Christy Lopez: Police Reform and Carceral Logic

Christy Lopez draws on her work as a Deputy Chief in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice to talk about Pattern or Practice Investigations with in police departments. How these investigations begin, how they work, and what their outcomes may be, are all unpacked by Professor Lopez. Additionally, Prof. Lopez describes her formulation of “carceral logic” and how it informs police reform efforts.

Christina Aushana: Role-Playing in Police Trainings

Christina Aushana discusses her article “Inescapable Scripts: Role-Playing Feminist (re)visions and Rehearsing Racialize State Violence in Police Training Scenarios.” Professor Aushana talks about participating in Police Academy Scenario Training as an actor. By participating in the police role-play training, she was able to witness and document a genre of performance wherein training officers, patrol officers, and recruits' stage, rehearse, and revise racial (re)visions together, infusing…

Aaron Bekemeyer: Thin Blue Line of Police Unions

Aaron Thomas Bekemeyer, Lecturer on History, Harvard University. Professor Aaron Bekemeyer discusses the complicated history of police unionization. How police balanced their role as union busters and political enforcers with their desire for higher wages and retirement/pensions led to contradictions in messaging. After both World Wars, American society changed in various ways and policing took on new meanings, in response to reformist challenges to political machine corruption and later the…

Joanna Schwartz: Unaccountable Policing

Joanna Schwartz is a professor of law at UCLA. Professor Joanna Schwartz discusses her new book, Shielded: How The Police Became Untouchable. Prof. Schwartz draws on her experience as a civil rights attorney and law professor to explain how Section 1 of the Klu Klux Klan Act of 1871, known as Section 1983, set the groundwork for protections for state employees, most notably police officers, when they violate a citizen's civil rights. As civil cases against police violence reached the…

Jessica Katzenstein: Scenario Training and Police Reform

Jessica Katzenstein completed her PhD in Anthropology at Brown University in 2022. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Inequality in America Initiative though 2024. Dr. Jessica Katzenstein discusses her research on how U.S. police officers absorb and resist reforms during a mounting legitimacy crisis. She explores why reforms fail to realize their promises to curb racialized violence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with officers and reformers in Maryland, she…

Jessica Katzenstein: Problems in Police Training

Police reform advocates often push police departments to move from fear-laden “warrior” survival trainings and toward reality-based or scenario trainings, which involve immersive role-playing scenarios such as making an arrest. Scenario trainings promise to teach officers to suppress fear, counter racial bias, and calibrate “reasonable” uses of force. But these trainings often fall short of their promise and end up reinforcing the threats and survival mindset. Drawing on 16 months of…