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  

By Nick Tilley, Graham Farrell, and Ronald V. Clarke

This is a chapter from The Criminal Act: The Role and Influence of Routine Activity Theory edited by Martin A. Andresen and Graham Farrell. This chapter is available open access under a CC BY license. Target suitability is a cornerstone of Marcus Felson's routine activities approach, and critical in determining crime rates. Recent research identifies reduced target suitability, via improved security, as central to the 'crime drop' experienced in many countries. Studies in different countries show car theft fell with far more and better vehicle security. Yet increases in household security were more modest and do not track burglary's decrease as well. In this chapter, the authors explain that apparent anomaly as due more to an improvement in the quality of household security leading to reduced burglary. It is further suggested that improvements to home insulation in the UK that brought double glazing may have, somewhat inadvertently, introduced better frames and locks for doors and windows, that in turn reduced household burglary.; This is a chapter from The Criminal Act: The Role and Influence of Routine Activity Theory edited by Martin A. Andresen and Graham Farrell. 

London: Springer Nature, 2015.

By Stephen Farrall and Emily Gray

This book explores the impact of right-wing political ideology on crime, the criminal justice system, and attitudes towards punishment in Britain. Grounded in a rigorous analysis of repeated cross-sectional surveys such as the British Social Attitudes Survey and the British Crime Survey, as well as individual-level cohort data such as the 1958 National Child Development Study and the 1970 British Cohort Study, it examines changes in long-term crime rates, criminal justice policies, and their integration with social and economic policies in Britain over four decades. It offers a detailed discussion of how radical social and economic changes affected the fear of crime and attitudes to punishment, and how well Thatcherite social and economic values were embedded in contemporary British society. Drawing on a wide literature across criminology, political science, sociology, and social policy, this book demonstrates how a thorough understanding of crime cannot take place without an examination of the wider social policies enacted, the life courses of the individuals affected, and their communities and the political environment in which they live. It is essential reading for criminologists, sociologists, political philosophers, and social theorists alike since it combines thinking from political sciences, life-courses theories, and detailed analyses of the outcomes of social policy change

Abingdon, Oxon, UK: New York: Routledge, 2024.