Policing Empires

Abstract

Abstract Policing Empires examines the militarization of the “civil police” in Britain and the United States. It tracks when, why, and how British and US police departments have adopted military tactics, tools, and technologies for domestic use. It reveals that police militarization has occurred since the very founding of modern policing in the nineteenth century and that militarization has long been an effect of the imperial boomerang. When militarizing their forces, police officials have drawn upon the tactics, tools, and technologies associated with imperialism and colonial conquests. Using the tools of comparative and postcolonial historical sociology, the book further shows that there have been distinct waves of militarization in Britain and the United States since the nineteenth century and that each of these waves has been triggered by the racialization of crime and disorder. Police have typically brought the imperial boomerang home to militarize police in response to perceived racialized threats from minority and immigrant populations. Police militarization results from the imperial state domesticating the methods and tools of its armies abroad to herd, contain, and thrash imagined barbarians who have dared flood through the gates of ostensible civilization.