The Imperial Origins of American Policing: Militarization and Imperial Feedback in the Early 20th Century

By Julian Go

 In the early 20th century, police departments across America’s cities enhanced their infrastructural power by adopting various tactical, operational, and organizational innovations. Based upon a nested cross-city analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, including negative binomial regression analysis of the determinants of militarization, this study reveals that these innovations constituted an early form of militarization resulting from imperial feedback. Local Police Borrowed Tactics, techniques, and organizational templates from America’s imperial military regime that had been developed to conquer and rule foreign populations. Imperial feedback occurred as a result of imperial imports, many of them veterans of America’s imperial-military apparatus, who constructed analogies between colonial subjects abroad and racialized minorities at home. The study identifies an early form of police militarization, reveals the imperial origins of police militarization, and offers a potentially transportable theory of imperial feedback that stands as one among other possible routes to police militarization.  

   AJS Volume 125 Number 5 (March 2020): 1193–1254