Introduction to the Special Issue: A Critical Theory of Police Power in the Twenty-First Century.

Barely a day goes by without the police being in the news. In part this is because of the profound impact of campaigns such as Black Lives Matter, United Friends and Families, the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance, Police Spies Out of Lives, the Guardian newspaper's ongoing report called "Counting the Dead," and the meticulous work of organizations such as the Network for Police Monitoring and Inquest. The work of these groups and bodies has in recent years opened the police institution to intense scrutiny and sustained public criticism. In that sense, it might appear that we live in a time of profound crisis for the police institution, a turning point in police history which might see the kind of police reforms many have been demanding.

A quick glance at the history books tells us otherwise. Open any history of policing and one finds the same stories over and over again. Police brutality? Police torture? Police killings? Police discrimination? Police corruption? Far from being recent developments, these have been integral to the police power since its inception; they are what the police do. Far from being the outcome of a few "bad apples," as the liberal press would have us believe, they are the very nature of the orchard. Because of this, the same history books tell us time and time again of crisis after crisis, where the police come under the kind of scrutiny and criticism which makes it feel like a turning point. And yet what happens follows a pattern: a reform here, an adjustment there, a pruning of the most rotten of the apples, and on we go, round and round, with more of the same, so that each and every crisis turns out to be a historical turning point where history forgets to turn. It is abundantly clear that the kind of police reform demanded by some is not the solution. It may sometimes be a solution to a particular local problem, but will never be the solution.

Our starting point in this special issue lies elsewhere. It also puts us at odds with the way police power is discussed in police science and criminology departments, the usual home for such discussion. The massive expansion of university departments, institutes, and research centers devoted to research and teaching in policing is truly dizzying, as is the plethora of journals, books, conferences and courses generated by them. Less dizzying is the range of laughably predictable questions that they ask: what increases police efficiency, what are the right police numbers, what makes for police professionalism, what will improve police performance, how might the police best relate to the public, how might we reduce police violence, how many bobbies on the beat? Each question leads in its own way to what is, for police science and criminology, the ultimate question: how can we make the police work best? The necessity of the police power is taken for granted; all that remains is for a doffing of scholarly caps and an offering of the very support and knowledge on which the police power insists. Any criticism of the police power, as far as criticism is permitted, is always already liberal and always already at pains to defend the existence of the police power as such. It is for this very reason that those departments, institutes, and centers are generally welcomed by the police themselves. How better to verify the need for the police power's very existence than to have all those academics thinking through that power's minor difficulties?

The questions that guide our thinking here are somewhat different. They are questions that attempt to think outside and against that dreary cycle of "professional engagement" and "academic impact," but they are also attached to a political analysis that demands that we think beyond police...