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The Boundaries of Twenty-first-Century Policing

Review products

Cheng, Tony. The Policing Machine: Enforcement, Endorsements, and the Illusion of Public Input. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024
Phelps, Michelle. The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024
Sierra-Arévalo, Michael. The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2024

Daanika Gordon
Daanika Gordon*
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Tufts University, Medford, MA, United States
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Three new books by sociologists—The Policing Machine by Tony Cheng, The Minneapolis Reckoning by Michelle Phelps, and The Danger Imperative by Michael Sierra-Arévalo—offer us a view into the state of US policing leading up to and following the racial reckoning of 2020. I read these books together through the lens of boundary work, examining what they tell us about the various projects that seek to maintain, expand, or change police jurisdiction over the production of public safety. Collectively, these books suggest that the police work to preserve and extend their extant role and power. Meanwhile, boundary work through movement mobilization and political systems has aimed to contain policing through law and policy, shrink policing within municipal service systems, and replace policing through community-led models of safety. These projects point us toward important areas of inquiry in efforts to understand whether and how policing can change.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , November 2024 , pp. 2547 - 2564
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

The author thanks the authors of the books under review for sharing their important work.

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