Policing The State, Second Edition [Hardcover]

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. The crevasse between scholarly thought and human suffering often seems unconscionably vast, as very few thinkers directly apply their elite knowledge to current problems. Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr. speaks powerfully against this quiet, applying his extraordinary ethical sensibility and interpretive discernment to expose the underpinnings of a tragically commonplace crime. --Kathryn Lofton, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies, Yale University In this moving, haunting, probing book, Ruprecht tells the story of a trial in which he participated as a juror in 2008. The story is in some sense a tragedy, a form of art and experience that happens to be at the center of the author's academic concerns. This book has the human interest of any such story . . . but it is also asking, between the lines, what tragedy is and what it would be to maintain hope, rather than resigning oneself to fate, in the midst of tragedies. --Jeffrey Stout, Professor of Religion, Princeton University Ruprecht has a wide-ranging and fertile intellectual imagil3Ü