Police: A Field Guide

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Description

This book will arm activists on the streetsas well as anyone with an open mind on one of the key issues of our timewith a critical analysis and ultimately a redefinition of the very idea of policing. The book contends that when we talk about police and police reform, we speak the language of police legitimation through the art of euphemism. So state sexual assault become body-cavity search, and ruthless beatings become non-compliance deterrence. A Field Guide to the Police is a study of the indirect and taken-forgranted language of policing, a language were all forced to speak when we talk about law enforcement. In entries like Police dog, Stop and frisk, and Rough ride, the authors expose the way copspeak suppresses the true meaning and history of policing. Like any other field guide, it reveals a world that is hidden in plain view. The book argues that a redefined language of policing might help chart a future free society.

Reviews

Seeing through police bluewashing at every turn, Correia and Wall have put together a comprehensive, rigorous and highly useful guide to understanding copspeak. Unpacking the structural violence and racism of the police, and their functional role in capitalism, as well as in the historical continuity of slavery, Police: A Field Guide is a resolutely practical guide to thinking of a world beyond the police. Of value to activists and theorists alike, this text is a careful analysis of core concepts in policing of use to everyone committed to ending racist state violence and the tyranny of cops everywhere.
Nina Power, author of One-Dimensional Woman

Police: A Field Guide is a dictionary of liberation, an antidote to the copspeak thats everywhere, even in our own heads. By dissecting and analyzing a vocabulary of power that has become dangerously ubiquitous, this book can help us dispel and loosen its grip.
Astra Taylor, author of The Peoples Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

One of the angriest and saddest indictments of American policing I have ever read. The exposure of copspeak is masterly and the analysis of the relationships between law and order, racism and capitalism, are explained with surgical precision.
Clive Bloom, author of Riot City: Protest and Rebellion in the Capital

Author Bio

David Correia is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico. Tyler Wall is an assistant professor in the School of Justice Studies as Eastern Kentucky University.