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The Imperial Origins of American Policing:
Militarization and Imperial Feedback
in the Early 20th Century1
Julian Go
Boston University
In the early 20th century, police departments across America’s cities
enhanced their infrastructural power by adopting various tactical, operational, and organizational innovations. Based upon a nested crosscity analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, including a negative binomial regression analysis of the determinants of militarization, this
study reveals that these innovations constituted an early form of militarization resulting from imperial feedback. Local police borrowed tactics, techniques, and organizational templates from America’s imperialmilitary regime that had been developed to conquer and rule foreign populations. Imperial feedback occurred as a result of imperial importers, many of them veterans of America’s imperial-military apparatus, who constructed analogies between colonial subjects abroad and racialized minorities at home. The study identi?es an early form of police militarization, reveals the imperial origins of police militarization, and offers a potentially transportable theory of imperial feedback that stands as one among other possible routes to police militarization.
INTRODUCTION
Dramatic instances of police violence against protestors have proliferated in recent years. Most have involved the use of military equipment. At Standing
Correction: This article was corrected and reposted on June 15, 2020. Due to a typesetter error, two values in table 6 and one value in table 8 were keyed incorrectly. A detailed erratum and both corrected tables will appear in the July 2020 issue. The publisher regrets the errors.
1
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the University of California, San Diego, the University of Chicago, the University of Florida, Harvard, McGill University, the University of Montreal, Stony Brook University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the
© 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0002-9602/2020/12505-0001$10.00
AJS Volume 125 Number 5 ( March 2020): 1193–1254
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American Journal of Sociology
Rock in 2016 and 2017, Native American activists faced an array of paramilitary police vehicles including BearCats, Humvees, and mine-resistant
ambush protected vehicles (MRAPs; Tolan 2017). During the Black Lives
Matter protests at Ferguson, police forces used tear gas canisters, MRAPs, and short-barreled 5.56 mm ri?es based on the military M4 carbine. These
and related incidents attest to the militarization of American policing. According to Kraska’s useful de?nition, “militarization” is “the process whereby
civilian police increasingly draw from, and pattern themselves around, the tenets of militarism and the military model.” This can involve the adoption
of “material,” “cultural,” “organizational,” and “operational” aspects of the military (Kraska 2007, p. 3).
The examples from Standing Rock and Ferguson make clear that police have indeed adopted military materials. Through a program known commonly as the “1033 Program” (referring to the section of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1997), local police departments
have acquired up to $5.4 billion worth of surplus military equipment. But police have also adopted operational, organizational, and cultural aspects
of the military. Special Weapons and Tactics units of the police (SWAT), for example, use military-style training and tactics as well as military-grade
weaponry (Kraska and Kappeler 1997). Furthermore, while Standing Rock and Ferguson highlight the use of military equipment and operations for
public order policing, militarization also impacts other activities, such as police raids on homes and surveillance using military software (ACLU
2014; Brayne 2017). Militarized forces have been involved in even the most mundane policing tasks, not just highly visible protests.
