THE GEOPOLITICS OF AMERICAN POLICING.

AuthorLanham, Andrew
PositionAnnual Michigan Law Review Book Review Edition

BADGES WITHOUT BORDERS: HOW GLOBAL COUNTERINSURGENCY TRANSFORMED AMERICAN POLICING. By Stuart Schrader. Oakland: University of California Press. 2019. Pp. xi, 393. Cloth, $85; paper, $29.95

INTRODUCTION

On July 9, 2016, Jonathan Bachman, a freelance photographer for Reuters, snapped a photograph of Ieshia Evans, a nurse from Pennsylvania, as she confronted the police at a protest march in Baton Rouge. (1) Evans and the other demonstrators were there to protest the killing of Alton Sterling, a Black man who was shot by the police while he was pinned to the ground. (2) Bachman's picture, titled Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge, shows Evans, tall, serene, and bespectacled in a flowing black dress, being handcuffed by two police officers who are clad in heavy riot gear and helmets, looking for all the world like "storm-trooper[s]" dropped in from some dystopian sci-fi future. (3) The officers, one journalist noted, "look better prepared for a war than a peaceful protest"--better suited for a combat zone abroad than for the classic democratic practice of political demonstration here at home. (4) The photo graph became an instant icon, a symbol of both the militarization of modern American policing and the moral force of Black Lives Matter protesters demanding criminal justice reform. (5)

The picture resonated, too, with deep strands of American visual memory. It echoes the iconic photograph of the civil rights activist Gloria Richardson audaciously pushing away a National Guardsman's bayonet in 1963, or the photo of the anti-Vietnam War protester Jan Rose Kasmir offering a flower to bayonet-wielding National Guardsmen at the Pentagon in 1967. (6) Like those two earlier pictures, Bachman's photograph distills into a single image the long and tangled histories of militarism, domestic policing, and racial subordination that have shaped American life. Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge captures the racial violence of modern American domestic and foreign policy alike as it critiques the deployment of excessive force at home and abroad.

Since the beginning of the War on Terror in 2001, and especially since the rise of Black Lives Matter protests in the 2010s, critics have argued both that the War on Terror has been driven by racist ideologies and that domestic police departments have become unnecessarily militarized and have used military-style force against domestic political dissent. (7) In 2014, for example, the ACLU published a report entitled War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing, which criticizes post-9/11 federal programs that provide surplus military weapons, vehicles, and body armor to local cops. (8) Politicians from across the political spectrum have introduced the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act to block such transfers. (9) Taking a longer-term view, the historian Nikhil Pal Singh argues that the War on Terror is inextricably tied to America's past as both a colonial power that has subjugated people of color abroad and a white supremacist society here at home. (10) "[F]oreign policy and domestic politics," he writes, have "develop[ed] in a reciprocal relationship," producing "mutually reinforcing approaches to managing social conflict"--similar state practices to govern racially stratified societies at home and away. (11) Singh especially criticizes the use of military-grade equipment by domestic police forces waging a "war on drugs" that has jailed millions of people "deemed dangerous to the U.S. body politic," the "majority black and brown, and poor." (12) The Movement for Black Lives succinctly expressed this critique in its Platform statement in 2016, linking excessive domestic policing with aggressive American foreign policy and arguing that "militarism[] and white supremacy know no borders." (13) The Platform consequently condemned both "anti-Black racism" and "war," "demand[ing] an end to the wars against Black people," wherever they occur. (14)

Despite the clear threads connecting domestic policing with military hegemony, however, we tend not to see the excesses of the modern American carceral state in relation to their wider geopolitical context. (15) The discourse of criminal justice reform tends, instead, to focus on specific legal changes that could occur domestically, such as the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences or bail reform. (16) While the Movement for Black Lives' Platform statement does depict a larger ideological struggle in which racist foreign and domestic policy are two sides of the same coin, that view remains outside the mainstream policy-reform conversation.

