Policing the State, Second Edition: Democratic Reflections on Police Power Gone Awry, in Memory of Kathryn Johnston (1914-2006)

The manner in which Kathryn Johnston died so tragically at the hands of Atlanta narcotics police on the evening of November 21, 2006, anticipates and informs a number of very contemporary--and extremely volatile--issues that have become closely associated with the name of Ferguson, Missouri. As the "Black Lives Matter" movement makes clear, the issues center primarily around the relationship between racial identity and lethal police violence in the United States today. In this Second Edition of Policing the State, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. attempts to situate both "Ferguson" and "Black Lives Matter" within a relatively narrow historical frame of the two years since Policing the State was first published, as well as a longer history of the emergence of a more violent policing regime and an ever-more intensely carceral society that came on the scene quite suddenly in the United States in the mid-to-late 1980s.