How does social science insulate police from social movements’ demand for abolition? We explore this through a content analysis of policing social science research funded by Arnold Ventures, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Institute of Justice published from 2011 to 2022 (N = 143 studies). Our mixed method content analysis revealed what we call “Academic Copaganda,” or studies contesting social movement claims by authors (1) masking their conflicts of interest, or (2) espousing police epistemology. Although Academic Copaganda comprised 20% of studies in the sample, they received most media mentions after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd. We conclude by discussing our contributions to legal scholarship on police legitimacy and empirical critical race theory.

Recent years have seen the development of a range of approaches concerned with theorizing and empirically demonstrating the significance of “transboundary entanglements” – patterns of connections between and across social sites. This work, spanning disciplines from sociology to international relations, and including subfields from postcolonial scholarship to global history, seeks to transcend the methodological nationalism associated with much preexisting historical social science by examining how, and with what effect, transboundary entanglements are formed and transformed over time. To date, however, the rich theoretical and substantive contributions made by these approaches have not been matched by comparable attention to the methodological principles and transposable procedures that can be used to analyze transboundary entanglements. This article contributes to this task. We make the case for a principle we call “global methodological relationalism” and explore how this principle can be operationalized through a three-step procedure: first, track relations across a boundary; second, follow these relations over time and across cases to establish variation; and third, provide an explanation of this variation. We highlight sites of overlap and contrast with existing methods for case selection, tracing historical processes, and making causal claims in small-N research, and establish the ways in which a “global historical sociology” oriented around “global methodological relationalism” can assess the significance of “transboundary entanglements.”

This article examines the history of Haitian-owned freighters that have been trading between Haiti and the Miami River since the 1970s, how this shipping economy became racialized in ways that marked it and the river with a “threatening” Haitian Blackness, and how local government agencies, real estate developers, and law enforcement officials worked to remake the aesthetics of the river as something other than Haitian and Black. Projects to re-racialize the riverway played with the spurious surface-and-subsurface spatial logic of racial discourses more generally—that is, the mistaken but widely-held belief that visible, physical markers of race reveal hidden capacities and propensities. Policing that pushed Haitian commerce into an economy of containerization—a race- and class-marked shipping technology on the river—allowed the Haiti trade to “pass” as non-Haitian on a gentrifying waterway. Law enforcement programs that seized and sank Haitian freighters to create artificial reefs off the Florida coast bluewashed the river’s surface and its ethnoracially coded, “polluting” vessels by transforming them into subsurface, “White” recreational ecologies. These processes reveal how politically fraught contests over racialization recruit layered material environments as part of larger projects of policing, re-racialization, and urban renewal. In exploring this history, the article pushes against arguments from some quarters for a “post-critical” turn by demonstrating that reflexive critique, with its focus on the hidden and the submerged, remains necessary for grasping the ways racialization processes operate through structures of material and discursive layering.

Following the al-Qassam Brigade breach of the “Iron Wall” barrier, Muslim Americans participated in protest movements across the United States in support of Palestinian liberation. Many of the Muslim American youth involved in such spaces of have drawn on religion to advance the issue of Palestine in U.S. urban centers, such as Los Angeles. However, instead of invoking those iterations of American Islam emerging from West or South Asian communities, protestors have turned to Black Islam to forge an internationalist politics of solidarity. This essay examines events held in the aftermath of 10/7 in solidarity with Palestine at Islah, a predominantly Black American mosque located in South Central LA, to consider how Muslim Americans engage with Islam as an ethical and political site from which to launch critiques against Zionism and US imperialism. Specifically, it probes how Black Islam can be best understood as Internationalist or Third World Islam, which deems coalition-building with non-Muslims to advocate for the oppressed in the US and the Global South an Islamic virtue. Attending to invocations of Malcolm X, I document how Muslim Americans are increasingly looking to Black radicalisms by way of Islam to establish a revolutionary politics that links the dismantling of policing at home to decolonization abroad, most notably in Palestine.