Police militarization is worth sociological analysis for a number of reasons. One is that police militarization has notable consequences. Preliminary research suggests that the use of militarized equipment, forms, and tactics increases police aggression and police killings while decreasing the
public legitimacy of policing institutions (Delehanty et al. 2017; Lawson 2018; Mummolo 2018). Additionally, the police have emerged historically
as an alternative to the military. Many European states have long had militarized police forces in the form of a national gendarmerie, such as France’s
current Gendarmerie Nationale, the Prussian gendarmerie from the 19th
American Sociological Association meetings. Bart Bonikowski, Sean Case, Wilber R. Miller, Fréderic Mérand, Christopher Muller, Jessica Simes, Stuart Schrader, Nathan Yaffe, and Nicholas Hoover Wilson provided comments or help on various parts of the article. Skyler Zu, Masanao Yajima, and Nathaniel Josephs of the Statistical Consulting Group at Boston University provided guidance and replicated the regression analyses. All errors are the sole responsibility of the author. The College of Arts and Sciences of Boston University provided funding. Elizabeth Jones and Fernanda Gutierrez Mello Vianna assisted in the research. Direct correspondence to Julian Go, Boston University, Department of Sociology, 96 Cummington Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02215. E-mail: juliango@bu.edu 1194
Imperial Origins of American Policing
century, or Italy’s carabiniere (Bayley 1975, p. 46; Gobinet 1999; Emsley
1999a; Broers 2016).2 These “state military” police are national in scope and
explicitly militaristic in function, form, and content. As direct branches of
the military, they are “armed and equipped like soldiers, stationed in barracks” (Emsley 1999b, p. 36). But the city and county police forces seen at
Ferguson and other U.S. cities manifest a putatively different model of policing: the “local civilian” or “state civilian” type. This refers to police controlled by civilian of?cials with subnational and local jurisdiction. They
are not part of the military and emerged historically in opposition to both
the state military model of policing and the army. In this sense they are
not supposed to be militarized.3
The local civilian model originates with the London Metropolitan Police,
founded in 1829, considered to be the ?rst modern local police department
in the world. The of?cials behind it felt they could no longer rely upon the
army to manage riots, strikes, and other outbreaks of public disorder and
therefore sought an alternative. They initially considered a French-style gendarmerie but dismissed it on the grounds that such a force “smacked of the
absolutism of continental states” and would be “odious and repulsive” to English citizens (Emsley 1997, p. 217; Waddington 1991, p. 125; Ellison and
Smyth 2000, p. 13). They devised the London Metropolitan Police as the
best option, thereby inventing the local civilian police. The goal was to allow the state to penetrate civil society with a legitimacy that militaristic
forces lacked, making it more acceptable to the populace (Emsley 1997,
p. 217). As the classic statement by Reith (1952, p. 20) put it, the basic idea
was to create a police system “exercised indirectly by the people, from below, upwards,” as opposed to the “despotic totalitarian police systems” represented by the French gendarmerie or the army whereby authority came
“from above, downwards.” Accordingly, the London force was not put under the control of the army but rather of civilian authorities. Patrolmen
wore uniforms, but they were designed to look different from the army.
They did not carry ?rearms, and the truncheons they had were to be hidden
from view (Miller 1977, pp. 32–33; Reiner 2000, p. 50).
2
In the United States, the National Guard or the Coast Guards come closest to the European gendarmerie model.
3
My notion of a “local civilian” or “state civilian” model draws from Emsley’s (1999a,
1999b; 2014) distinction between “state military,” “state civilian,” and “civil municipal.”
I use the term “local civilian” essentially to refer to a combination of what Emsley classi?es as “civil municipal” and “state civilian.” For our purposes, the two are similar in that
they are both opposed to the state military model. For Emsley, the distinction between
civil municipal and state civilian policing only refers to the fact that some local police
are in capital cities and therefore the national state has some control over them (e.g.,
the London Metropolitan Police), but even in his view, both are different from the military model in that they are not controlled by the military, nor are they explicitly militaristic in form and function
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America’s municipal, city, and county police forces—such as those seen
at Ferguson—have the same origins. Boston created the ?rst professionalized police department in 1838, followed by New York in 1845, and then
most cities in subsequent decades. These were all modeled after the London
Metropolitan Police, and they too were meant to be an alternative to a “tyrannical standing army” (Miller 1977, p. 17).4 Accordingly, like the London
police, they were put into the hands of civilian of?cials and had to appear
nonmilitaristic. They initially eschewed military-style uniforms (and uniforms entirely), pistols, military wares, and training (Miller 1977, pp. 35–
36, 51–52). The “democratic policing ideal in Anglo-American countries”
that “assumes a civil police force” and “a strict demarcation between the police and the military” was thereby spread throughout the United States
(McCulloch 2016).5
The militarization of the police the United States is notable, therefore, because it blurs the lines between the army, state military police, and civilian
police. In appearance and operation, the local civilian police originally
emerged as an alternative to both the state military police and the army,
but it has become increasingly like them. This presents a puzzle. Emsley
(1999a, pp. 4–5) asks how it was possible for state military and local civilian
police to coexist in most countries “side by side,” but it might also be generative to ask how and why their operations and outlooks have become more
blurred. Or if, as Bayley (1990, p. 8) contended, “the separation of the police
from the military is an important matter to examine,” it is also important to
explore their intermingling. Exactly when, how, and why do civilian police
become militarized?6
In this article I propose one answer through a study of the transformation
of local civilian policing in early 20th-century America. Historians agree
that this was a formative moment for policing. As noted, local civilian police
departments in the United States had been established in the mid-19th century, modeled after the London Metropolitan Police of 1829, but these early
police departments were notoriously inef?cient, powerless, and often corrupt (Monkkonen 1981; Harring 1983, p. 30). They were not professionalized. They focused less upon crime than upon managing public disorder
4
European states have this type too, alongside their national gendarmerie. Besides the
Gendarmerie Nationale, e.g., France’s towns and cities also have municipal police forces
and the Paris police that follow this state civilian type are modeled after the London Metropolitan Police (Emsley 1999b).
