History of U.S. Police Suppressing and Stoking Racial and Class Conflicts

Looking broadly across time and space, and tracing histories of policing in Britain and the United States, Julian Go will join us for the fifth session of our Criminal Law as a Tool of Authoritarian Control speaker series to discuss how in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, police forces drew inspiration from the military and, since then, have grown more militarized during heightened moments of perceived racial threat. By studying colonial contexts and imperial history, Go traces an “imperial boomerang,” in which police forces further militarized domestically within each country by using and importing the tactics and strategies first developed in suppression and repression of colonial subjects under empire—tactics like pin-mapping, snatch squads, mobile strike squads, tear gas, fingerprinting, and more. Go argues that police agencies developed these same tactics, tools, and technologies as colonial forces in service of a common goal: maintaining a racialized socioeconomic order, with cities functioning like colonies of a domestic militarized force. We will consider how this history foregrounds current developments in the United States, including tactics like deployment of the national guard and threats of direct deployment of the military as a standing army, clearing homeless encampments to respond to “disorder,” increased violence in immigration raids, fingerprinting during criminal arrests leading to immigration detention, and how thinking through the lens of empire offers new horizons for understanding, critiquing, and containing police violence and the violence of policing.

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Speaker

Julian Go is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago where he is also a Faculty Affiliate in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture and The Committee on International Relation. He is also a Fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and former President of the Social Science History Association.

Julian Go’s research explores the social logics, forms and impact of empires and colonialism; postcolonial/decolonial thought and related questions of social theory, epistemology, and knowledge; and global historical sociology. Much of Go’s work has focused on the US empire, resulting in, among other work, his trilogy on empire: American Empire and the Politics of Meaning (Duke University Press, 2008), Patterns of Empire: the British and American Empires, 1688 to Present (Cambridge, 2011) and Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the United States (Cambridge, 2024).

Julian’s research also includes the historical sociology of policing, resulting in his prize-winning book, Policing Empires, his award-winning article, “The Imperial Origins of American Policing: Militarization and Imperial Feedback in the Early 20th Century”, several book chapters, and a forthcoming volume co-edited with Stuart Schrader titled The Imperial Entanglements of Policing. 

The Criminal Law as a Tool of Authoritarian Control speaker series is organized by Katy Naples-Mitchell, Program Director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and Sandra Susan Smith, Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice (HKS); Faculty Director, Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management; Professor of Sociology (FAS).