Policing Beyond the Police - Tracking Police Violence in the United States

 Brian Mercado and Angela LaScala-Gruenewald

Introduction

Section 1: Tracking Violence

Section 2: The Expansion of Policing Logics & Practices Into Non-Police Actor Activities

Section 3: Policing in U.S. Social Institutions

Introduction

Recent police violence targeting Black and Brown people in the U.S. has been met by some of the largest movements in history to resist and dismantle the carceral state. In an attempt to quantitatively identify and track police violence and contribute to education and activism, many researchers and journalists have launched public data projects. A report based on data from one such project shows that in 2020 over 1,100 people were killed by police, a third of whom were Black people. These tracking projects are valuable in multiple ways, in particular for monitoring the pattern and scope of police violence given the absence of reliable information from police departments and the U.S. government.

Simultaneously, a close look at tracking projects shows that they do not and cannot account for the expansive nature of violence and the diversity of approaches to policing people in the U.S. This resource guide attempts to bridge this gap by situating tracking projects in a broader context. We ask: What is the nature and extent of institutional and individual power to commit violence, particularly violence against Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) and poor, working-class people? 

Throughout this guide, we conceive of police violence as an extension of state violence--the use of government powers (like police) to enact harm, ranging from mass incarceration and genocide to the erosion of social services--and define violence broadly to consider its physical and non-physical forms. Seeing police violence as tied to the will of the State is critical for understanding how policing serves neoliberalism. For example, we hope this guide challenges us to see how anti-Blackness and xenophobia are political projects to maintain the status of wealthy people, not the individual biases of a single police officer or border control agent.

To organize this guide, we focus on three core areas: Section 1 provides examples of historical and contemporary tracking projects and discusses the limitations of such methods to quantify police violence. Section 2 discusses the diffusion and expansion of policing logics and capabilities as they have been extended to private citizens and institutionalized by social service providers. This approach makes it possible to observe, categorize, and understand how non-police actors engage in policing practices. By non-police actors, we refer to those state and non-state actors whose actions fall outside of formal police agency operations but whose activities, intentionally or unintentionally, often carry functions that expand police enforcement and surveillance capabilities. Examples of non-police actors include social service providers, private citizens, and public and private employers, among others discussed in this resource guide. Section 3 builds upon Section 2 by examining three major U.S. institutions (immigration, education, and welfare services) that deploy policing logics and violence to surveil and control individuals. The materials across all three sections are intended to serve as a provocation, to invite a question that is not entirely answered by the guide itself: How can we identify, track and, most importantly, disrupt and abolish all types of police violence?

Each section interacts with different types of materials while always centering and dissecting the very terms embedded in the subtitle of this resource guide: “Tracking Police Violence in the United States.”  For example, Section 1 discusses tracking as a method and as a tool of activism to measure and combat police violence; Section 2 interrogates the logics of policing; and Section 3 shows how institutions commit violence across multiple public institutions (e.g., education and welfare systems), engaging in multiple types of policing practices and activating multiple figures to engage in these practices (e.g., teachers, social workers, etc.). Finally, we focus on how these practices engage in  ways that cross boundaries, serving to support and continue colonial projects within and beyond the United States (e.g., immigration systems and deportation regimes).

This guide’s broad set of goals are limited by some choices related to content as well as our own personal approaches and backgrounds. The content seeks to challenge conventional understandings of the State, violence, and tracking; however, in order to narrow the scope, several sections were left out. For example, this guide does not provide resources for considering the role of some private institutions in enacting violence. We also do not address the critical absence of these private actors in existing violence tracking projects (e.g., the violence perpetrated by private police forces like university police or the role of corporations in upholding prison systems). It also neglects violence against BIPOC individuals committed by U.S. paramilitary and military forces, closely linked to American policing, and extending beyond the U.S. and within U.S. correctional facilities.

