Policing the Planet ─ Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter

Policing has become one of the urgent issues of our time, the target of dramatic movements and front-page coverage from coast to coast in the United States, and, indeed, across the world. Now a star-studded, wide-ranging collection of writers and activists offers a global response, describing ongoing struggles over policing from New York to Ferguson to Los Angeles, as well as London, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, and Mexico City.

This book, combining first-hand accounts from organizers with the research of eminent scholars and contributions by leading artists, traces the global rise of the "broken-windows" style of policing, first established in New York City under Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, a doctrine that has vastly increased and broadened police power and contributed to the contemporary crisis of policing that has been sparked by notorious incidents of police brutality and killings. With contributions from Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors, Ferguson activist and St. Louis University law professor Justin Hansford, scholars Vijay Prashad and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Pakistani writer and politician Hamid Khan, and many more.

Jordan T. Camp is a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University and Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. His work appears or is forthcoming in venues such asAmerican Quarterly, Kalfou, Race & Class, In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina, andRace, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime.

Christina Heatherton is an American Studies scholar and historian of anti-racist social movements. She is completing her first book,The Color Line and the Class Struggle: The Mexican Revolution, Internationalism, and the American Century. Her work appears in places such asAmerican Quarterly and in The Rising Tides of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements Across the Pacific, and is forthcoming in volumes such asFeminists Rethink the Neoliberal State: Inequality, Exclusion and Change. She is the editor ofDowntown Blues: A Skid Row Reader. She teaches at Trinity College.