Much political commentary on the left in the West has singled out the overtly racist rhetoric central to the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement in the United States, which frames (racialized) immigrants as some of the most “violent people on earth” and “blood thirsty criminals.” Many observers frame such discourses as aberrant, as a deviation from our liberal and civilizational mores. Yet this sort of scapegoating, and the raced tropes it relies on, has a lengthy and illustrious lineage. In his Policing Empires, Julian Go walks us through this history in granular and compelling detail. We are reminded, for instance, that in 1856, New York Mayor Fernando Wood baldly and without evidence averred that foreign governments had been sending “their criminals and indigent populations … people who … are far below the moral standard of this nation” to the city (p. 87). It is against this backdrop that Policing Empires provides deep insight into the historical conditions that gave rise to the militarization of the police across diverse geographical contexts. And it offers a powerful reminder that the “othering” narrative that informs the increasing normalization of far-right politics in the United States, Europe, and beyond is a story of continuity rather than departure.
Using Aimé Césaire’s famous conceit of the colonial boomerang to frame his narration of the development of police thought and action, Go organizes the book into three key parts. He takes us on a journey commencing in 1829 in London, a city that was conceived at the time as “threatened” and under attack by Irish immigrants. Around the same time that the British state set up the Irish Constabulary, Robert Peel became a key figure in the creation of the London Metropolitan Police in order to counter the Irish “menace.” The “Met,” as they became known over time, adopted what Go describes as a colonial-influenced counterinsurgency approach to social order, albeit one “tempered” by the largely White population of London that they were dealing with. This in turn serves as a reminder of the slippery—or as Cedric Robinson phrased it in his essay, “Forgeries of Memory and Meaning,” the “deadly and slick”—nature of racialization, whereby the Irish lost their “not quite white” status over time. To show the reach and relative consistency in policing praxis, Go then turns his focus to New York and Georgia, where police power was arrayed against the “racialised threat” posed by both Irish immigrants, as well as both free and enslaved Black people.
Go also zooms into key personalities that developed, expanded, and theorized policing across time and space. One such personality is August Vollmer, the Los Angeles police chief who brought his counterinsurgency experience during the United States’ occupation of the Philippines back to the city. These military practices of population control boomeranged back to Los Angeles, where the police department adopted punitive processes, such as data collection on racialized populations, more heavy policing and surveillance, and the use of strategies of “preemption.” These strategies of preemption follow the enduring (policing) logics of racial profiling, where mere suspicion can result in arrest, for example. At a high level of abstraction, Go captures the circulation of ideas and practices (such as fingerprinting) that have undergirded the militarization of policing across geographies and historical contexts, while skillfully interrogating the cultural and political specificities shaping their various iterations. (The case of “de-irishizing” (p. 147) crime as this population became more integrated in the British populace is a case in point.)
The final part of the book brings Go’s analysis up to date by stressing the continuities between policing in the colonial period as it is reflected and refracted through such familiar police configurations as Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams. For example, while it is not referenced in Go’s work, one is reminded here of the Philadelphia police department’s 1985 decision to bomb a house occupied by members of MOVE, a Black liberation and animal rights organization, resulting in the death of six children and five adults. In turn, Go stresses the revolving door of personnel that facilitated the exchange of counterinsurgency knowledge between the military and the police—a phenomenon that Stuart Schrader also traces in his 2019 book, Badges Without Borders, and which framed the “Black Ghetto” as another target for the pacification of (post)colonial populations.
Policing Empires is a terrific contribution for those who wish to learn more about how the ideas around and the practices of state-supported violence circulate between the imperial metropole and the colonies, as well as their mutating but continual deployment in the contemporary context. The role of the Scottish Police Training College in supporting Sri Lanka’s Special Task Force in recent years, alongside the genocidal Israeli Defence Force’s training of US police forces, underscores how militarized policing continues to flagrantly violate international law and human rights. It is the forces of those states that originally set the normative standards that are now largely responsible for violating human rights and international law. In this way, repressive, militarized, and, in some instances, settler colonial practices have wide and enduring currency in the pacification of people of color, all of which are analyzed in Go’s Policing Empire with insight and acumen. His research into the genesis of these practices, as well as their circulation, is especially commendable.
I would, however, have liked to see further contextualization of and elaboration on a key—perhaps the key—concept of the book, that of militarization. Go tends to use militarization as a catch-all for military practices (hardware and ethos) that are then co-opted by police entities. Or in other cases, he refers to the diffusion of these militarized notions as key military actors move into civilian organizations, taking their ideas and values with them. Yet as Alison Howell has convincingly argued in her 2018 article for the International Feminist Journal of Politics, “war and politics are mutually shaped” (p. 117). As such, assertions that the police have become increasingly militarized tend to elide the very essence of the police as a “war-like” political entity. As Howell puts it, “policing is not a matter of ‘domestic’ politics … it is precisely a matter of martial politics, of war-like relations within so-called ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ politics alike” (p. 124). When presented in a register that eschews the nodal “beginnings” of militarization and its “end state” of militarized policing, it is possible to see policing as a key tenet of a martial politics that is already “of war”—in this case, on racialized populations. It would have been helpful if the book had more explicitly engaged contemporary debates around the concept, particularly those that stress the structural power imbalances that have shaped policing from its inception.
My other point of contention is around the relative absence of class and capitalism in this analysis. “Race” does not operate in a vacuum, and colonization was as much about economic extraction as it was about racial subordination. The raced, classed, and gendered modalities of colonial dispossession worked and continue to work in tandem to underwrite the twin processes of capital accumulation and labor pacification. In this sense, while Go corrects for the lack of attention given to racialization and racisms in many Marxist texts on policing (including in Mark Neocleous’s pathbreaking work), there is an almost overcorrection that elides the importance of policing for the perpetuation of a deeply unequal capitalist order, both within nation states and across the globe.
These small shortcomings notwithstanding, I think this is an excellent book. It would be especially useful for students of politics and for those who still have faith in an apolitical, deracinated police apparatus. I would encourage everyone to read it, particularly for what its historical analyses have to say about the afterlives of colonial policing in places like Gaza.
