Law Enforcement

Florida Is the “Tip of the Spear”

How 287(g) Expansion Fuels Mass Deportations

A collage of people in front of a red background; two protestors holding signs against ICE and soldiers in uniform with guns

The proliferation of 287(g) agreements under Trump has expanded the deportation machine exponentially, and there’s no better case study for what this future of anti-immigrant crusading looks like than the state of immigration and deportation…

Article

A Deep State Affair

How the Right Fell out of Love with the FBI

Faith Lazar details the history of the U.S. Right’s relationship to the FBI and the security state, from the early days of the Red Scare and pro-government conservatives to the anti-state militias that arose in the aftermath of Waco.

Article

Synagogue Safety Beyond Higher Walls and Militarized Police

An Excerpt from Safety Through Solidarity

A group of people standing in front of a synagogue with umbrellas open

In this excerpt of the book Safety Through Solidarity, Ben Lorber and Shane Burley share insights on community organizing to build Jewish solidarity.

Article

Stop the Steal

The Insurgence: Sheriffs—Season 1, Episode 6

This episode explores how constitutional sheriffs’ actions have escalated voter intimidation and suppression, with plans to deputize armed citizens and form “posses” to disrupt election processes and intimidate officials.

Podcast

Mechanisms of Social Control

The Insurgence: Sheriffs—Season 1, Episode 5

Former Sheriff Tim Howard of Erie County, New York.

Sheriffs wield immense power over jails, controlling the lives of a third of the nation’s incarcerated population. What happens when that power goes unchecked, & sheriffs ignore a pandemic’s threat or dozens die from medical neglect?

Podcast

What is FAIR?

The Insurgence: Sheriffs—Season 1, Episode 4

A person's back wearing a vest that says "Police ICE"

What happens when the Constitutional Sheriffs network finds an ally in the White House? In this episode, we uncover how far-right networks leveraged the power of local sheriffs to collaborate with ICE in a nationwide crackdown on immigrants.

Podcast

The Takeover and The Rebellion

The Insurgence: Sheriffs—Season 1, Episode 3

Ammon and Cliven Bundy speaking on microphones

This episode examines a turning point in the growing alliance between far-right activists and local sheriffs in their resistance to federal authority.

Podcast

The Network

The Insurgence: Sheriffs—Season 1, Episode 2

Former Sheriff Richard Mack speaks at a podium

Why are sheriffs aligning with right-wing insurgents? We go back to 2012 in Las Vegas, where a new far-right network of sheriffs held its first-ever gathering. Their mission? To combat what they saw as the “socialist” agenda under former President…

Podcast

The Sundown Siren

The Insurgence: Sheriffs—Season 1, Episode 1

Through firsthand accounts, this episode traces the chilling reality faced by racial justice protesters in 2020—who were violently run out of town by militias in coordination with their local sheriff.

Podcast

An orange gradient background with the words "101 Countering Violent Extremism"

Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programs purport to prevent radicalization and violence by identifying and surveilling communities that are deemed at-risk. These programs, however, only reinforce discriminatory practices against vulnerable…

101

When the Sheriff Is Above the Law

The Rise of the Far Right in Western New York

A man with white hair and white mustache in a sheriff's uniform.

Demographic shifts in Erie county have led to increased far-right activity. Local sheriffs and government officials have ties to a small but active Far Right in Erie County, leading to the legitimizing of these far-right, sometimes violent …

Article

Embodying White Christian Supremacy: From Deputizing Citizens to Flying the Blue Lives Matter Flag

Watch Now: A PRA Roundtable

A woman wearing a Make America Great Again cap carrying an image of Jesus wearing a MAGA hat with "WWG1WGA" on his lapel

In the same breadth as decrying so called liberal identity politics, the U.S. Right declares itself representative of an oppressed White, Christian social class, fly Blue Lives Matter flags in place of Old Glory, and bedeck themselves in the cultish…

Webinar

Blue Lives Matter and the U.S. Counter-Subversive Tradition

A Q&A with authors Jarrod Shanahan and Tyler Wall

On the anniversary of the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, PRA is taking a moment to examine the history of law enforcement’s relationship with the Far Right. In 2021, academic activists Jarrod Shanahan and Tyler Wall published a…

Q&A

Dispelling Illusions and Overlooking Continuities

A Review of Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror

A sign that reads: The War Against Terror is bound up in the War Against Poverty

Reading Spencer Ackerman’s new book Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump (Penguin Random House, 2021) is a…

Book Review

Anti-Sex Work Feminism and the Lived Reality of Criminalization and State Violence

Watch Now: A PRA Roundtable Discussion

Anti-Sex Work Feminists have a (deadly) listening problem: a problem listening to the people whose lives and livelihoods have been made economically and socially precarious by the state and made subject to daily violence by its carceral arm. In this…

Webinar

Far-Right Alignment of County Sheriffs and the Violent Policing of Immigrant Communities

Watch Now: A PRA Roundtable Discussion

The inhumane treatment and deportations of Haitian refugees from our southern border underscores what we already suspected: that the U.S. anti-immigration movement, which thrived under President Trump, has yet another champion in President Biden and…

Webinar

What If 9/11 Had Never Taken Place?

