Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter
Channel: Havens Wright Center for Social Justice
Date: 2022-09-29

A lecture by Jordan Camp examining the social (movement) response to decades of racism, militarism, and poverty embodied in, but not reducible to, police violence directed towards poor and/or non-white police communities. Camp argues the broken windows theory of policing is more than simply an attempt to stop crime before it happens; rather, it is a political expression of neoliberal capitalism at an urban scale.  The policing crisis, Camp contends, is the central political challenge of our time, and the country must grapple with the role and power of the police and its relationship to poor and/or non-white communities so as to pursue alternatives that better support justice, freedom, and life for all citizens.

Jordan T. Camp is a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown. He is the author of Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (University of California Press, 2016), co-editor (with Christina Heatherton) of Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016), and co-editor (with Laura Pulido) of Clyde A. Woods’ book, Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans (University of Georgia Press, forthcoming). He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has previously held teaching appointments, postdoctoral fellowships, or visiting positions at Princeton, University of Massachusetts-Lowell, California State University-Long Beach, and UCLA.