Violent Order

Book excerpt: This book 's radical theory of police argues that the police demand for order is a class order and a racialized and patriarchal order, by arguing that the police project, in order to fabricate and defend capitalist order,must patrol an imaginary line between society and nature, it must transform nature into inert matter made available for accumulation. Police don 't just patrol the ghetto or the Indian reservation, the thin blue line doesn 't just refer to a social order, rather police announce a general claim to domination--of labor and of nature. Police and police violence are modes of environment-making. This edited volume argues that any effort to understand racialized police violence is incomplete without a focus on the role of police in constituting and reinforcing patterns of environmental racism.