The end of the civil war, the fall of the Italian Social Republic, the allied occupation and the gradual transition to the new Italian Republic not only set Italy on the path to democracy, but also gradually gave Italians access to a new public space. This article proposes to revisit the classic question of the legacy of Fascism by looking at the question of space and the difficult construction of a genuine democratic space. During the ventennio, opponents were largely denied access to common spaces, both symbolically and physically. The article raises the question of violence and the exclusive appropriation of space, showing that the representations and practices inherited from Fascism did not disappear overnight. But these practices of space were not always violent: by looking at aspects that are often neglected (graffiti, manifestos, noises and singing), the aim is to show that the transition took time and was sometimes complicated, despite the political leaders of the Italian Republic claiming to have opened up a completely new era.

Quantifying the causal effects of race is one of the more controversial and consequential endeavors to have emerged from the causal revolution in the social sciences. The predominant view within the causal inference literature defines the effect of race as the effect of race perception and commonly equates this effect with “disparate treatment” racial discrimination. If these concepts are indeed equivalent, the stakes of these studies are incredibly high as they stand to establish or discredit claims of discrimination in courts, policymaking circles and public opinion. This paper interrogates the assumptions upon which this enterprise has been built. We ask: what is a perception of race, a perception of, exactly? Drawing on a rich tradition of work in critical race theory and social psychology on racial cognition, we argue that perception of race and perception of other decision-relevant features of an action situation are often co-constituted; hence, efforts to distinguish and separate these effects from each other are theoretically misguided. We conclude that empirical studies of discrimination must turn to defining what constitutes just treatment in light of the social differences that define race.

Latin American governments are increasingly adopting mano dura initiatives to combat gangs, organized crime, and insecurity. While mano dura has been a concept of increasing empirical interest, there seems to be limited conceptual clarity about the wide spectrum of strategies developed to combat crime and associated fear. This article proposes a definition of mano dura that has three different dimensions, each of them containing specific elements. The form of mano dura depends on formal, informal, and rhetorical practices. Drawing on 46 scholarly works in the social sciences, we develop our definition anchored in the knowledge of Latin American policing strategies, contributions on responses to crime in the region, and the conceptual development literature. With the purpose of supplementing our effort to standardize the usage of the term with the need to retain a degree of conceptual differentiation, we also offer a stylized model to better classify policing strategies in Latin America. In our stylized model, the numerous ways policies and narratives as well as their implementation (or not) interact can be grouped into four broad categories: full mano dura, institutional mano dura, performative mano dura, and covert mano dura.

This paper analyses the institutional incentives and constraints of the Black Mouth Society – the traditional police of the pre-colonial Mandan and Hidatsa tribes – to understand how it successfully maintained social order without abusing power. The Black Mouth Society was a fraternal organization of middle-aged men that monitored and enforced rules created by the village council and chiefs. Two categories of institutions ensured reliable policing. First, on the front end, a long probationary period and system of unanimous consent facilitated the selection of reputable men who would wield policing power responsibly, reducing the chance of predation. However, individual Black Mouths occasionally abused their power. Therefore, on the back end, public communication created common knowledge, leading to social sanctions in the form of shame and restitution that punished abuses and limited further abuse. Thus, well-functioning self-governance, including reliable policing, is possible without a centralized state, as these tribes have demonstrated.