5
The issue of how these government police operated alongside private ?rms like the Pinkerton Agency in Chicago is discussed in Obert (2018).
6
The study of police militarization historically is in its infancy. Classic works on the history of policing in the United States barely refer to it and instead speak of the Progressive
Era as one of “reform” rather than militarization (e.g., Walker 1977; Monkkonen 1981;
Harring 1983). Some even claim that local police were not militarized until the advent
of SWAT units in the 1960s (Coyne and Hall 2018).
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or, at other times, providing social services (Walker 1977, pp. 3–31; Harring
1983, pp. 26–29; Monkkonen 1992, pp. 554–55; Williams 2004, p. 125). During the early 20th century, all of this changed. Known as the “reform era,”
this was when city police departments reorganized, shifted focus, and increased their capacities through a range of new organizational forms, technologies, and tactics. They centralized, professionalized, and instituted new
modes of training. They increased their power capabilities by adopting new
technologies of criminal identi?cation, intelligence units, and crime-mapping
techniques, and they innovated by creating mobile squads and mounted units.
These reforms were foundational. Through them, policing in this period
slowly changed its character from an organization primarily focused upon
regulating order—arresting people on the streets for public drunkenness or
vagrancy or doing quotidian social service work—to one aimed at suppressing crime (Monkkonen 1992). What emerged, in short, was the “modern police organization” as we know it today (Fogelson 1977; Harring 1983, p. 30;
Monkkonen 1981; Walker 1998, p. 170).
This article amasses qualitative and quantitative evidence to register
three main claims. First, the reform era marked one of the earliest instances
of police militarization. Crucial changes instituted by police reformers in
this period were in fact borrowed from the military, in effect transforming
local civilian institutions into more militaristic ones. Second, in making the
changes, police reformers did not just draw from the “military” per se but
also more precisely from America’s imperial-military regime. Many of the
innovations did not only have military origins but rather imperial and colonial origins, thereby constituting a case of imperial feedback. Finally, this
feedback and hence militarization occurred through the work of imperial
importers who were most often but not exclusively military veterans and
who typically deployed overseas methods in order to manage perceived
threats to social order from racialized minority populations.
In short, I ?nd that local civilian policing militarized in the early 20thcentury United States due to feedback from imperialism abroad conjoined
with racial analogization at home. As I will show, this analysis is transportable to other moments of militarization and cross-national cases of militarization, helping us explain when, how, and why police militarization of civil police
might occur. I begin with a brief discussion of theory, data, and methods. Subsequently I discuss America’s imperial-military regime and show that policing reforms of the early 20th century drew from that regime. Then, through a
nested analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, I explain how and why
imperial feedback—and therefore police militarization—occurred in this period. The last part of the article puts the story of militarization through imperial feedback into a broader historical and cross-national frame that allows us to see both its potential generalizability as well as how it stands as
one among other possible routes toward police militarization.
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THEORY, DATA, AND DESIGN
While state military police forces such as France’s Gendarmerie Nationale
are explicitly militarized from the outset, the question of why local civilian
police militarize remains unanswered. The present study of early 20th-century
policing in the United States yields insights into one mechanism of militarization: imperial feedback. This refers more broadly to what Aimé Césaire
(1955) originally called the “boomerang effect”: foreign intervention, overseas imperial endeavors, or colonial rule in turn redound to impact metropoles
in transformative ways. Foucault (1997, p. 103), in one of the rare moments
where he discusses colonialism, also refers to this: “Colonization, with its
techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported
European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang
effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was
brought back to the West.”7
Imperial feedback means that metropolitan and peripheral state formation, and hence the histories of metropole and colony, were not isolated.
