This book 's radical theory of police argues that the police demand for order is a class order and a racialized and patriarchal order, by arguing that the police project, in order to fabricate and defend capitalist order,must patrol an imaginary line between society and nature, it must transform nature into inert matter made available for accumulation. Police don 't just patrol the ghetto or the Indian reservation, the thin blue line doesn 't just refer to a social order, rather police announce a general claim to domination--of labor and of nature.
Police and police violence are modes of environment-making. This edited volume argues that any effort to understand racialized police violence is incomplete without a focus on the role of police in constituting and reinforcing patterns of environmental racism.
David Correia is a Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Properties of Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2013), co-author with Tyler Wall of Police: A Field Guide (Verso, 2018), and co-author with Nick Estes, Melanie Yazzie, and Jennifer Denetdale of Red Nation Rising Nation: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation (PM Press, 2021). He is a co-founder of AbolishAPD, a research and mutual aid collective in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Tyler Wall is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the coauthor with David Correia of Police: A Field Guide.
Publication date: October 5, 2021
"In Police: A Field Guide, incisively cuts through the ‘copspeak’ all around us—the language of policing that turns cattle prods into ‘non-lethal pain compliance’ and state-sanctioned sexual assault into a ‘body-cavity search.’ With this edited collection of new essays, Correia and Tyler take us deeper still. As Violent Order brilliantly elucidates, policing is not only racist and dehumanizing—it is world making, a way of fabricating capitalist racial fictions about nature and human nature. Violent Order illuminates the very nature of policing, which makes it essential reading for moving us from reform to abolition." —Naomi Murakawa, author, The First Civil Right
"This book serves as an antidote to a range of contemporary tropes that increasingly fetishise forms of punitive-paternalism...The book also serves as a vaccine against the orthodoxy of the law-and-order mythology that has colonised almost all areas of culture and politics across the globe." —Erasmus Research