A new book by Stuart Schrader (17) begins to fill in the gap. In the polemically titled Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, Schrader reconstructs two histories of Cold War America and shows how they surprisingly intertwine: first, the U.S. national security state's efforts to train foreign police forces in order to control events abroad and, second, the evolution of domestic policing within the United States (pp. 2-5). Drawing on extensive archival research, Schrader argues that from the 1950s to the 1970s, the United States exported tactics of police repression to newly independent postcolonial nations, establishing a form of neo-imperialism in which America exercised power at a distance by training foreign cops to suppress leftist movements (pp. 4-6, 11). Then, in the late 1960s, the United States reimported those techniques to be used here, on the domestic scene, training and funding local cops to control political demonstrations, infiltrate radical organizations, and stop and frisk minority populations (pp. 2-6, 210, 270-71). Precisely the same politicians, police experts, and government agencies, Schrader shows, built both the foreign police-assistance program and the domestic "War on Crime" that was launched in the late 1960s and that led to modern mass incarceration (pp. 3, 9). The structural racism of our contemporary carceral state emerged hand in hand with the Cold War geopolitics of the national security state. (18)

Schrader's fascinating history is an important resource for anyone concerned about the shape and scope of American policing and state power today. It tells us that modern American policing has a fundamentally geopolitical genealogy. As a result, criminal justice reformers should approach domestic policy issues as part of a broader project of global justice. While Schrader's book seems pitched mainly for an audience of historians and social theorists, this Book Notice seeks to bring its insights to bear on legal academic discussions of criminal justice and national security, too. In Part I, I recount Schrader's twin histories of overseas police assistance and domestic police reform. Then, in Part II, I argue that this history has crucial implications for legal studies, law reform, and grassroots political mobilization today, as it shows that our analyses of mass incarceration and the national security state have to intertwine. Finally, I draw on my own archival research into the antiwar and civil rights movements to contend that the history of progressive protest politics provides a dynamic model of precisely the kind of capacious, multifaceted activism and analysis that Schrader's book aims to inspire.

  1. EXPORTING AND REIMPORTING POLICE REPRESSION

    In July 1967, amid the series of urban revolts known as the "long, hot summer," with the smoke still rising over Detroit, Lyndon Johnson took to the airwaves to lay out a plan to reestablish order. (19) Shortly afterward, his advisor Walter Rostow wrote to him, comparing Johnson's new domestic policy proposals with the counterinsurgency tactics that the Johnson Administration was already employing abroad (pp. 42-43). "At home your appeal is for law and order as the framework for economic and social progress," Rostow wrote. "Abroad we fight in Vietnam to make aggression unprofitable while helping the people of Vietnam[--]and all of Free Asia--build a future of economic and social progress. The equivalent of domestic law and order on the world scene is that nations forego the use of violence...." (p. 43; alteration in original, citation omitted). Rostow was apparently unembarrassed to compare the government's response to citizens expressing their outrage in the streets of Detroit with the brutal guerrilla warfare being waged in the jungles of Vietnam. But he did have a point about the strategic parallels between domestic "law and order" politics and Cold War geopolitical maneuvering; in both arenas, the U.S. federal government sought to partner with local police forces, either in the states or abroad, as the front lines to repress unrest. (20)

    This shift to a law-and-order mindset transformed America. By 1968, Johnson's law-and-order approach had culminated in his declaration of a War on Crime and the passage of the watershed Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. (21) Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon, who campaigned on a platform of "law and order," then declared a War on Drugs that one of his advisors later admitted was designed to "disrupt" and repress "the antiwar left and black" political activists. (22) The result has been an enormous expansion of the U.S. prison system, which now amounts to a novel way to govern the population, what critics call the carceral state. (23)

    Badges Without Borders argues that Rostow's comparison of domestic law-and-order politics with counterinsurgency in Vietnam was neither a historical accident nor a felicitous simile that Rostow happened upon. Rather, Schrader contends, Rostow and a host of other midcentury technocrats carefully crafted both American military hegemony and the War on Crime as interrelated projects to manage racially divided societies and to control dissent (pp. 3-6, 9). Consequently, although the 1960s finally saw the achievement of formal racial equality under the law by way of the Civil Rights Act...

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