Ultimately, this guide is a reflection of our backgrounds, both driven and constrained by what we bring to our work. We contributed writing and resources based on our perspectives, positionalities, and shared commitment to abolition. While recognizing our limitations, we attempted to remain critically reflexive throughout the development of the guide.

Brian is a Chicano and a second-generation immigrant, the son of formerly undocumented immigrants from México. He is a former system impacted youth from a family affected by policing and incarceration. Brian’s lived experiences inform his work, which examines how policing and surveillance capabilities in schools are taken on by non-police actors such as educators, administrators, staff, social workers, and security guards. In this work, Brian analyzes the mechanisms by which the criminalization of students serves to normalize and legitimize their policing, disciplining, expulsion, and incarceration.

Angela, as a white trans person from a privileged background, has limited experiences with penal systems beyond the policing and constraints of gender. Much of their work stems from their experiences with public bureaucracies: their research focuses on how whiteness is institutionalized and shapes mechanisms of punishment in penal and social service systems. This guided their interest in this project, particularly in examining the purpose and use of (often decontextualized) data on state violence and public tracking systems.

Influencing these interests, our political orientations are in line with police and prison abolitionists. We acknowledge we are operating within and building on the genealogies of thought developed largely by Black and Brown activists, community organizers, writers, artists, and academics. Our political alignments move us to radically imagine and work towards a world free from prisons, police, borders, nation-states, and colonial projects. These orientations informed our very conceptualization of this resource guide, particularly in our understanding of abolition as necessitating not only an end to carceral institutions and police agencies, but ultimately the logics that uphold and empower them. 

Section I: Tracking Violence

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, a Black teenager living in Ferguson, Missouri, was walking down a two-lane street when a police officer drove by and asked him to walk on the curb. The confrontation that followed led to the officer drawing a gun, shooting, and killing  Brown. Brown’s murder led to nationwide protests. As in other moments in U.S. history, diverse research and data strategies rose to support education projects and movement building. New crowdsourcing and web scraping techniques led to an unprecedented rise in what we might call “violence trackers”: databases that systematically track police shootings and murders in response to the lack of reliable government data. Many of the projects that began after 2014 are still maintained today.

While these projects were neither the first nor the last attempts by researchers to contribute to social movements, looking across historical and contemporary projects reveals several themes. To begin, such violence tracking projects are useful tools to explore previously unknown questions and provide a modicum of police accountability. The trackers make visible what many people have always known: that police violence is ubiquitous and racialized; for young men, it is among the leading causes of death in the United States. Many trackers, by providing reliable data and creating communities of support between activists and researchers, enhance the work of movements like Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police, which calls for the scaling back and/or abolition of policing.

Despite the importance of this work, the violence trackers share common limitations, often but not always acknowledged by the people who produce them. Data trackers are often portrayed as new areas of activism, rather than outgrowths of critical anti-carceral traditions at the intersection of activism and research. Relatedly, police violence is often tracked across recent periods of time, often a reflection of when the tracker began collecting publicly available data and therefore sometimes neglecting histories of violence and its vast intergenerational effects. Additionally, most projects conceive of violence as murder—encounters that are fatal in the moment—and recognize police violence only when the police are “on duty” or using a firearm. Many trackers measure murders, shootings, and a category termed “use of force,” but do not measure other types of violence, the context in which the violence occurs, and its reverberating consequences for individuals, families, and communities. Finally, like many quantitative projects and the statistical analyses that follow, most of these trackers skip important contextual narratives that provide a deeper understanding of how people are affected by police violence.

Focus Questions

1. How do current public violence trackers build on or diverge from earlier historical projects? What data are used? And what do they tell us about police violence in the United States?
2. What are some common themes and limitations of these projects, in particular regarding their inability to document expansive notions of violence?
3. Can—and if so, how—contemporary tracker projects be used to further anti-violence research and activism?