No Department of Homeland Security. No Paramilitarized Border Enforcement. No War on Terror. No Trump.

A white rose placed on the 9/11 memorial

On this 20^th anniversary of September 11, 2001, the attacks and their political aftermath have receded into the distance: an important historical event at the start of the 2000s, long before Obama, the Tea Party, Trump, and the pandemic.…

Article

Subverting State Violence

A PRA Webinar Series

State police standing in line holding batons.

Save the Date From the Rise of the New Right to Trump’s America: Forty Years of Right-Wing State Infiltration and Left Resistance Date/Time TBA Previous Webinars in the Series…

Webinar

A person at a protest holding a board that says "Abolish Prisons"

In 1983, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, now CoreCivic) was founded. That year, approximately 24,000 people were sent to state and federal prisons, bringing the total number of prisoners to 438,830. It was a 12 percent increase from the…

Article

Unmasked: Impacts of Pandemic Policing By Pascal Emmer, Woods Ervin, Tiffany Wang, Derecka Purnell, and Andrea J. Ritchie As of this report’s release in October 2020, the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 was approaching a quarter-of-a-…

Article

insurrectionists clashing with police on January 6th. Men are pushing against each other.

On January 6, the world saw competing representations of the United States, as the Deep South state of Georgia sent two Democrats to the Senate just hours before hundreds of Trump supporters invaded the Capitol with the goal of overturning the…

Article

Reactionary Power in the Union

The Repercussions of Politicized Law Enforcement

Protesters gathered. A woman holds up a sign that read Back the Blue.

On January 6, a right-wing mob took over the U.S. Capitol with relative ease. Among many things this made clear—including the continued threat of far-right violence, reinforced by movement misogyny^[1]—the coup attempt…

Article

Far from Fringe

Why the Far Right Flourishes in German Police and Military

A group of men in german police gear wearing helmets. One man is looking straight at the camera.

Countless pictures of Hitler and swastika propaganda. A refugee photoshopped into historic pictures of concentration camp gas chambers. A Black man being gunned down. These horrific images were…

Article

Paramilitaries at the Polls

What to Expect Around the 2020 Elections

As we draft this memo in the days immediately prior to Election Day 2020, there are dozens of articles and opinion pieces pointing out possible “chaos” or “nightmare” scenarios related to the 2020 elections and what could happen in their wake.…

Report

New England's Joe Arpaio

How a Massachusetts Sheriff Became the Far Right’s Perfect Ally

Two weeks before Donald Trump took the oath of office, Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson walked into a Fall River, Massachusetts, auditorium filled with law enforcement officers from around the county. With bagpipes blaring, Hodgson was sworn in…

Article

Open Map Introduction to Right-Wing Sheriffs County sheriffs have featured heavily in the right-wing imagination…

Map

Webinar 8/13/2020 – Under the Cover of COVID

The murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020 marked the beginning of a dramatic surge in racial justice and politics accountability protests. The Black Lives Matter movement that was at the heart of those…

Map

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Covid!

ReOpen Protestors Turn to Constitutional Sheriffs to Defy State Policies

Coronavirus lockdown protestors hold American flag and gun, April 21, 2020 (Credit: Becker1999/flickr)

In May 2020, a leader of the recent wave of anti-Lockdown protests against government issued Covid-19 directives and ReOpen America founder, Suzzanne Monk,…

Article

A hand gripping a handgun in front of an American flag backdrop

On February 10, 2020 seven Republican representatives in Mississippi introduced a first-of-its-kind bill that raises the possibility of a so-called Second Amendment Sanctuary region stretching…

Article

Small group poses for camera with US and Gadsden flags. In front, a child in pink jacket stands beside man wearing a brown camo jacket with sign pinned on it. Sign reads: "GUN FREE ZONES ARE KILLING OUR KIDS"

This wave of Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions and ordinances reflect the contemporary growth of CSPOA’s ideology.

