Abstract

Speaker: Professor Julian Go, Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago

Chair: Dr Filipe Carreira da Silva, Fellow of Selwyn College, University of Cambridge

This lecture, drawing upon Go’s recently published book, Policing Empires, offers a postcolonial historical sociology of police militarization in Britain and the United States. It tracks when, why, and how British and US police departments have adopted military tactics, tools, and technologies for domestic use since the founding of modern policing in the nineteenth century into the present. It shows that militarization is an effect of the “imperial boomerang.” Police have brought imperial practices home in response to perceived racialized threats from minority and immigrant populations.