Histories of Police Violence

“A Long View of Policing in America” by History Talks (2015): Hosted by Leticia Wiggins and Patrick Potyondy, this episode of History Talks discusses the history of policing in the United States. In particular, it focuses on the origins of police in slave patrols and lynching. This podcast offers a social historical framework for understanding the context and purpose of police violence as a mechanism of social control.

The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, 1892-1894 by Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1895): In 1895, the journalist, sociologist, and activist, Ida B. Wells-Barnett compiled statistics from local newspapers to demonstrate how white mobs are responsible for lynching Black people. Her work serves as an early--and often neglected--example of a police violence tracker. The Red Record  presents these statistics and makes the case that white lynch mobs were not justified community crime fighters as many white people claimed, but rather perpetrators of racialized violence. She also defends the importance of data collection, writing “No good result can come from an investigation which refuses to consider the facts.” 

"Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era” by Matthew D. Lassiter and the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab at the University of Michigan Carceral State Project (2021): Detroit Under Fire provides a rare example of a contemporary public tracking project that includes social histories alongside quantitative data to examine murders committed by police in Detroit between 1957-1973. The archive is divided into five sections and offers a story map as well as images. It demonstrates the potential of contextualizing tracking projects within histories of police brutality, rather than simply quantifying police murders in ahistorical terms and without attention to structural and intergenerational violence.

Conceptualizing Violence

“The Effects of Violence on Communities: The Violence Matrix as a Tool for Advancing More Just Policies” by Beth E. Richie (2019): Richie brings a critical feminist criminological approach and an understanding of the particular violence experienced by Black and African American women to develop a framework for understanding violence. “The Violence Matrix” presented in the paper provides an expansive approach for disrupting the idea that violence is simply physical and interpersonal to show how violence must be contextualized and explored at the community level (e.g., hostile work environments and sexual harassment) and social level (e.g., negative media images and a lack of affordable housing). Richie ends with some reflective questions in preparation for a roundtable to discuss anti-violence policies. This framework is useful in  critiquing violence trackers that focus on a single “type” of decontextualized violence perpetrated by police (like shootings or homicides).

By the Numbers

“The Counted” by the Guardian (2015-2016): One of several projects launched after the murder of Michael Brown in August of 2014, “The Counted” is a project by the Guardian, a UK newspaper that combines crowdsourced information with reporting. The database spans two years of killings by police. It includes the contributions of news outlets, open-source reporting, and websites like Fatal Encounters and the project “Killed by Police,” which no longer has a functioning website. The Guardian also carefully presents an interactive database sharing the faces and stories of some of the individuals murdered by police.

“Fatal Force” by The Washington Post (2015-Present): Like the Guardian, this project launched post-2014 and compiles every fatal shooting in the United States by a police officer in the “line of duty.” The Post collects data in a manner similar to the Guardian: they combine local news reports, law enforcement data, social media data, and independent databases like Fatal Encounters and Killed by Police. It includes several map and graph tools to examine fatal police shootings across the U.S.

Fatal Encounters (2000-Present): Of existing public trackers of police violence, Fatal Encounters was one of the first to use crowd-sourced data, government data, and media and news reports to track deaths that happen when police are present or deaths caused by police. It is considered a primary source for data analyses because it includes a wide range of deaths such as when police are on-duty or off-duty or, what they term “accidental” and “intentional” deaths. The project aggregates these data and provides them in a publicly available Google Spreadsheet. The project’s researcher, D. Brian Burghart, helps maintain the site, emphasizing the impartiality of their work and providing some guidance to researchers and activists on the nature of the data.

Mapping Police Violence (2013-Present): This data tracker is one of the newest projects and relies on use-of-force data collection programs in states like California, Texas, and Virginia as well as the Fatal Encounters database to create, what they believe, is “the most comprehensive accounting of people killed by police since 2013.” The site includes several features that make it particularly user friendly including a map to compare places, a police scorecard broken out by departments, and a 2020 Police Violence Report. 

