ABSTRACT
This chapter examines police brutality in great detail, but simply notes that there are two ways to think about police brutality. It can be understood as an aberration or excess, or as a foundational component of policing. Many of the uprisings in Black communities that occurred during the late 1960s were prompted by police brutality. During the 2020 wave of protests against racist police brutality, police officers used pepper spray against protesters in many cities, prompting public outrage, criticism, and lawsuits. Militarization was also built on increased exchanges between police and military, both nationally, and in war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel. Such experiences reinforced and spread a militarized logic of risk and threat assessment, that encouraged police to evaluate the territory it control as a space under they control. Militarization holds within it, a centralized, top-down logic that perceives those outside of its control as threats.