As Adams and Pincus (2017) suggest, early modern European state formation had always been entangled and coconstituted by the colonial sphere.
Only recently have scholars begun to show how metropolitan and colonial
state formation were entangled in U.S. history as well. Frymer (2014, 2017)
and Katznelson (2002) allude to how military confrontations with Native
Americans and other western frontier dynamics shaped the federal state’s
administrative and coercive capacities. McCoy (2009, 2015) traces how
the Philippine-American War and policing in the Philippines in the war’s
aftermath returned to the United States to shape the creation of America’s
federal surveillance state. Coyne and Hall (2018, p. 2) investigate methods
of social control that were developed overseas and reveal how they have
been used at home, thereby expanding the powers of the federal government to “erode citizens’ liberties.”8 Schrader (2019) and Kuzmarov (2012)
show that not only has foreign policy impacted domestic policing and surveillance but also domestic methods have been exported abroad.
The present analysis extends this growing literature on feedback in three
key respects. First, it focuses on imperial feedback and local civilian policing. Bittner (1970, p. 15) notes that “the municipal police department has
been by far the most important way of doing police work in the United
States since the turn of the century,” but existing studies focus on how U.S.
7
This literature is extensive, but see the early discussions in Rabinow (1989) and Cooper
and Stoler (1997). Barder (2015) offers a useful overview. See also Magubane (2004), McCoy and Scarano (2009), and, for policing, McCoy (2009), among others discussed below.
8
Coyne and Hall (2018) use the term “boomerang effect,” but it was Césaire (1955) who
originated the concept to this author’s knowledge.
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foreign policy impacted America’s federal, national-level capacities such as
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (McCoy 2009). I ?nd that imperial feedback hit local policing, penetrating deep into America’s heartland.9 Second,
and more importantly, the present study identi?es and theorizes the causes
and mechanisms of imperial feedback. Unlike existing scholarship, it proposes and systematically tests a theory that speci?es when, why, and how
imperial feedback—and hence police militarization—might occur. As I will
show later, the theory highlights the role of “imperial importers” and posits
that they will import methods of social control from the colonial site when
they face domestic social ?elds that are perceived to be homologous with peripheral ?elds and thereby as they analogize domestic and peripheral populations and spaces.
This theory is induced from an analysis of the early 20th-century police
reform movement. The analysis proceeds in two stages. The ?rst stage is genealogical: I locate the origins of the police reform movement, showing that
police reformers turned to America’s imperial-military regime for models.
For this part of the analysis, sources include (1) existing secondary histories
of policing, (2) information from the annual meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP; the main police reform organization of
the time that included politicians and police chiefs from across the United
States), (3) newspaper accounts of police departments available in newspaper electronic archives, (4) government reports on policing issues and hearings of investigative commissions on policing in the period, and (5) annual
reports of police departments available online. While these sources offer insights on broader patterns across the country, other sources were consulted
to explore particular police departments. Foremost I look at the Berkeley,
California, Police Department. Berkeley is relevant because it was the leader
of the reform movement. The chief of police at Berkeley, August Vollmer,
originated many of the police reforms and helped popularize them in other
departments. Appropriately, he is widely known as “the father of modern policing” (Carte and Carte 1975; Oliver 2017).
The second part of the analysis is explanatory, disclosing the causal processes by which militarization occurred. Here I elaborate the theory of imperial feedback and mobilize qualitative and quantitative data to conduct nested
cross-case analyses (Lieberman 2005). The qualitative cross-case analysis is
based on the sources mentioned above, with additional primary qualitative
data on select cities. For the quantitative part, I conduct a regression analysis
9
Schrader (2019) offers insights on local level policing and its relationship to foreign policy but at a much later historical period. Kuzmarov’s (2012) study is most directly about
local policing in the early 20th century but is primarily interested in showing how methods are exported overseas. Coyne and Hall (2018) refer to some instances of local policing
but primarily focus on federal capacities and claim that police militarization at the local
level did not occur until later in the 20th century (pp. 104–5).
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of militarization using data on 204 cities in the early 20th century. The data
include an original database on police chiefs.
I discuss the qualitative and quantitative methods, design, and data in
more detail below. First I offer an analysis of the origins of the reform movement, beginning with an overview of America’s imperial-military regime to
more clearly see the imperial ?eld from which police reformers later drew.