Social Science Analyses of Quantitative Data (& Its Limits)

“Mapping fatal police violence across U.S. metropolitan areas” by Gabriel Schwartz (2020): The authors draw from the Fatal Encounters database to analyze fatal police violence. They frame police violence as a “public health problem” and emphasize the importance of data to map police violence across U.S. metropolitan areas. The results show Southwestern areas have the highest rates of police-related fatalities and high racial inequities across all regions. Although the authors exclude what they term as accidental deaths (e.g., vehicular collisions), they note that removing such deaths from analyses could lead to underestimates of fatal police violence by around 60 percent in some metropolitan areas. This raises the question of how police tracking projects, specifically, and violence tracking projects, more broadly, conceptualize and differentiate between accidental and purposeful deaths.

“Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex” by Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito (2019): This paper uses Fatal Encounters data to analyze police killing by age, gender, and race-ethnicity. It also provides detailed supplementary information comparing Fatal Encounters to government data from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). In their analyses, the authors find people of color are more likely to be killed by police than their white peers. Black men have a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police over the course of their lifetimes. They describe when and how the Fatal Encounters data on police killings, race, and ethnicity align with patterns found in the official (undercounts) provided by NVSS.

“A Bird’s Eye View of Civilians Killed by Police in 2015” by Justin Nix, Bradley Campbell, Edward Byers, and Geoffrey Albert (2017): This third example of statistical analyses born from data tracking projects uses The Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” database. An analysis of 990 fatal police shootings in 2015 examines whether fatalities occurred when an individual was attacking someone and/or they were armed. Results show evidence of racialized bias, demonstrating implicit fear of people who are not identified as “white” even if they are unarmed and passive. The paper also explores issues with the lack of national data provided by the U.S. government to allow researchers and activists to understand the scale of police violence.

“Race, Policing, and the Limits of Social Science” by Lily Hu (2021): Hu grapples with the studies that analyze racism and police violence using quantitative methods. In particular, her critique of social science methods and their potential limitations focuses on a debate spurred by a 2016 paper whose author finds no racial differences in police use of force. She questions how views, perceptions, and politics interact with the world of data collection and analyses. She challenges her readers, writing: 

If certain methods erase these stark (and undisputed) disparities, painting a picture of a social landscape in which race does not causally influence police shooting behaviors, then so much worse for those methods. From this vantage, failing to take account of the many different forms of evidence of decades of racialized policing and policymaking is not only normatively wrong. It is also empirically absurd, especially as a self-styled “evidence-based” program that seeks to illuminate the truths of our social world. (Hu, 2021, para. 18)

Section II: The Expansion of Policing Logics & Practices Into Non-Police Actor Activities

Just as we envision a manner of tracking police violence that does not center recent police killings to the neglect of other forms violence, we seek to look beyond a definition of “policing” that is tied to official police agency administration or supervision. In other words, we regard policing as not simply the actions undertaken by police officers, but the actions of non-police actors that support and expand official policing information gathering and operations.  In the pursuit of tracking policing violence, we must track policing practices in all their manifestations, including in consideration of how policing expands, consolidates, and legitimizes non-state actors to take on policing practices.

In order to begin to categorize the modalities by which citizens and social service providers become involved in the policing of the public, we draw on James P. Walsh’s 2014 article, “Watchful Citizens: Immigration Control, Surveillance and Societal Participation.” Walsh analyzes the mechanisms by which immigration control in the United States is extended and intensified through immigration policing across and beyond the sovereign state. We draw from Walsh’s analysis to make sense of how the state facilitates the involvement of an escalating number of local and private actors and institutions in immigration control activities as well as criminal law enforcement practices.

The typology of societal participation in immigration control put forward by Walsh includes deputization, responsibilization, and autonomization. 

Deputization involves the activation of certain state, local, and private agents to serve as formally and informally deputized immigration law agents tasked with surveilling perceived immigrants, preventing perceived transgressions of the law, and regulating access to public resources.

