Policing and the American Racial State from Plantation to Algorithm: Racial Governance by Design
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Book Overview
Why does American policing persist in producing racial inequality despite decades of reform? This book argues that the answer lies not in individual bias or institutional failure but in intentional design. Introducing the Racial Governance Theory of Policing (RGTP), Jason M. Williams offers a sweeping reinterpretation of American policing as the central mechanism through which the racial state governs racialized populations, from slave patrols and convict leasing through stop and frisk and predictive policing algorithms.
Drawing on critical race theory, Black radical thought, decolonial scholarship, and abolition studies, the book traces a four-century genealogy of racial governance, demonstrating through case studies of Ferguson and Baltimore how contemporary policing reproduces the same logic of extraction, surveillance, and control that structured the plantation. The book argues that reform has consistently served to extend and legitimize this system rather than constrain it, and closes with an abolitionist reconstruction of public safety grounded in the insurgent knowledge traditions of communities most targeted by racial governance.
Written for scholars, students, and practitioners across criminology, sociology, political science, Black studies, and law, this book offers the theoretical language needed to understand and ultimately dismantle policing as a technology of racial domination.
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