AN “ARMY FOR EMPIRE”
By the end of 19th century, before the proliferation of the police reform movement, America’s imperial-military regime had become a powerful institution
in American society. By de?nition, “empire” is a transnational formation by
which political power is unequally exercised over weaker populations deemed
and treated as inferior (Go 2011). An imperial-military regime refers to the
coercive components of this larger apparatus. It refers to the coercive institutions and practices of the imperial state that create and sustain empire.
These practices include among others colonial conquest, the violent suppression of anticolonial dissent, and counterinsurgency operations.
While America’s imperial-military regime had already been built slowly
as the United States expanded westward in previous years, by the end of the
19th century it extended further a?eld (Katznelson 2002; Frymer 2017). After ?nalizing its conquest of the West, the American state seized Hawaii in
1893 and fought the Spanish empire in 1898, from which the United States
acquired the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico as of?cial colonies. The
United States also acquired Samoa, the Panama Canal Zone, and the Virgin
Islands and temporarily occupied Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic among others (Go 2011, pp. 54–59).
The military was crucial for this new empire of the late 19th and early
20th century. The solidi?cation of the western frontier required repeated
military intervention. Through the 1870s and 1880s, the army engaged in
more than 1,000 combat actions subduing ?erce resistance from Native
American tribes. These “Indian wars” constituted the vast bulk of the military’s activity in these years (Williams 1981, p. 310; Katznelson 2002; Clark
2017). In 1898, the military then extended overseas to defeat Spain and occupy
Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In the Philippines, the U.S. Army had
to subdue the formidable Philippine resistance to American sovereignty, leading to the Philippine-American War. Ending of?cially in 1902, this was America’s ?rst guerrilla war and largest protracted overseas war up to that time. It
cost some 500,000 Filipino lives and 5,000 American lives (Linn 2000).
Beyond colonial conquest, the military was also crucial for sustaining imperial rule. Military governments ruled Cuba from 1898 to 1903 and from
1906 to 1909; Puerto Rico from 1898 to 1900; and the Philippines from 1898
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Imperial Origins of American Policing
to 1902, not to mention occupying various Central American and Caribbean
countries. And because the American state did not have a proper “colonial
of?ce,” administration of the colonies and western territories was put into
the hands of the United States Department of War, the overseer of America’s
armed forces. The military and the empire were thus administratively entwined, and the military was thoroughly transformed by its imperial experience. The post–Civil War military had been comparably weak, poorly
equipped, and provincial. Even by 1898, the U.S. Army was not an “army”
in “any operational sense of that word” (Cosmas 1998, p. 14). Lacking proper
“training, equipment, and centralized structure,” it was little else than “a
large collection of companies, battalions, regiments and batteries” (Cosmas
1998, p. 14). It “was still in its infancy as a professional organization” (Long
2008, p. 4). But the imperatives of the new overseas empire prompted a series of important and long-lasting changes and innovations that later in?uenced policing.
One set of changes was at the organizational level. Prior to this period,
there had been no centralized chain of command. Rather, different bureau
chiefs in Washington, D.C., managed their own of?cers in the ?eld, and the
Department of War was little else than a series of relatively autonomous
bureaus with overlapping and sometimes con?icting roles (Kaplan 2001).
But Elihu Root, head of the Department of War (and hence of the colonies),
helped institute a series of changes. In order to make the army more ef?cient
and capable to ?ght in the Philippine-American War as well as control far?ung territories, these “Root reforms” included the Army Reorganization
Act of 1901 and the creation, in 1903, of the position of chief of staff and
the general staff corps (Clark 2017, pp. 188–96). The reforms centralized
army administration, supply, and personnel as never before and were vital
for turning the army into a powerful global apparatus (Ball 1984).
Another crucial change was professionalization. In response to inadequacies of of?cer training and military discipline revealed during the SpanishAmerican War, new military academies and colleges such as the Army War
College were created under Root’s direction (Nenninger 1978; Gabel 1997).
The new centers of learning signi?cantly expanded the training and professionalization function that had previously been ful?lled only by the School
of Application for Infantry and Cavalry at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas,
founded in 1881 (Nenninger 1978). They taught military science along with
strategy and tactics and marked a new scienti?c orientation in military leadership. Again, the point was to strengthen the military in the wake of its earlier imperial experiences and better serve the new empire (Cosmas 1998, p. 9).