Responsibilization involves the activation of individuals to serve as extensions of surveillance and law enforcement through integrated models of policing, cooperative databases, and the discourse of personal responsibility for ensuring public safety. Responsibilization is a form of liberal governance that extends policing powers onto the public through participatory policing models and discourses that place the responsibility of policing on the private citizen.

Autonomization involves efforts by vigilante organizations that, even if unsolicited, represents an extension of state surveillance and law enforcement activities.

Focus Questions

1. How do non-police actors deploy policing logics?
2. What role does the neoliberal State play in Walsh’s typology of societal participation in control?
3. How does diffuse policing serve to consolidate U.S. colonial power? 
4. What are some potential implications of diffuse policing practices on tracking the nature and scope of police violence?

Deputization

“‘The Eyes and Ears on Our Frontlines’: Policing without Police to Counter Violent Extremism”: This article delves into the mechanisms by which social service providers are activated as extensions of police when they come into contact with racialized individuals who are deemed to be at risk of terrorist radicalization and recruitment. Countering Violent Extremism initiatives will provide lists of “risk assessments” for “terrorist extremism” and will call on social service providers to identify and report individuals who fit into criteria of radicalization. Specifically, these initiatives often target Muslims in the U.S. despite the persistent threat of right-wing, domestic terrorists such as white supremacist vigilante groups. These practices serve to extend surveillance capabilities of law enforcement while disciplining US Muslims and other racialized groups to conform to what is deemed acceptable behavior.

“When We All Become the Immigration Police”: “Cross-deputization,” is the official term used to discuss the processes by which state and local law enforcement become authorized to engage in federal immigration enforcement. Marrow, borrowing from this expression, advances the term “bureaucratic and civil cross-deputization” to denote the trend of laws and policies that creep immigration enforcement into non-law enforcement sectors, such as schools, healthcare facilities, and private employers. This has the consequence of involving non-law enforcement actors in immigration enforcement practices. The bureaucratic aspect of the term refers to the regulation of immigrants’ access to social services, while the civil feature refers to laws that make providing aid to immigrants into criminal acts.

“Exclusive investigation: Your prescriptions aren't private”: This piece of investigative journalism focuses on the access that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and state and local police agencies have to monitor drug monitoring programs. These programs were conceived to curb the abuse of prescription drugs, but, according to the article, as of August 2016, 49 states (all states except Missouri and the District of Columbia) have central prescription databases. Of those 49 states, 31 allow for warrantless searches. 

Despite the privacy laws in the remaining states, the DEA is pushing to circumvent privacy safeguards in states that have them. This piece serves as an example of how doctors, pharmacists, and other medical staff are compelled to cooperate in law enforcement practices by being required to log information in the prescription database.

Responsibilization

“A First Line of Defence? Vigilant surveillance, participatory policing and the reporting of ‘suspicious’ activity”: This article lays out a foundational view of the activation of non-state actors as extensions of police surveillance and enforcement. Non-state actors take on the roles of police extensions through a process of responsibilization. This article gives multiple examples of current regimes of surveillance and suspicion in a variety of Western societies, focusing on the U.S., U.K., and Australia. This article showcases the similar strategies of participatory policing these countries share.

“Surveillant staring: Race and the everyday surveillance of South Asian women after 9/11”: This resource dives into the everyday surveillance practices in public places wielded by white Americans toward young South Asian women after 9/11. National, state, and local governments tacitly approve or actively encourage the surveillance of racialized Brown bodies in the name of public security and counterterrorism.

“Crowdsourcing Homeland Security: The Texas Virtual BorderWatch and Participatory Citizenship”: This article investigates the move for governments to electronically crowdsource their surveillance practices. To showcase an example of this process, the author hones in on the case of the Texas Virtual BorderWatch, a network of web-based cameras along the U.S.-Mexico border that allows anyone with an internet connected device to patrol the border.

