Sociology Annual Lecture – Policing Empires

Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US

Dr. Julian Go

The police response to protests erupting on America’s streets in recent years has made the militarization of policing painfully transparent. Yet, properly demilitarizing the police requires a deeper understanding of its historical development, causes, and social logics. This talk offers a postcolonial historical sociology of police militarization in Britain and the United States to aid that effort. It theorizes the racialized imperiality of modern policing, showing that police militarization has occurred since the very founding of modern policing in the nineteenth century into the present, and that it is an effect of the “imperial boomerang.”