Militarized Policing and the Imperial Boomerang in the US and Britain

Talk by Professor Julian Go, University of Chicago.

Today the police in the United States and Britain are heavily militarized forces wielding the same weaponry, operations and tactics as armies that treat immigrants and citizens, including student protestors, as enemies of war. But this is not supposed to be. When the modern police were first created, they were meant to be a non-militarized “civil” police. How and why did the police in liberal democracies become militarized? As this lecture will show, the answer lies in imperialism past and present, and associated dynamics of racialization and colonial fascism. Militarized policing is an effect of what the anticolonial thinker Aimé Césaire called “the imperial boomerang.