“Amazon’s Home Security Company Is Turning Everyone Into Cops”: This Vice news article tracks Neighbors, a social platform for local communities whose main use has been to serve as a neighborhood watch and crime-reporting platform. Users of the app frequently encourage people who have posted a supposed crime to report it to the police, showing the ways policing practices are taken up by people in their own communities and serve to extend policing capabilities into the hands of citizens. Often, as the article notes, the reporting of a supposed crime is rooted in a racialized fear based on the assumed criminality of Black people.

Autonomization

“Armed Vigilantes Antagonizing Protesters Have Received A Warm Reception From Police”: During the protests after the murder of George Floyd, far-right armed vigilante groups often identifying as or linked to white supremacist organizations have shown up as counterprotesters based on their professed goals of protecting private property and standing with law enforcement, often with encouragement from or in collaboration with law enforcement agencies. The article roots the contemporary presence and acceptance of vigilante groups against a history of collaboration with law enforcement.

“What’s the Difference Between Kyle Rittenhouse and the Police?”: This article aims to situate the murder of two people and the wounding of a third by Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin on August 25, 2020, against the cultural and economic factors that motivate far-right vigilantes to perform the function of policing society. These factors include seeing themselves as “good guys with a gun” (which, with the use of gendered language, points to the strong relationship between policing and white masculinity), fears of state abandonment, and the maintenance of the existing social and economic order.

“Standing By: Right-Wing Militia Groups & The US Election”: This report maps the activities of vigilante groups across the United States, which ramped up prior to the 2020 presidential election, and identifies states with high to moderate risk of experiencing heightened vigilante activity before, during, and after the election. The report highlights the most active right-wing militia groups, including “mainstream militias” whose professed operations of ‘public security’ are most likely to align with law enforcement agency and U.S. military goals.

“What border vigilantes taught US right-wing armed groups”: This resource focuses on the right-wing armed groups who have operated autonomously on the U.S.-Mexico border to stop undocumented migrants from crossing the border. The article touches on the histories of specific groups, the admiration and approval they have received from law enforcement and politicians, and the sharing of their tactics and ideas with other right-wing armed groups operating on the border and in communities with high immigrant populations during Black Lives Matter protests and the 2020 presidential election.

Section III: Policing in U.S. Social Institutions

In the previous section, we discussed a typology of neoliberal social arrangements that activate private citizens and social service providers as extensions of police power. In this section, we examine how policing logics infiltrate institutions that purportedly provide access to resources and social support. This challenges the idea that institutions, like our education and healthcare systems, act as educators and healers working in the public interest, and instead demonstrate how these institutions may adopt policing logics to punish and control people. An institution can provide access to resources and have a legal and organizational structure that empowers policing practices. These institutions may be subject to a creeping of policing logics with the purpose of extending and intensifying policing practices into all domains of life. Policing serves as one tool to facilitate the infiltration of neoliberalism into social service institutions.

The institutions we cover in this resource guide were chosen based on our areas of sociological inquiry. These areas include forms of policing, surveillance, and social control in welfare programs and social work, immigration services, and primary and secondary educational institutions. The institutions represent only a few of many institutions that undertake policing practices and the readings demonstrate how the diffusion of policing logics occurs through a wide variety of means. To summarize a few tactics: diffusion occurs through legal infrastructures that facilitate police enforcement and surveillance; long-term policy shifts; ideological commitments to punishing perceived legal transgressions; formalized partnerships and agreements; the linking of and access to interoperable databases; the entrenchment of state carceral practices; the retrenchment, disinvestment, and abandonment of social services; the presence of police officers in institutions purportedly meant to provide support; and the willing and reluctant participation of individual actors with their own biases and motives within these institutions.

In the three broad arenas of welfare, education, and immigration, we include historical and legal reviews, frameworks for understanding the complicated relationships between institutions, maps of policing activities throughout the U.S., reports of policing practices as they are occurring in chosen jurisdictions, and case studies that paint a picture of how policing occurs on the ground and perpetuates various forms of violence.

