CCJS Annual Lecture: Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US
On Tuesday 7 May 2024 the University of Leeds had the honour of hosting Professor Julian Go to deliver the Annual Lecture for the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies.
About Julian Go
Julian Go is the Professor of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate of the Centre for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture and the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago. His research interests include postcolonialism, empire, social theory and global historical sociology. He has authored numerous works including American Empire and the Politics of Meaning (Duke University Press, 2008); Patterns of Empire: the British and American Empires, 1688 to Present (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (Oxford University Press, 2016).
At a time when student protests across the US are being met with an increasingly militarised police response, Go’s lecture – based upon his most recent work, Policing Empires: Race, Imperialism and Militarization in the US and Great Britain, 1829-present (Oxford University Press, 2023) – is both timely and significant. There have been reports of numerous arrests of students calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and the disinvestment of institutions from weapons manufacturers and companies doing business in Israel, as a result of the ongoing military occupation and alleged genocide in Gaza. Earlier this month, upon numerous occasions, cordons of police units in riot gear have moved to dismantle tent encampments in early morning raids, using teargas and rubber bullets against student protestors at a number of universities across the US.
Professor Go began his lecture by highlighting his concern with the way in which police are so ready to treat citizens as enemies of war. Go’s main contention is that such militarisation of policing does not represent a transgression of the civil policing ideal, but rather that it is in fact an intrinsic and fundamental function of the police. In this way, Go’s work seeks to provide a counter-narrative to other accounts by arguing that, indeed, the civil police were in fact militarised from the very beginning of modern policing in the nineteenth century. His contention is that distinctive waves of militarisation have emerged as an effect of the ‘imperial boomerang’, and that any attempt to understand how and why the police function in this way requires an understanding of the historical relationship of the police to empire, race and coloniality.
Go’s lecture provided an overview of his historical sociology of militarised policing, beginning with the establishment of the London Metropolitan police in 1829, a new form of centralised uniformed police tasked with regulating crime and tackling disorder. Sir Robert Peel borrowed from colonial forms of control when creating this new force, drawing on his experience of serving in Ireland as an inspiration for the Met. Numerous aspects of this new body mirrored colonial structures – from the appointment of Commissioners with military experience, to the introduction of the notion of a police patrol, or ‘beat’. The concept of a ‘beat’ reflects an amalgamation of slave patrols in former colonies, for example, which were organised into distinctive ‘beats’ or territorial districts, in conjunction with the deployment of light infantry as highly mobile and flexible counter-insurgency military units.
Boomerang Effect
Thus, the ‘boomerang effect of colonisation’, as described by Aimé Césaire (1955) and, later, Michel Foucault (1976), brings ‘home’ colonial regimes of coercion to a localised police force. Professor Go explained that this was regarded as a necessary response to the perception of ‘disorder from colonial bodies’ coming to England. Heightened migration from Ireland as a result of demand for labour fuelled anxieties reflected in the narrative of Irish migrants as disorderly and violent, depicted as the racialised sub-proletariat of the work force responsible for a rise in crime. The Chartists, regarded as one element of this disorder and disruption, were often described as an Irish movement led by black radicals. The ‘Irish problem’ resulted in a demand to adopt the ‘same [policing] methods used in colonial Ireland’. Similarly, in the US, crime and disorder were heavily racialised: mass migration into industrial urban spaces resulted in ‘racial logics summoning the boomerang home’. African American and Asian communities moving into cities were blamed for a rise in crime and decay, and a demand for a more powerful police force in response.
