Overview: policing protest and youth.

• Author: Shank, Gregory

THE YEAR 2008 MARKED THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDING OF THE FEDERAL Bureau of Investigation. In this issue, Peter Conolly-Smith tells the story of the FBI before J. Edgar Hoover became director in 1924 of the Bureau of Investigation, as it was then called. Hoover inherited, perfected, and passed on its surveillance methods to contemporary practitioners of domestic spying. Aided by emergency legislation passed during World War I, this was the largest effort in U.S. history to clamp down on dissent, silence protest, and incarcerate radicals. Methods included wire-tapping, the use of informants, and the monitoring of mail, the latter with the cooperation of the Postmaster General and the Post Office Department's Solicitor General, an operation Conolly-Smith compares to more recent forms of data-mining and communications surveillance, break-ins into suspects' homes and offices, and the retroactive legalization of illegal surveillance programs. Legislation authorizing domestic surveillance passed by a pliant Congress during wartime and national crisis often remain on the books long after the war or crisis has passed. The Bush-Cheney war on terrorism, with its boundless Orwellian timeframe, warrantless searches, and wiretapping programs that epitomized its extra-constitutional prosecution, has been deemphasized by the Obama administration, but it nonetheless supports renewing three provisions of the Patriot Act due to expire at the end of 2009, despite objections from liberal and conservative groups regarding excessive governmental authority to intrude into Americans' private lives. The American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes extension, characterized the administration's position as "a mixed bag," and hopes the next version of the Patriot Act will contain important safeguards concerning the collecting of international communications and specifically bar surveillance of protected First Amendment activities such as peaceful protests or religious assembly.

This issue contains two views on how globalization affects policing practices in the United States, including the policing of protest and of inner-city youth. Stephen Hill and Randall Beget argue that "paramilitarization" of U.S. security represents the convergence of two trends, with the police becoming more militarized (e.g., Special Weapons and Tactics units) and the U.S. military increasingly taking on police functions. The rapidity with which this trend is progressing, Hill and Beger argue, must be reversed before it reaches a threshold already crossed by the heavily militarized Israeli National Police. Paramilitary forces have often been historically synonymous with political repression and are generally undemocratic and unaccountable. Militarization of policing is a global trend since all states operating in the globalized neoliberal economy respond to the same pressures. However, U.S. support for foreign paramilitary police forces and paramilitary police units abroad has intensified this process. A blurring of traditional distinctions between military/ police, war/law enforcement, and internal/external security, the authors argue, is a product of globalization. As criminal and social issues such as drug trafficking, illegal immigration, and organized crime have become increasingly transnational enterprises, they have been subsumed under the mantle of counterterrorism. Yet the use of heightened national security threats to justify militarization of policing first emerged in the late 1970s...