Sanctuary cities define themselves as metropoles that refuse to share information, personnel, and facilities with federal immigration authorities to police immigrants. While research suggests that sanctuary cities contest the criminalization of migration, a growing literature depicts how these urban sanctuaries could, in practice, perpetuate hierarchies and exclusionary politics against noncitizens. Yet, most of these studies conceive of urban sanctuary as local policies designed to challenge federal power and, thus, fail to fully capture how sanctuary policies could actually rely on the criminalization of migration to govern cities’ political problems. Drawing upon 1,900 pages of archival materials and 100 newspaper articles, this article takes the case of Chicago to study how and why the urban sanctuary expands immigrants’ rights while reinforcing policing with punitive implications for Latino “undeserving” noncitizens. As a form of racialized governance, I argue that Chicago’s sanctuary policies activate a set of punitive exceptions that—in response to distinct political urgencies—allow law and immigration enforcement to converge and control Latino undocumented workers, “criminals,” and “gangs.” This study not only challenges the premise that sanctuary cities necessarily resist federal power but also illustrates how they could strengthen the legitimacy of the state and racialized police power.

Prior scholarship has established that controlling space is central to policing, while highlighting various ways in which this form of social control can be racialized. Extending this work, we advance a theory on the racialized control of space that predicts a higher level of police stops and lower standards of suspicion along neighborhood racial boundaries, the areas where racial composition changes between adjacent neighborhoods. Our theoretical argument sheds light on the selective enforcement of law and order in these transitional spaces, which is a form of racialized spatial social control. Integrating data from New York City’s Stop, Question, and Frisk program from 2008 to 2012 with extensive neighborhood measures, our analyses reveal that White neighborhoods along boundaries experienced substantially elevated levels of police stops even after conditioning on a wide array of potential confounders. This relationship is partially mediated by elevated crime along neighborhood racial boundaries. Still, a sizable direct effect persists, indicative of the racialized social control of spaces. Further, the police tended to require less suspicion before deciding to conduct stops in White neighborhoods along racial boundaries, but only for Black and Hispanic suspects. Implications for the study of race and policing, law and society, and urban and racial inequality are discussed.

Monism and pluralism are not only used to describe the ways in which international law becomes part of a domestic legal system but can also be applied to scholarship that seeks to explain the messiness of discrimination. According to Sophia Moreau's pluralist theory, the wrongfulness of discrimination can be summarized as three types of treatment: subordination, restriction, and exclusion. In this contribution, I will explore the role that power plays in her theory; while power is explicitly discussed in relation to subordination, it is less apparent from restriction and exclusion. However, as I will argue, power is a crucial element underpinning all forms of discrimination and all protected grounds.

Emergencies, such as natural disasters, wars and terrorist attacks, are known to have important effects on police–community relations and, specifically, on public attitudes toward the police. At the same time, little is known about what happens to public sentiments over time in prolonged emergencies. Similarly, it is unclear if different types of attitudes follow a similar trajectory or if they “behave” differently. The present study examines general and pandemic-specific attitudes toward the police over the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Israel, using data from a community panel survey (n = 535) carried out in its first three peaks. We found a statistically significant deterioration in all types of attitudes in the first six months of the study, followed by stabilization in general attitudes. Interestingly, some emergency-specific attitudes followed a different path and demonstrated consistent deterioration throughout the study period. These findings contribute to our theoretical understanding of police–community relations in emergencies and bear practical implications for policing emergencies.

This article critically examines reasons for the persistent use of states of emergency (SOEs) as a tool of crime control in Jamaica and risks associated with normalising these measures in small, low-capacity, competitive democracies in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). We attend to the question of permanent SOEs as an issue of law and certain policing methods becoming normalised. This differs from scholars who think about the use of permanent SOEs as suspension of law or executive rule and make a clear distinction between law and violence and normalcy and emergency. Our findings show that persistent usage of SOEs in Jamaica reflects the incapacity of the state to control violent crime as well as its effort to strengthen its coercive capabilities and compensate for the ineffectiveness of the police. It is also a response to public demand for SOE policing. State strengthening is a necessary condition for a more peaceful and law-abiding society but is also a carrier of risks of democratic degeneration via rights-disregarding policing. Nonetheless, we have seen authoritarian management of crime without descent into authoritarianism, in general, and strong boundary-marking and patrolling by some state-oversight institutions that enjoy the support of civil society.