Focus Questions

1. What elements of the carceral state appear common across social institutions?
2. How might social institutions re-center communities and pursue more liberatory or abolitionist approaches in order to fully abandon policing logics? 
3. What type of tracker might capture, record, and describe elements of the police violence described in these social institutions? How might such a tracker contribute to anti-violence efforts?

Welfare Systems & (Carceral) Social Work

“The Criminalization of Poverty”: This article maps how the U.S. welfare system and criminal legal system interact, including the social construction of welfare fraud, the existence of welfare courts, and the use of welfare as a tool of policing.

“Prison, Foster Care, and the Systematic Punishment of Black Mothers”: Roberts discusses the relationship between the U.S. prison system and the foster care system. The article shows how various state mechanisms of surveillance and punishment permeate both institutions, multiplying the trauma, violent victimization, and social inequality of poor women of color.

“State supervision, punishment, and poverty”: This article examines the interaction between America’s carceral system and forms of social assistance, demonstrating how punitiveness expands across the welfare state. While states have moved away from more overt policies (such as denying individuals access to welfare due to a criminal record), they have replaced policies with supervisory requirements that act as another form of punitive social control.

“Defund the Police: Moving Towards an Anti-Carceral Social Work”: This paper uses the term “carceral social work” to describe how social workers and social welfare systems collaborate with the police and deploy policing logics. The authors focus on several social institutions where social work engages in punitive and/or coercive practices (two of which are explored in the next set of readings for this guide): gender-based violence, child welfare, schools, and health and mental health. They offer “anti-carceral social work” as an alternative.

“Trading Cops for Social Workers Isn’t the Solution to Police Violence”: This article examines carceral social work and how social workers have been complicit in colonization, white heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, and the logics of neoliberalism. The authors argue that replacing police with social workers ignores the historical and contemporary connection between social workers and state violence. They describe the potential of a new form of social work that removes policing logics from social work, termed “abolition social work.”

Immigration System

“Criminalizing Migration”:

The policies on immigration Donald Trump held during his presidency are not isolated, extreme incidents of anti-immigrant violence, but rather arise after decades of the intertwinement of the practices, goals, and actors of the criminal justice and immigration systems. This article tracks federal policy shifts and ideological commitments that have led to the utilization of the criminal justice system for immigration enforcement.

“A Multilayered Jurisdictional Patchwork: Immigration Federalism in the United States”:

This article proposes a framework that complicates the idea of “immigration federalism,” or the notion that states and localities are able to construct and enact immigration law. This framework accounts for the decentralization of immigration enforcement authority within a chosen “jurisdiction,” with shared, though unequal, and at times conflicting surveillance, enforcement, and governance capacities extended among the different law enforcement actors who take on immigration enforcement practices.

Protect, Serve, and Deport: The Rise of Policing as Immigration Enforcement:

Armenta’s ethnography of Nashville, Tennessee’s policing practices aims to explain how the federal government's deportation infrastructure has been expanded through policing practices dictated by local politics, policies and commitments taken on by local police agencies, and state laws. Armenta paints a picture of how something as mundane as a traffic stop by a local police officer for a broken taillight can lead to the deportation of a driver who has a tenuous legal status.

“National Map of 287(g) Agreements”:

The 287(g) program, taking its name from its section in the Immigration and Nationality Act, provides the legal infrastructure for state and local police agencies to engage in immigration enforcement. 287(g) serves as a collaborative enterprise meant to share law and immigration enforcement information and capabilities, leading to the deportation of people with tenuous legal statuses who come into contact with partnering law enforcement agencies. The Immigrant Legal Resource Center has tracked and mapped the jurisdictions across the United States that have 287(g) contracts with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as of October 2020.