Finally, the imperatives of empire also yielded innovations in military operations and tactics, amounting to a new science and practice of colonial
counterinsurgency. The military had already seen some advances in military
science and strategy, not least through the publication of the Leavenworth
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American Journal of Sociology
board manuals in 1891 that served as the army’s ?rst actual tactics manuals
(Jamieson 1994, p. 101). But it was through America’s imperial experiences
in the late 19th and early 20th century that the military ?rmly instituted and
innovated these and related operations and tactics.
One important innovation was the “open order” (or “extended order” or
“loose order”) operation. These required small mobile units or squads led
by individual initiatives of company captains and majors. Something like
these units had been initially used during the Indian wars in the 1880s (especially against the Sioux on the Plains) and by the Texas Rangers, but it
was during the Philippine-American War that they were expanded, further developed, and perfected (Birtle 2009, p. 114). In the Philippines, the
army faced Filipino guerilla units moving swiftly through a complex terrain of rivers, jungles, and mountain villages. In this context, the large-scale
cordon-and-sweep campaigns and close-order formations that had dominated the Civil War and some Indian campaigns were useless. The army thus
innovated by devising new small mobile units who could deploy rapidly,
“match the mobility of the insurrectos [insurgents],” and launch what would
later—during the Vietnam War—became better known as “reconnaissancein-force” and “search-and-destroy” missions (Linn 1991, p. 98). Open-ordered
mobile units often deployed under the cover of night, launching long-distance
expeditions to ambush or surround and surprise enemy encampments. They
required an unprecedented reliance on cavalry units and “special detachments
of mounted infantry and scouts” and “elite” forces (Birtle 2009, p. 115). The
army in the Philippines increasingly relied on such elite units as the war raged
on (Linn 2000, p. 325).
Another innovation regarded military intelligence. Again, the Philippine
experience here was seminal (Linn 1991; McCoy 2009). To survey the ostensible hordes of nonwhite Filipinos and to collect information on nationalist
activists and would-be guerillas, the army ended up forming three new services amounting to an original counterintelligence unit known as the Division
of Military Information—the very “?rst ?eld intelligence unit in its hundredyear history” (McCoy 2015, p. 7). The division created novel records-keeping
and information-gathering techniques: it established a mapping section, merged
reports and data from the army’s ?eld of?cers with the emerging local police
forces, utilized new telegraph lines constructed across rural and urban territories, and constructed “identity cards” to pro?le insurgent leaders (Bidwell
1986, pp. 63–64; Linn 1991, pp. 100–101). This information was vital for the
newly developing counterinsurgency operations. With it, mobile squads operating under open orders could better track and identify insurgent camps,
track rebel movements, and launch swift and deadly raids led by the army’s
new elite units (McCoy 2015, p. 7).
In sum, the exigencies of empire at the turn of the 20th century led to the
formation of a new imperial-military regime better oriented toward the
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Imperial Origins of American Policing
needs of colonial conquest and counterinsurgency. This was an “army for
empire” that because of its imperial experience was signi?cantly different
from the military that had fought in the Civil War (Cosmas 1998; Birtle
2009). And it was through these experiences that it innovated on multiple
fronts, eventually becoming the globally oriented, highly capable, and modern force that later entered World War I (United States Marine Corps [1940]
1990, p. 2; Kaplan 2001). In many ways, this “military” was synonymous
with empire.10 This is why, in this period, the military must be thought of
as part of an imperial-military regime, rather than just a “military” in itself.
FROM EMPIRE TO POLICING
The imperial-military regime was not only an important dimension of America’s extraterritorial affairs, it also impacted a variety of spheres on the domestic front, including policing.11 As police reformers sought to transform
their police departments in the early 20th century, one of the institutions from
which they drew their inspiration was the new imperial-military regime itself.
If we use Kraska’s (2007) categories for analyzing militarization, we can say
that police reformers drew upon the “organizational” and “cultural” aspects
of America’s new imperial-military regime, as well as the “operational” and
“tactical” components of its counterinsurgency operations in the colonies.
The so-called police reform movement was thus the product of imperial feedback: the ope