Violent Order: Essays on the Nature of Police

by David Correia (Editor), Tyler Wall (Editor)

This book 's radical theory of police argues that the police demand for order is a class order and a racialized and patriarchal order, by arguing that the police project, in order to fabricate and defend capitalist order, must patrol an imaginary line between society and nature, it must transform nature into inert matter made available for accumulation. Police don 't just patrol the ghetto or the Indian reservation, the thin blue line doesn 't just refer to a social order, rather police announce a general claim to domination--of labor and of nature.

Police and police violence are modes of environment-making. This edited volume argues that any effort to understand racialized police violence is incomplete without a focus on the role of police in constituting and reinforcing patterns of environmental racism.

Genres: Nonfiction, Social Issues, Essays

225 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 17, 2021

About the author

David Correia is the author of six books, including Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Studies in Northern New Mexico; An Enemy Such as This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation in One Family on Two Continents over Three Centuries; and Set the Earth on Fire: The Great Anthracite Strike of 1902 and the Birth of the Police. He is a professor in the department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of New Mexico.

Reviews

[Xavier · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting collection of articles that range from ecological interrogations to humanistic appraisals of the conditions of police. Still, the authors do not necessarily do the work of wrestling with more than the police which is but one node on the carceral continuum (alongside courts and prisons) and in the larger apparatus that is the Prison Industrial Complex. In other words, while the book is about police, they can't serve as a catchall for all capitalist exploitation, legal construction, and/or cultural hegemony. Furthermore, the ubiquitous yoke of police violence leads to some grand statements that veer into dogma more than rigorous argumentation that would better serve abolitionist world building.

[Karen Kohoutek · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent and unfortunately timely collection of essays on policing and the way it is intrinsically tied to the use of violence in pursuit of an elusive "order." Maybe not as beginner-friendly as "The End of Policing," but full of information and historical context for anyone interested in issues of justice or, frankly, democracy.