A borderless police world
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A borderless police world Guillermina Seri1 Published online: 24 July 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Following their 2016 visit to the USA, the U.N. Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent expressed concern regarding the “alarming levels” of police brutality targeting African Americans.1 Made visible by Black Lives Matter since 2013, the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and a number of other victims mobilized communities and gained national media coverage. Still, killings continued, as did unjustified detentions, police harassment and violence, taking thousands of lives and impacting “all levels of the lives of African Americans” with almost total impunity, the Working Group concluded.2 Steadily surpassing 1,000 killings by police every year, in 2020 the situation remains unchanged.3 Racist policing contributes to the over criminalization leading to world record imprisonment levels, with 2.3 million people in 7 thousand carceral institutions, a number of them for profit, and almost as twice as many people caught in the criminal system.4 Pervasive police presence across schools and as first respondents dealing with mental illness or the homelessness expands criminalization among the most vulnerable, just as police abuses are accompanied with almost total police immunity.5 While recent research, especially Keenanga Yamahtta Taylor’s,6 offers a detailed reconstruction of the history of police abuses of African Americans, understanding what makes abusive policing so resilient, so scandal-immune in the US may bring us back in time, beyond national boundaries, in Badges without Borders Stuart Schrader contends. In the US, policing is not merely a domestic matter, not at least 1 Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent—visit to USA of America, 19–29 January 2016 (A/HRC/33/61/Add.2), p. 7. 2 Ibidem. 3 Police Shootings Database, The Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/ police-shootings-2019/; Most of the victims are male, and half of those whose race is known are African American or Latino. 4 Prison Policy Initiative, www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html. 5 Vitale, Alex, The end of policing (Verso, 2017). 6 Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Haymarket, 2016).
* Guillermina Seri [email protected] 1
Department of Political Science, Union College, Schenectady, NY 12308, USA Vol.:(0123456789)
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International Politics Reviews (2020) 8:21–31
since the aftermath of WWII, when it started deploying “beat cops to police the globe.”7 The book exposes policing at the heart of a governing apparatus seamlessly extending from our local communities to the farthest posts of the US empire, relying on the continuum between policing and war. The story goes back to the early years of the Cold War, with the need to enhance the US image in its dispute of global hegemony with the “communist” world while crushing rebel groups and keeping African Americans’ demands for rights muffled. At the ti
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