Stuart Schrader, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing
| Date | 01 October 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520915757 |
| Author | Marisol LeBrón |
| Published date | 01 October 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
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system’s inability to solve the crises it creates” . . . to shrink the state’s capacity for
violence”. (pp. 169–170)
Abolition is a promising antidote to how policing and security make emancipatory
ways of thinking and inhabiting the world impossible, politically unimaginable—
obvious things. In Camden, McQuade explains how the routine work of policing
maintains particular social relations that keep fifteen percent of all buildings
vacant . . . with no connection to the possibility of responding to the needs of the
cities’ 600 homeless people through this surplus housing. “Mass supervision by the
kinder gentler ‘social police’”, he writes, “would not be the radical break that these
movements demand. Instead, the substantive concern must be how to exorcise
police power and the prose of pacification from social life” (p. 173). One of
McQuade’s key contributions marks how policing takes shape through decarcera-
tion: warrant sweeps, compliance checks, chronic offender initiatives, saturation
patrols, human rights compliant policing all “extend police power deeper into
criminalized communities, subsume probation and parole within policing, and
place police power at the core of mass supervision” (p. 102).
Once we get the risks, the histories, the ceaseless and continuous convergent
power of policing, then we must move to envision an otherwise. Hopefully,
McQuade’s work takes off right here . . . what set of social relations must converge
in order for the abolition of fusion centers, policing, the carceral state, and racial
capital to materialize?
Michelle Brown
University of Tennessee, USA
ORCID iD
Michelle Brown
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7838-7696
Stuart Schrader, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency
Transformed American Policing, University of California Press: Berkeley,
2019; 416 pp. ISBN: 9780520295629, $34.95 (pbk), $85 (hbk)
A slew of recent efforts at police reform in the United States have sought to
demilitarize the police. The sight of police armed with military-grade weapons
and technology conducting drug raids, evicting residents, and breaking up peaceful
protests has become increasingly commonplace. Policymakers and liberal activists
have called on law enforcement...
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