Article

President Donald J. Trump gives a thumbs-up as he is presented with a plaque of recognition by “The Nation’s Sheriffs,” Thursday, Sept. 26, 2019, at the South Portico of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

Targeting local sheriffs and other law enforcement is an effort by FAIR to complement this direct access to the administration and develop support for its agenda outside the Beltway.

Article

National Sheriffs’ Association’s Winter Education and Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C., Feb. 6, 2017.

Technological tools to increase law enforcement’s surveillance capacity will be showcased at this year’s annual National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA), Education and Technology Expo from June 14-18, heightening concerns regarding law enforcement’s…

Article

Epicenter: Chicago

Reclaiming a City from Neoliberalism

Introduction In many ways, all eyes are on Chicago. The city increasingly finds itself at the epicenter of multiple discourses of violence and safety – from hubristic Presidential tweets claiming federal intervention is necessary to address Chicago’…

Report

Blurring the Border

Immigration Enforcement and Solidarity in Ohio

“Families Belong Together” rally and march in Ohio, June 30, 2018.

The growth of immigration enforcement further north has led many within the immigrant and refugee communities to feel that they, too, live on the border.

Article

Captive Audience

How Prison Ministries Prioritize Salvation Over Justice

As bipartisan reform efforts have steadily drifted rightward, the heavy hand of evangelicals in prison reform efforts has created new kinds of problems. In the eight years I spent researching my book, God In Captivity: The Rise of Faith-Based Prison…

Article

California's Prop 47 Savings in Context

On June 8, 2017, the California Board of State and Community Corrections announced the reallocation of $103 million in savings resulting from the passage of 2014’s Proposition 47 criminal justice sentencing reforms to drug treatment, mental health…

Article

Endgame

How “Bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform” Institutionalizes a Right-Wing, Neoliberal Agenda

More than an actual means of improving policy, “bipartisan criminal justice reform” has become a mantra signifying hope: that people of good will can come together across ideological divides and partisan gridlock to end our country’s overreliance on…

Article

#First100Days Crash Course: Week 13

Political Repression, Surveillance, and PRISONS

The steady expansion of both the power and use of law enforcement in multiple areas of life reflects (and institutionalizes) right-wing worldviews regardless of the political party or identity claims of the speaker. These readings explore the…

Article

Press Release: Verdict in Bundy Militia Occupation Sends Dangerous Signal

Today Political Research Associates, a Massachusetts think tank that monitors right-wing movements, warned that the surprise acquittal yesterday of seven militia members on conspiracy and weapons charges in connection with their armed occupation of…

Press Release

Black Lives Over Broken Windows

Challenging the Policing Paradigm Rooted in Right-Wing “Folk Wisdom”

Regrouping for day 3 of the week of outrage surrounding the denial of justice for Eric Garner on December 10, 2016

When protesters developed a platform to end police violence in the wake of the 2014 police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the first of their 10 demands was to end “broken windows” policing, the law enforcement paradigm…

Article

Tracking Blackness: A Q&A with Dark Matters Author Simone Browne

Simone Browne, an associate professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, describes her new book, Dark Matters: On The Surveillance of Blackness, as a conversation between Black Studies and Surveillance…

Q&A

What Happens When Terroristic Threats Come From Someone Wealthy & White?

The case of David Lenio is opening up many questions about the criminal justice system and White supremacy. Specifically, questions about how terroristic threats are treated when the person making them comes from a wealthy White background versus…

Article

Crime Control & Political Repression

From the War On Drugs To The War On Terror

American political time is often rhetorically divided into before and after the attacks of September 11, 2001. In this model, “before” signals liberty and respect for individual rights while “after” brought increasing restrictions and surveillance…

Article

35 Years of Demonization

The Criminalization of Black Women

Black woman in field facing away from camera with arms in the air crossed at the wrist.

Between 1990 and 2000, the number of people in U.S. prisons and jails increased from 292 per 100,000 to 481 per 100,000. But the number of women in prison rose even more sharply, doubling over the ten-year period.

Article

Using the "War on Drugs" to Arrest Pregnant Women

The War On Drugs, launched in 1971 by Richard Nixon, has been repeatedly exposed as a failure. Yet, the same failed tactics used to fight drugs continue to be used to retain control over women’s reproduction. Drug laws are increasingly being…

Article

Anti-Death Penalty Activism Reinforces Racist Status Quo

While abolishing the death penalty would clearly be a positive step forward, it is a limited and inadequate objective — particularly if achieved without any meaningful discussion of the racism and structural inequalities that produced and continue…

Article

Terror Network or Lone Wolf?

