When Riot Cops Are Not Enough

In When Riot Cops Are Not Enough, sociologist and activist Mike King examines the policing, and broader political repression, of the Occupy Oakland movement during the fall of 2011 through the spring of 2012. King’s active and daily participation in that movement, from its inception through its demise, provides a unique insider perspective to illustrate how the Oakland police and city administrators lost the ability to effectively control the movement. Drawn from King’s intensive field work, the book focuses on the physical, legal, political, and ideological dimensions of repression—in the streets, in courtrooms, in the media, in city hall, and within the movement itself—When Riot Cops Are Not Enough highlights the central role of political legitimacy, both for mass movements seeking to create social change, as well as for governmental forces seeking to control such movements. Although Occupy Oakland was different from other Occupy sites in many respects, King shows how the contradictions it illuminated within both social movement and police strategies provide deep insights into the nature of protest policing generally, and a clear map to understanding the full range of social control techniques used in North America in the twenty-first century.

Mega-events such as the Olympic Games, World Cup finals and international political summits are occasions of almost unparalleled economic, political and social significance for host nations and cities. The scale and scope of mega-event security has continued to grow enormously since 11 September 2001, consistently involving the largest policing and security operations for event hosts outside of wartime. This book is the first to focus exclusively on the organisational dynamics underpinning the design and delivery of mega-event security. Using the G20 Summit in Brisbane, Australia in November 2014 as a case study, in conjunction with comparisons with events such as the Toronto 2010 G20, the authors engage in a comprehensive assessment of the networks, strategies and tensions involved in mega-event security. By drawing on the insightful experiences of those responsible for securing the Brisbane 2014 G20, the authors look behind-the-scenes to capture the complexity of mega-event security. The authors argue that such an approach is essential to better appreciate how different conceptions of security, ways of thinking and acting, impact a range of security ideals and outcomes.

A collective ethnography of grassroots mobilizations for community safety across the Silicon Valley This is a narrative of struggle and solidarity and a collective toolkit for grassroots opposition to militarization, policing, and ongoing conditions of war in the current conjuncture of racial patriarchal capitalism. Grassroots researcher Annie Paradise presents here a collective ethnography of the mothers and community matriarchs whose children have been murdered by police across the San Francisco Bay Area as they develop and practice autonomous, creative forms of resistance. The War on the Social Factory: The Struggle for Community Safety in the Silicon Valley maps local families’ struggles to reclaim their households and their communities—to create a social infrastructure of care, justice, and safety outside state- and market-determined modes of “security.” Practices such as sustained vigil, testimony, and the production and circulation of insurgent knowledges are shown here to be part of interconnected justice efforts to demilitarize and decarcerate communities in the face of the multiple forms of violence enacted under late racial patriarchal capitalism. Paradise examines the expanding carceral processes of enclosure, criminalization, dispossession, expropriation, and disposability that mark the neoliberal "security” regime across the Silicon Valley and offers counter-counterinsurgent strategies and practices of co-generative, dynamic resistance.

In the United States, race and police were founded along with a capitalist economy dependent on the enslavement of workers of African descent. Race and Police builds a critical theory of American policing by analyzing a heterodox history of policing, drawn from the historiography of slavery and slave patrols. Beginning by tracing the historical origins of the police mandate in British colonial America, the book shows that the peculiar institution of racialized chattel slavery originated along with a novel, binary conception of race. On one side, for the first time Europeans from various nationalities were united in a single racial category. Inclusion in this category was necessary for citizenship. On the other, Blacks were branded as slaves, cast as social enemies, and assumed to be threats to the social order. The state determined not only that it would administer slavery, but that it would regulate slaves, authorizing the use of violence by agents of the state and white citizens to secure the social order. In doing so, slavery, citizenship, and police mutually informed one another, and together they produced racial capitalism, a working class defined and separated by the color line, and a racial social order. Race and Police corrects the Eurocentrism in the orthodox history of American police and in predominating critical theories of police. That orthodoxy rests on an origin story that begins with Sir Robert Peel and the London Metropolitan Police Service. Predating the Met by more than a century, America’s first police, often called slave patrols, did more than maintain order—it fabricated a racial order. Prior to their creation, all white citizens were conscripted to police all Blacks. Their participation in the coercive control of Blacks gave definition to their whiteness. Targeted as threats to the security of the economy and white society, being policed defined Blacks who, for the first time, were treated as a single racial group. The boundaries of whiteness were first established on the basis of who was required to regulate slaves, given a specific mandate to prevent Black insurrection, a mandate that remains core to the police role to this day.

The massive uprising following the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020--by some estimates the largest protests in US history--thrust the argument to defund the police to the forefront of international politics. It also made The End of Policing a bestseller and Alex Vitale, its author, a leading figure in the urgent public discussion over police and racial justice. As the writer Rachel Kushner put it in an article called "Things I Can't Live Without", this book explains that "unfortunately, no increased diversity on police forces, nor body cameras, nor better training, has made any seeming difference" in reducing police killings and abuse. "We need to restructure our society and put resources into communities themselves, an argument Alex Vitale makes very persuasively." The problem, Vitale demonstrates, is policing itself-the dramatic expansion of the police role over the last forty years. Drawing on first-hand research from across the globe, The End of Policing describes how the implementation of alternatives to policing, like drug legalization, regulation, and harm reduction instead of the policing of drugs, has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice. This edition includes a new introduction that takes stock of the renewed movement to challenge police impunity and shows how we move forward, evaluating protest, policy, and the political situation.

Rectifying the fact that little criminological attention has been paid to the notion that the security of flows increasingly embodies concerns at the heart of contemporary policing practices, this book makes a significant contribution to knowledge about the policing and security governance of flows. The book focuses on how the growing centrality of flows affects both contemporary 'risks' and the policing organisations in charge of managing them. The contributors analyse flows such as event security; border controls and migration; the movement of animal parts; security-related intelligence; and organisational flows. The emerging criminology of these, as well as flows of money, information and numerous commodities, from pharmaceuticals to minerals or malicious software, is leading to critical advances in the understanding of the changing harm landscapes and the practices that have developed to manage them. Taken as a whole, the book opens up the conversation, and encourages the invention of new conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools to help criminology tackle and better understand the mobile world in which we live. This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Crime.

Trauma has unfortunately become an all-too familiar occurrence in the lives of children, with a majority of youth experiencing a traumatic event before the age of 18. With the rise of school shootings and recent March for Our Lives, this timely book will address intervention strategies for social workers and counselors to combat this negative phenomenon. Urban Youth Trauma focuses on urban violence and guns, while due attention is also paid to other forms of trauma in order to ground violence-related trauma within the constellation of multiple forms of trauma. Violence, and more specifically that related to guns, is very much associated with urban centers and youth of color. Divided into three parts, this volume traces the roots of urban youth trauma. Parts I and II provide context and foundation for the problem and intervention strategies. Part III takes the reader through a variety of intervention strategies directly related to the community’s assets. The strength of Urban Youth Trauma’s lies in its focus on the community itself as the key to survival, resilience, and change.

Cultures of Resistance brings new insight to a key question: do government efforts to repress social movements effectively repress dissent, or do they spur mobilization? Through analyses of activists' experiences of repression and resistance, the book uncovers processes that shape how individuals understand the risks of participating in collective action. Reynolds-Stenson demonstrates how individual rationality is collectively constructed.