Police officers kill and injure an alarming number of people in the United States each year. According to a 2016 study published in Injury Prevention, the police killed or injured over 55,000 people in 2012; the police-brutality monitoring website Mapping Police Violencereports that over 1,000 people have been killed by police so far in 2017. Previous studies have found that the police disproportionately use excessive forceagainst, search, and kill people of color, particularly black people.
In 1983, City University of New York School of Law professor Sidney L. Harring published Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities 1895ā1915, which addresses the history of working-class repression by the police. And, in October, the second edition of Harring's Marxist analysis of the relationships between capitalism, class divisions, and policing in cities was published by Haymarket Books. The re-release aims to convey Harring's insights to a new generation living in a world in which the police are becoming increasingly militarized.
In Policing a Class Society, Harring argues that police have not historically "served and protected" the general population, but rather violently divided the working class and protected the interests of the upper classes. Harring uses Milwaukee and Chicago as case studies to illustrate repressive tactics of the police during the late 19th century and turn of the 20th century.
[For more on this story by ELIZABETH KING, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...released-now/546788/]
Photo: Members of the Baltimore City Sheriff''s Office stand guard outside a courthouse where Caesar Goodson, one of the police officers charged in connection with the death of Freddie Gray was acquitted of all charges Patrick Semansky/AP
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