Disparate Legal Treatment of Muslims and the Radical Right

In April 2014, an armed encampment formed at the Nevada cattle ranch of Cliven Bundy as news spread through militia networks about the confrontation between the 67-year-old rancher and the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM began to impound Bundy’s…

Article

Will Our Prisons Overflow with Christians?

Many leaders of the Christian Right, from megachurch pastors like Rick Warren to the top prelates in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, have repeatedly threatened civil disobedience (and worse) over marriage equality. If they follow through…

Article

Defending Justice: How Does Law & Order Play Out in Racial Terms?

You might imagine that an increased emphasis on law and order would result in increased attention to all forms of law-breaking. But addressing police brutality and other forms of State violence clearly is not the focus of law-and-order policies.

Article

Beyond Prisons, Mental Health Clinics

When Austerity Opens Cages, Where Do the Services Go?

Barbed wire in a spiral form outside a brown building.

Neoliberal policies that result in institutional closures carry a cost, too. Could communities seize the moment to redirect resources toward self-determination and liberation?

Article

Sticks and Cages, Carrots & Cash

The Right’s Racist Assaults on Reproductive Freedom

The criminal justice system deploys a variety of methods to deny incarcerated people their rights to have children, and because mass incarceration is a racist project, African American people bear the brunt of this punishment.

Article

AUDIO: Officer Who Pushed CNN's Don Lemon Claims There's a Military Plot For One-World Government

St. Louis County police officer Dan Page is best known for shoving CNN host Don Lemon while the journalist was covering the Michael Brown protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Page has since been suspended after video of his speech to a right-wing militia…

Article

Confronting Hate

Addressing Violence Against LGBTQ and HIV-Affected Communities

While the mainstream LGBTQ rights movement made historic progress in 2013, LGBTQ and HIV-affected people around the country still face appalling rates of prejudice-fueled violence and discrimination. During 2013, Manhattan alone—from Harlem to…

Article

Exploiting the Fear of Exploitation

The Truth Behind the Right's Resistance to Human Trafficking

A sign that says "The Truth shall set the children free."

The abuse, manipulation, and exploitation of others is unacceptable in any context, and should be confronted and stopped. Yet conservative religious groups, lobbyists, and legislators have done little to curb the harmful elements of the sex trade.…

Article

“Banking on Bondage” Beyond U.S. Borders

More recently, the privatization of prisons has begun to expand around the world. The GEO Group, America’s second largest prison corporation, boasts that it is the world’s leading provider of correctional, detention, and community reentry services.…

Article

Guns and Racism

The Critical Issue We're Not Allowed to Discuss

As gun control advocates push for stricter gun laws, and pro-gun groups continue to push back, there’s one important aspect of the debate conservatives tend to fear discussing: race.

Article

CSPOA founder former sheriff Richard Mack speaking at the 2014 PrepperFest Expo at WestWorld in Scottsdale, Arizona on October 26, 2014. (Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) was founded o organize county sheriffs around a mission similar to Oath Keepers—that is, to refuse to enforce laws that they believe are unconstitutional.

Profile on the Right

From the Archives: Righting Crime, Conservative Criminal Justice as Common Sense

Nine years ago, PRA published an article written by our founder Jean Hardisty, examining the conservative model of punishment that has dominated the criminal justice system. Since then, the ‘on the ground’ reality in prisons has grown worse.

Article

Look Beyond Police for Solutions

A Response to "Reconsidering Hate"

The dominant story about race in the United States goes like this: in the past, we had troubling racial patterns, including genocide, slavery, and segregation. Then heroic individuals took spontaneous action and showed America the error of its ways…

Article

Muslim Community Resistance

Organizing & Advocacy in a Time of Struggle

A woman in a hijab smiling, holding a poster that says No Muslim Ban

Since 9/11, the New York Police Department’s Pre-Ramadan Conference and Breakfast has become one of the largest gatherings of Muslim leadership in New York City. Last July, I sat among a sea of suits and uniforms, colorful headscarves, turbans, and…

Article

Michigan Intelligence Operations Center (MIOC) Partners

The Michigan Intelligence Operations Center names the following partners -Michigan State Police (MSP) -Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) -Michigan National Guard -U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) -U.S. Coast Guard -U.S.…

Article

When Secure Communities Meet Border Security

Looking at Michigan’s Fusion Centers

People standing on a platform with a table in front of them with a banner hanging off the table that says "A voice for Working America."

