Abstract
On 4 June 2020, the US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper took to the Pentagon briefing room podium to comment on the use of military force in controlling the nation-wide protests that shook the US following the violent killing of George Floyd on 25 May 2020. The media mostly focused on Esper’s opposition to invoking the Insurrection Act, hence his distance from President Trump’s wish to employ the army domestically. Lost in the fascination with the ‘revolt of the generals’, in the midst of the most intense uprising across the US cities since the Black uprisings of the 1960s, was Esper’s other comment on the National Guard’s conduct in the event they are needed on the ground: ‘we do it with utmost skill and professionalism’. Esper’s appeal to professionalism appears to contradict the ongoing militarised scenes of the police and National Guard forces on the streets of the US cities. Badges without Borders addresses this apparent contradiction.
Stuart Schrader, a lecturer at the Department of Sociology and the associate director of the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship at Johns Hopkins University, documents how the US police has become increasingly professionalised through the introduction of a centralised command, standardised training, communication technology, specialised divisions, crowd control techniques, etc. He takes readers back to the mid-twentieth century and the cold war period, as he moves from the Midwest and Pacific Rim US cities (Kansas City, St Louis, Wichita, Los Angeles) to the then in-formation geography of US imperialist interventions in Asia and Latin America. Schrader’s main argument is that the professionalisation of the police was a transnational project that was central to the eventual militarisation of policing. In the aftermath of the Black uprisings in the 1960s, a consensus within the US state apparatus began to grow, focusing on the upgrading of the police as the main way to prevent future unrest. The way to assure security, in this rationale, was to reform the technical apparatus of the police. The Kerner Report, which looked at the causes of the unrest and recommended solutions, not only galvanised the War on Poverty, but also initiated the War on Crime with its emphasis on transforming policing.
The Kerner Report’s call to reform policing was not an innovation, however. By the 1960s, the maintenance of peace by means of police reforms was already an established practice in the US counterinsurgency programmes in the Third World. From the mid-1950s to its close in 1974, the US Office of Public Safety (OPS) assisted police forces in some fifty-two countries, reaching over a million police officers around the globe. OPS was born out of the attempts of police reformers to make the US counter-insurgency in the Third World a police project – less lethal, more professional, skilful and technical. Taking OPS, and the major police and political forces behind its formation, Schrader details how ‘the personnel, technologies, ideas, and repertoires that enabled the extension of policing overseas were the very same ones that reformed it at home’. In doing so, the other important message of Badges without Borders is that rather than passively taking orders from politicians, police leader-intellectuals themselves put crime on the national political agenda. They were not only active agents in making ‘law and order’ a domestic and foreign policy priority, but also successfully gained relative autonomy and considerable financial resources for militarising the police through professionalisation, as is also evident in the power of police unions today.
Schrader starts with underlining the centrality of US police experts in the reshaping of US imperial domination during the cold war. At home and abroad, policing reform attempted to reframe the securitisation of non-white populations in a developmentalist racist logic, rather than the hitherto biological racist policing ideologies. In tune with the era, modern policing centred on technical reformism and developmentalism. Policing, thus, simultaneously became the engine of a liberal racial order – itself essential for pacifying the revolutionary demands of decolonisation. He then takes readers through the adventures of major police reformers, whose works were essential to police professionalisation and the work of the OPS. Bryon Engle, ‘the father of modern US foreign police assistance’, took his reforming work from Kansas City to occupied Japan, and finally brought his developed practices back to the US. Through the figure of Robert Komer in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, Schrader focuses on how civil policing and development programming became a ‘preventive medicine’ for nullifying insurgency in South Vietnam and other Third World countries through OPS programmes. Arnold Sagalyn, in turn, brought OPS orthodoxy back to the US at the time that the Johnson Administration was grappling with Black uprisings.
Professionalisation, Schrader argues, was a form of crisis management that aimed to implement a new social order in the name of law and order through introducing new technological tools to fight crime and subversion. He engages with some of these technologies and techniques in his discussions on ‘riot control’ – the use of chemical weapons (such as CS gas), disappearances, and the formation of the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) units (particularly in Los Angles). He traces the trajectory of these techniques from their use overseas to the US cities to fight Black radicalism. The OPS, for example, was a fierce promoter of CS gas (a potent chemical compound first developed in 1928) in counter-insurgency policing. After its so-called success in Vietnam, tear gas became a favourite police technical weapon to control crowds in US cities. Social scientific debates (rational choice theory, cost-benefit economics, etc.) around counter-insurgency and crime prevention, which Schrader examines in the last chapter, were also essential in justifying the form of technologies and strategies of police professionalisation.
Badges without Borders provides much-needed historical documentation on the constant reformation of US policing across national borders during the cold war – a period that, according to official history, was focused on cementing national borders in debates on domestic and international politics. The book underlines the importance of going beyond the neutral and technical appeals of professionalism, and the liberal divides of civilian and military, domestic and foreign, in order to understand the politics of security in an imperialist capitalist world order. The book, however, suffers from some shortcomings. The lack of clarity in defining the main concepts such as policing, national security state and counter-insurgency, coupled with a convoluted discussion on the relations between racial formation and policing, particularly in the Introduction and Chapter One, have not only limited its accessibility, but also scaled back the analytical reach of an otherwise fascinating historiography. Despite these shortcomings, Badges without Borders has a lot to offer, not least at the current conjuncture in which, under the pressure of popular unrest and in the hope of winning the upcoming election, liberal and Democrat sections of the ruling class are, increasingly, echoing calls for police reform in the United States.