Professor Go explained that one can find an explicit reflection of the ‘boomerang effect’ in early 20th century policing in the US. He traced the reform and modernisation of the police at this time – including mounted police and police training schools – back to renowned figures such as August Vollmer. Vollmer had been part of the US colonial military regime serving in the Philippines. Whilst policing the city of Manila, Vollmer was handpicked to join a new elite counter-insurgency unit charged with capturing rebel leaders. After he returned to Berkeley, California, he brought with him colonial counter-insurgency techniques, many of which are still in use today. One example of this is ‘pin-mapping’ – known today as predictive policing, a technique involving AI. This method can be attributed to army techniques used during the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). Vollmer described it as ‘art of making war on the map’: he stated that ‘we are conducting a war against the enemies of society and we must never forget that’. Another tactic ‘brought home’ was the ‘water cure’, the chosen mode of torture by US forces in the Philippines, adopted in the 1910s-1920s by the police to extract confessions from suspects.
Professor Go’s lecture addressed two specific ‘waves’ or movements of the boomerang ‘coming home’, but he stressed that there were indeed many others. In his book, he addresses other moments in which a tactical police force was used to respond to perceived crime waves, drawing links between developments in police tactics as a direct effect of military techniques. SWAT teams in the late 1960s (deployed against the black panthers, for example) were directly inspired by tactical units in Vietnam, and special patrol units in the 1970s were used in response to the perceived racial threat of the post-Windrush generation in England, based on specialist units which had emerged in former colonies. Go highlighted counter-insurgency techniques which are directly taken from Iraq and Afghanistan to deal with local ‘gangs’, justified by the perception that ‘gangs are like insurgents’. This is often an explicit inheritance, as demonstrated by the fact that US police chiefs have frequently travelled to Israel to learn about counter-terrorism techniques and intelligence gathering.
Questions and Answers
Following the lecture, questions addressed whether the role of race and empire can be over-emphasised, given the history of robust police responses to working- class struggles. Go suggested that his research had identified that policing techniques were primarily derived from their deployment in colonial sites, giving the example of fingerprinting, which was initially a means of maintaining ‘control’ of colonial subjects in India. He stressed the intersection of class and race was evident, but emphasised that racialisation was effectively the Trojan horse within which tactics are tested out, before being deployed against working-class strikers or students, for example. In the Miners’ Strikes, police were re-using techniques they already had in their repertoire – such as ‘kettling’ – from their treatment of black and minority communities throughout the 1970s.
In response to the question of whether there was an obsession with new technological approaches and a disregard of military failures, Go explained that he had found the police are largely enamoured with the military leading to an unquestioning adoption of various techniques. He argued that the police are not a rational institution– they operate under a process of emotive and fear-mongering racialisation, and as a result an admiration for militarism shapes the form and function of the police. This would perhaps explain why he suggested that he had not seen examples of resistance within police to the ‘boomerang effect’ of coloniality. Resistance came instead from the racialised populations – reflected perhaps in today’s call to defund the police from the Black Lives Matter movement.
Finally, Professor Go was asked whether he had considered other moments in which particular minorities were singled out – such as in the ‘war on terror’, or the ‘war on drugs’. He suggested that the way in which certain groups are racialised varies depending on the context. Indeed, elements of re-racialisation have been observed in the context of the recent protests. It can be argued that here in the UK, despite the diverse communities involved in anti-war protests, events calling for peace have been narrativized as peopled primarily by ‘Muslim extremists’, or ‘anti-British hate marches’, leading to calls from some quarters for a more punitive police response.
Go stressed however that although processes of racialisation are always subject to spatio-temporal shifts, the demand for a militarised response will always be focused on race. He concluded his lecture by reflecting on the way in which, through racialisation, the police see citizens as colonial subjects, reflecting Achille Mbembe’s analysis of the construction of the racialised colonised subject as ‘a menacing object from which one must be protected or escape’. Thus, Professor Go considered whether, in recognising ‘our modern present is not far distant from our imperial past’, we might conclude that there is no reform or rehabilitation which would truly achieve justice, as by its very nature, ‘policing is colonialism’.
Abiout the author: Emma Patchett is a postgraduate researcher in the School of Law. Her doctoral thesis explores the policing of rough sleepers through Public Space Protection Orders, drawing on critical legal geography and spatio-temporal theory to explore the ways in which public space is constructed through the law.
