethnic groups were savages from birth, unfit for civilized society. After the mid-20th-century shift, the “savages” were defined not by their race, but by their resistance to policing. Policing, in Schrader’s reading, produces rational actors who can choose to be part of civilized society or choose to be against it--to be criminals, to be subversives. When they place themselves against the police, then, by their own choice, they place themselves outside of civilization and outside of the protection of the law. Of course, the overwhelming majority of criminals and subversives were those who were previously considered “savages.” The police aimed to protect existing property relations and relations of power, and anyone who found those unfair and tried to resist them would find themselves labeled as a subversive--as one who had, freely and through no fault but their own, placed themselves outside of the law’s protection. Thus, global policing substituted a race-neutral justification for empire for a racial one, while keeping the actual relations the same. Another linked idea is that "professionalization" of the police in the middle of the last century almost never reduced repression and brutality, but in fact did a great deal of ideological work to legitimate it. I have found both of these insights really useful since reading these books; they reoccur to me a lot, in a lot of different scenarios.

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

The chickens of empire always come home to roost. Here the professionaliZation of policing in the postwar turns out be part of the globalization of the effort to deliver “order” everywhere from the rights demanding radical denizens of America’s inner cities to the restive populations of the Global South emerging from colonialism.

[Sara Shocks · Rating 4 out of 5]

very dense & academic, very good research & analysis

[Eric Bottorff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant work of scholarship that will be of great interest to those who want to understand and resist the tyranny of modern policing.

[Oca · Rating 2 out of 5]

Those looking for smoking guns of evidence will be disappointed. This is not an objective analysis of a hypothesis with competing alternatives. It completely overlooks the major violent crime rise since the mid 1960s that eventually led to popular demands for police militarisation to restore order.

Latin American death squads were in no way comparable to US policing (despite the latter also sometimes operating outside the bounds of the law, which deserves to be fairly criticised) Critically, they aren’t murdering ppl systematically on the basis of political beliefs.

Rather, it appears those in the Global South who received US police/counterinsurgency training applied it for their own purposes back home. The author argues for the other way around.

By now, it's clear the real limitation of this book is its reliance on Marxist analysis and terminology. This is how it asserts the improbable and common-sense defying notion that ordinary people with run-ins with police in US can be compared to Marxists in the developing world being repressed during the Cold War.

If all ideologies are merely masks for power relations in class conflict, then there can be no apparent differences between any two groups being repressed.

Moreover, the focus of the book is often misplaced. The focus is too strongly on the "ends" and not the improper "means" of policing which is disappointing. It is not what one should expect from objective police studies.

From a non-Marxist point of view, police obviously are supposed to protect “property relations”, everyone else supports this. If your own property was robbed/ransacked you would want to be able to do something about it. This is the basis of nearly all human civilisation. Neglecting property rights, pressing for enforced egalitarianism often leads to economic disaster and gross human rights violations as well.

Instead of focusing so much on apparently malign motives, the book should take a purely methods-based analytic approach. That would improve its credibility.

[Ryan Day · Rating 3 out of 5]

6.8/10

Normally with these books I do not critique the prose too closely. Usually the information and arguments make up for the writing style. Usually.

Badges Without Borders covers a very important topic, the origins of our police. Their existence as an entity is to control a population doomed by our economic system to destitution, from Ferguson to Fallujah. This powerful argument is bogged down by the most annoying, academic prose imaginable.

In my opinion, a book dealing with something this important should be made for wide audiences, written as captivatingly as possible. I read this style often, and still I wanted to put the book down half the time because of how needlessly verbose and dense it was. It is possible the book's thesis meant it could only ever be written this way, but I’m not convinced.

The content is nonetheless compelling. The post-war age saw a huge expansion in U.S.-backed global policing in the form of funding cops to train third world cops. This did not exactly come back to bite us in the form of racist, militarized police. Rather, the two were always and at every moment intimately connected. The same men working foreign then domestic, or vice versa, to spread the best tactics of social control and counter insurgency.

Policing is, at heart, meant to control the effects of poverty endemic to our capitalist system. Simultaneously, this means upholding the remnants of a global system of white supremacy. It’s not at all clear where the upholding of capitalism ends and where the maintaining racial hierarchy begins, but these goals are the implications of phrases like “law and order.”

Anyone seeking to reform policing, or to combat extremely common and extremely Hitlerian narratives about RISING CRIME, must contend with this history of cops. Too bad this book is a slog that barely attempts to appeal to anyone.

[NCHS Library]

From Follett: From the Cold War through today, the U.S. has quietly assisted dozens of regimes around the world in suppressing civil unrest and securing the conditions for the smooth operation of capitalism. Casting a new light on American empire, Badges Without Borders shows, for the first time, that the very same people charged with global counterinsurgency also militarized American policing at home.

In this groundbreaking expose, Stuart Schrader shows how the United States projected imperial power overseas through police training and technical assistance--and how this effort reverberated to shape the policing of city streets at home. Examining diverse records, from recently declassified national security and intelligence materials to police textbooks and professional magazines, Schrader reveals how U.S. police leaders envisioned the beat to be as wide as the globe and worked to put everyday policing at the core of the Cold War project of counterinsurgency. A "smoking gun" book, Badges without Borders offers a new account of the War on Crime, "law and order" politics, and global counterinsurgency, revealing the connections between foreign and domestic racial contro

[Spicy T AKA Mr. Tea · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating, though dry and sometimes disjointed, history of how policing in America was exported to other colonized nations; the experiences of subjugating dissidents was then imported back to America and used against subversive, dissident, or protesting populations. A really high-level look at the evolution of policing as a method of domestic counterinsurgency. Some of the chapters were amazing while others could have been clearer. On the whole those, a worthwhile read and one I need to read again!

[Daniel Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stuart Schrader meticulously lays out the trail from when the U.S. began training foreign police to current methods of our own urban policing. The book pieces together the evolution of American law enforcement from the cop on the street to a paramilitary unit. It's an important read during the debate on how the country should proceed with policing. The JFK years were especially interesting as the Kennedy brothers tried to shape foreign policy through policing.

[David Hockabout · Rating 4 out of 5]

This gives us a deep background of policing in the U.S. and in other parts of world, particularly in nations that imperialism dominates. You will come to see how the School of the Americas, now called Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, has impacted policing. Not well I would add.

The only issue I have is that Badges Without Borders appears to be aimed at an academic audience rather the average reader.

[Jessica Forsee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thorough yet succinct explanation of the expansion of police power through the Cold War counter insurgent efforts and international police forums. This is a 10/10 book for anyone interested in the current conversations and understanding the historical roots of it all.

[Grace McMorris]

'global counterinsurgency' = war in vietnam

[Kaveri Sarkar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super insightful but too much jargon!

[Melina McGovern · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really strong and influential in the study of high-policing. I read this for a class on policing and it was really interesting.