ABSTRACT
Scholars of police reform, noting some of the difficulties involved in relying on the US courts and constitutional jurisprudence to limit police violence and reform police practices, argue that the more systemic efforts of the Department of Justice (DOJ) in transforming whole departments constitute a more promising avenue of change. Recent work in political theory suggests that the importation of market logics into the state constitutes one of the paradigmatic features of neoliberalism. Neoliberal political rationality can be understood as one that subjects state actors, decisions, and processes to norms of market efficiency and quantitative performance measurements. The quantification of policing has followed a market logic, where the broader social goal has been transformed into a productivity metric. A task force, established by presidential executive order in 2014, with a staff provided by the Department of Justice's community policing division, published its recommendations after conducting a series of listening sessions with police, civilians, academics, and politicians.