The Border's Long Shadow: How Border Patrol Uses Racial Profiling and Local and State Police to Instill Fear in Michigan’s Immigrant Communities:

This report from the ACLU’s Michigan chapter dives into Border Patrol’s policing practices within the state of Michigan. Border Patrol interprets its jurisdiction to be within 100 miles from each international border and international waterway. This interpretation places the whole of Michigan under Border Patrol’s jurisdiction. This report reveals Border Patrol’s tactics throughout the state, including racial discrimination and collusion with state and local police agencies to target, arrest, and deport immigrants.

Educational System

“Arresting the Carceral State”:

This article tracks the imposition of the criminal justice system into schools in the United States, particularly around zero tolerance policies and the introduction of school resource officers, which leads to disproportionate punishment of Black and Brown youth in secondary schools. The article also names the disinvestment in public schools, including inadequate funding of public education, the lack of relevant and culturally sustaining curriculum, and the privileging of high stakes testing, all of which contribute to the disengagement and early-exit of students.

We Came to Learn: A Call to Action for Police-Free Schools:

The Advancement Project released this report on and call for the end of policing practices in schools. The report examines the roots of the introduction and institutionalization of school resource officers through partnerships between schools and state and local law enforcement agencies. The report centers the perspectives of students from around the country who discuss the harms school policing has brought them. The report also catalogues known assaults of students by school resource officers, which, in conversation with students’ perspectives, shines a light on physical and non-physical forms of violence experienced by students who experience this form of policing.

“Education or Incarceration: Zero Tolerance Policies and the School to Prison Pipeline”:

This article discusses the disciplining and punishing of students for their comportments deemed subject to zero tolerance policies, or regulated by strict application of punishment. These zero tolerance disciplinary policies institutionalize and legally legitimate the basis for exclusion and punitive outcomes for students and are associated with a number of negative effects that are enacted disproportionately against Black students, including disciplinary outcomes such as increases in suspensions, expulsions, early-exiting from school, and interactions with the criminal justice system.

“Compendium of School Discipline Laws & Regulations”:

The National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments tracked and compiled resources from government-sponsored sites and other sources concerning distinct school discipline laws and regulations around the country. The compiled information can be organized and searched by category of type of disciplinary issue addressed (i.e. in-school discipline, out-of-school discipline, and disciplinary approaches addressing specific infractions and conditions) or jurisdiction (all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and several U.S. territories). The information is up to date as of January 2019.

“He Drew His School Mascot — and ICE Labeled Him a Gang Member”:

Operation Matador is a program that partners the federal immigration enforcement system with state and local police agencies with the intent to curtail a perceived increase of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang members and activities in New York City, Long Island, and Hudson Valley. This news article discusses how the presence of school resource officers in Long Island high schools allowed for information of school-based incidents to be communicated to ICE despite laws and policies that protect immigrant students from such information sharing practices. The article follows the case of a Honduran-born asylum-seeker named Alex as he is deemed to be gang affiliated, detained for over a year, and is eventually deported back to Honduras. This article tracks the manner in which information is passed from person to person, from teacher to principal to SRO to ICE agents, to show the variety of actors implicated in Alex’s deportation.

Angela LaScala-Gruenewald is a doctoral student in the Sociology Program at The Graduate Center. Their research explores social control and punishment in social systems with an emphasis on how bureaucratic processes create inequality through racialized organizational structures and the criminalization of poverty. Angela’s current project uses ethnography and interviews to examine how fines and fees are administered in suburban and rural court systems. Angela teaches contemporary social theory and criminology at Hunter College.

Brian Mercado is a doctoral student in the Sociology Program at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His current research explores how immigrant students navigate, claim, and reclaim spaces in and around their schools against the surveillance and policing they face in these settings. Brian is currently part of the first cohort of Vera Institute of Justice/Public Science Project Fellows. He teaches as an adjunct faculty member in the Sociology Department at Hunter College and has taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.