There’s an evergreen relevance to books about the nature of policing in the United States and its history in racist vigilante violence. When I bought Schrader’s book in late 2019, I was thinking it would be an insightful read on the history of policing in this country with a particular focus on the beginning of Black Lives Matter as a social movement. That’s not quite what this book addresses. Still, Schrader tells an informative story through his research into connections between the professionalization of U.S. policing that came about as a result of military occupations overseas. Given the recent deployments of National Guard members in U.S. cities, Schrader's is a useful text that can help make sense of how this situation came to be.
Because I am an asshole, I emailed Schrader about his book after I read it in the summer of 2020 to say I am also a former punk zine editor who has a Ph.D. Who cares? I thought it would be cool to tell him I thought of AGENT ORANGE (DEN) and NEGATIVE APPROACH after reading the intro paragraph to his book’s conclusion. (It mentions The Exorcist stairs.) Not only that—I also told him he had misspelled counterinsurgency on one page. I’m really helpful, you see. He graciously (and within a day!) replied that getting people to listen to those two bands was the precise reason he wrote the book—tongue firmly in cheek, I am sure. Like I said, I am great at making friends.
Overall, Schrader's text discusses the racist roots of U.S. policing; how law enforcement became professionalized overseas; how law enforcement became professionalized and enmeshed domestically; how everyday experiences complicated police reform efforts overseas; how policing lessons from overseas came back to the U.S. in the form of “tear gas,” riot control, and SWAT teams; how counterinsurgent policing informed “broken windows” policing in the U.S.; and how the overseas counterinsurgent reformers came back to the U.S. to continue implementing counterinsurgent police practices on the streets of this country.
On the “fun fact” side of things, I learned that 911 did not exist as an emergency response number until 1968, five years after a similar service debuted in Venezuela. If you want a more succinct idea of the book’s thesis than the above road map paragraph, here you go: “Training, technologies, and tactics for emergency situations grew from overseas counterinsurgency and became integrated into everyday policing in the United States, recalibrating racialized social control” (p. 23). What does that mean? Could he put it to you any simpler? How’s this? “Keystone Kops could not catch Communists” (p. 14). That’s about it, really. And don’t get it twisted—police have always been militarized. No system works.
(This review originally appeared in a slightly different version in issue #2 of the zine Anxiety's False Promise, published in February 2023.)
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