Table Of Content

Police A Field Guide David Correia is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico. Tyler Wall is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Police A Field Guide David Correia and Tyler Wall First published by Verso 2018 © David Correia and Tyler Wall 2018 All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-014-8 ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-014-8 (US EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-014-8 (UK EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Arnhem by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh, Scotland Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Contents Introduction: Copspeak and the False Promise of Police Reform 1. Weaponology: Technologies and Tactics of Police Violence Gun Throw-Down Weapon Taser Tear Gas Handcuffs K-9 Racial Profiling Stop and Frisk Rough Ride Body Cavity Search Curfew Rape Lynching Starlight Tour Flashlight Nightstick Chokehold Lapel Camera Police Helicopter Traffic Stop Checkpoint Pain Compliance 2. The Oath: Core Values of Police Private Property Order Security Pacification Law Crime Violence War Force Jurisdiction The Badge Thin Blue Line Professionalization 3. Models of Policing: How the Police Are Organized and Defended Police Gangs Community Policing Red Squads CRASH COINTELPRO Officer Friendly SWAT Militarization Police Uniform Slave Patrol Rent-a-Cop Police Oversight Police Union Police Reform 4. Using the Force: How Police Impose Order Search Patrol The Beat Investigation Discretion Predictive Policing CompStat Ghetto Gentrification Broken Windows Vagrancy Interrogation Good Cop, Bad Cop Pursuit Crowds Police Brutality Arrest Plain View Asset Forfeiture Testilying Cop 5. Copspeak: How the Police See the World Threat Emergency Bad Apple Deterrence Disproportionate Ferguson Effect Furtive Movements Justified No Humans Involved (NHI) Noncompliance Officer-Involved Shooting The Public Reasonable Suspicion Unarmed Use-of-Force Continuum Criminology Epilogue: On a World Beyond Police Introduction: Copspeak and the False Promise of Police Reform Police violence is not a new phenomenon. Nearly fifty years before Ferguson, Missouri erupted in anger at the police killing of Mike Brown in 2014, James Baldwin wrote that Black communities in the United States are “policed like occupied territory.” Fifty years before police demanded Black obedience to mostly white cops during anti-police violence protests in Baltimore, Milwaukee, Baton Rouge and dozens of other cities, Baldwin wrote in 1966 that “the law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.” Nearly fifty years before Charlotte, North Carolina police refused to release the video of Keith Scott’s killing because, as the cops claimed, they needed to finish their investigation of their own killing, Baldwin wrote, “I have witnessed and endured the brutality of the police many more times than once—but, of course, I cannot prove it. I cannot prove it because the Police Department investigates itself, quite as though it were answerable only to itself.” Fifty years before waves of police in riot gear used tear gas and truncheons to protect white-owned businesses in Minneapolis and New York from Black Lives Matter activists, Baldwin wrote that police are “present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover—even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.”