In the Winter 2009/Spring 2010 edition of The Public Eye, we reported on the rise of Intelligence Fusion Centers, created to coordinate the national security intelligence efforts of the Department of Homeland Security, US Department of Justice, CIA…

Article

Law Enforcement Training and the Institutionalization of Islamophobia

According to Slate, Department of Homeland Security has doled out more than $300 million since 9/11 to at least eight prestigious U.S. universities to support “centers of excellence” including the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and…

Article

Michigan Operational Integration Center's (MOIC) Response to Environmental Threat

What’s the scorecard on the Michigan Operational Integration Center’s ability to combine information from different sources when the threat is not terrorism but environmental disaster?

Article

Behavior Profiling: Ineffective and Expensive Security Theater

Behavioral profiling, the latest trend in pre-emptive policing, has been used in America’s airport terminals since 2003 when the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program was implemented by the Transportation Security…

Article

FBI JTTF Agent Hands Private Data Over to Corporate Security Guards

A Texas City police officer, Cpl. Tom Robison, detained freelance photographer Lance Rosenfieldduring the first week of July 2010 for taking pictures of public signs. The law enforcement harassment of Mr. Rosenfield resembles hundreds of similar…

Article

Ban All Racial Profiling Without Exception

On Monday this week, the New York Times announced that its investigation of NYPD “stop and frisk” practices from 2006 through 2010 found police stopped 52,000 people in a small eight-block predominantly black neighborhood called Brownsville. That’s…

Article

Suspicious Activity Reporting Expands to LAX and Amtrak: A Recipe for Racial Profiling

In an expansion of the national Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (SAR), law enforcement and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials recently tied both Amtrak and Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) into the initiative.…

Article

Activists Sue Denver Over Civil Liberties Violations

Since the successful street demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999, police and federal agencies have relied on aggressive and unconstitutional tactics to disperse, disrupt, and dissuade popular protest. Last…

Article

Army Civilian Employee Spied on Peace Activists

The discovery this month that anarchist “John Jacob,” an activist in anti-militarist organizing in the Pacific Northwest, is really civilian Army intelligence analyst John Towery II, shows that those concerned about civil liberties must remain…

Article

Boston Police Snoop at Celebs - Who's Next?

So Boston police troll the Criminal Record Information system to find personal information about local movie stars and sports heroes. We know that from a state audit released on May 6, 2009.

Article

Government Sets Sights on Extremists

Hot Air Leads to Violence? Homeland Security apparently thinks so. The Department of Homeland Security recently warned law enforcement that disenchanted, angry Americans are like kernels of corn under heat, ready to pop at any time.

Article

Thought Police Patrol Virginia

If the Virginia Fusion Center (VFC) isn’t careful, people might think its intelligence analysts are America’s thought police. Take a look at its 2009 Threat Assessment, which talks about “subversive thought” as a marker for violent terrorism and…

Article

Getting the Facts on Guantanamo Detainees

According to a Rasmussen Reports poll released on April 3, 2009, 75 percent of voters say that safety is more important than fairness in determining what countries the US government sends freed Guantanamo inmates. While some element of N.I.M.B.Y.…

Article

One Raid at a Time

How Immigrant Crackdowns Build the National Security State

a person holding a sign that says "they blame the immigrants so you won't blame billionaires"

Most explanations of the relentless pursuit of undocumented immigrants since 9/11 view it as a response to the continuing pressures of angry, mostly white, citizens. The “anti-immigrant climate” created by civic groups like the Minutemen, politicos…

Article

First Amendment Blues

Police Tactics Suppress Free Speech

Three of the cops had jumped out of the white nondescript van and attacked me. They were all wearing ski masks and dressed as anarchist black bloc protesters. I threw up my hands and offered no resistance.

Article

A sign on cardboard says "Fuck 12, Defund CPD, Abolish ICE, Free them All, Defund the Carceral System, Free them all"

Introduction “An eye for an eye” captures the conservative model of punishment in contemporary western societies. That is, when a wrong is done to an innocent person, the wrongdoer must be severely punished in order to “even the books” and stand as…

Article

Calvinism, Capitalism, Conversion, and Incarceration

Why are increased sentences and the severe punishment of those convicted of crimes so popular and prevalent in U.S. culture? Since the late 1970s our society has accepted increasingly rigid and vengeful ways of punishing those convicted of crimes.…

Article

Homeland Security

Low-Intensity Conflict Targets Non-Citizens

Presdient George Bush signing something, with men standing around him.

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the so-called war on terror has provided the U.S. government with a rationale for dramatically increasing state repression. This repression, linked with an upsurge of nationalism and nativist scapegoating,…

Article

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