To Protect and to Serve: Police, Power, and the Production of Inequality in the United States

The history of policing in the United States has garnered renewed attention over the past two decades. Historians have rethought the operation and function of police in American society. This body of scholarship, which can be characterized as a critical history of policing, has demonstrated the ways the police became powerful, independent political forces in cities and the role of law enforcement in shaping American life beyond crime prevention or control, most notably in maintaining racial, sexual, gender, and class inequality. The history of policing has been separated from the history of crime, taking account of theoretical frameworks that treat crime as a category that is socially and politically constructed over time. Scholarship since the turn of the twenty-first century highlights several themes including the relationship between crisis and reform, the maintenance of social control, the influence of imperialism and empire, and resistance and repression. The history of police and policing in the United States is a vibrant and distinct field on the cutting edge of the carceral turn in American historiography.