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This chapter examines the connections between systemic police terror, solidarity, collective consciousness, emotion work, and negative health outcomes for black Americans. While much social science and criminological research has focused on police brutality and the black male without much consideration of the collective effects of police violence on communities of color, we shift the conversation from brutality to systemic terror by incorporating the cumulative and collective effects policing has on communities of color, beyond those directly victimized via interactions with the police. In this chapter, we introduce and theorize about the deeper connections between policing, black communities, and emotional labor and the relationship(s) these factors have on negative health outcomes.

The first season of HBO's Lovecraft Country is based on Matt Ruff's 2016 novel and explores the horrifying world of H.P. Lovecraft and the very real Jim Crow-era racism that plagued the United States in the 1950s. The series, developed by Misha Green and produced by Jordan Peele, places Black protagonists at the centre of a Lovecraftian horror story. The Black characters have to face shoggoths, grand wizards and magic but they also have to deal with and escape very realistic horror, in the form of racist police violence and white supremacy. By bringing the Black characters into the centre – often the metaphorical villains of Lovecraft's stories – the series allows for a new layer of meaning to Lovecraft's fear of the other. Atticus, Leticia, Uncle George, Hippolyta and the rest of the cast are struggling to escape the everyday real and supernatural manifestations of racism. Their struggle can be seen as a reflection of the actual struggle of the Black communities today, who are trying to liberate themselves from the shackles of oppression and systemic racism once and for all, so all people regardless of the colour of their skin, gender, race and ethnicity can finally be free. Lovecraft Country can be read as a symbolic yet crucial contemporary representation of this struggle for freedom. The series was created before George Floyd's and Breonna Taylor's murders, but it came after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile and Sandra Bland. Once the viewers search deeper and look past the dark mansions, the wicked wizards and the shoggoth monsters, they can understand that the supernatural and fictional land of Lovecraft Country is not a distant place after all.

This paper documents the case of a young girl who went missing from a country track in 1972. It considers the function of roads in her disappearance, and the importance and terror of roads generally in Australia. For roads have a role in Australia that is vastly different to smaller, more populous nations. Roads in Australia are absolutely crucial to the maintenance and sustenance of society. So too are the cars and other vehicles we use upon them, but they are just as paradoxical in their effects. As Elizabeth Jacka and Susan Dermody (1988, p. 113) put it so plainly: ‘our cars kill us, and without them we would die’. The case of the girl who vanished from a road is not an unusual event in Australia. However, it has led to a conjunction of long-lasting effects, particularly on the community of Mackay, that are. The case has never been solved, not due to a desire to solve it, but ironically because of the very methods initially employed to do so.

The chapter situates the role of narrative power in shifting media policy amidst calls for police abolition, defunding, and media reparations following the documentation of media harm. Community-based narrative intervention is not only focused on those aspects of reporting and media that deal with harms perpetuated by discourses on public safety, but also about developing what I refer to as “collective narrative self-determination” to reflect the needs and desires of communities. The chapter documents how grassroots media efforts attempt to reconfigure the space of media policy and shift narratives toward the community power needed to reckon with the consequences of vital public resources being systematically defunded for budgets and policies that entail greater police powers. The chapter concludes this is an important moment for community-based initiatives and interventions that can shift media narratives around policing and urban violence and also shift who is served by those narratives, contributing to the long-term process of building narrative power and racial justice across a wide range of community and media organizations.

This article provides an overview of the opportunities enforcement has to undertake activities to reduce harms caused by drug markets. Four pathways are open to the police in relation to drug harm‐reduction: reducing the amount of drug use; reducing the harm that drug users experience; reducing the harms that drug users impose on others; and reducing the harms caused by drug markets. It is the latter pathway that is the main focus of this article, which draws on a range of international examples. After highlighting that ‘not all dealers are equally destructive’ it is argued that one aim for enforcement could be to shape the drug market by making the most noxious forms of selling uncompetitive relative to less harmful practices.

Over the last 40 years or so, the concepts of terror and terrorism have permeated and infused political, social, and economic thought and lexicon. Given the symbolism and obvious ways in which the terms become socially constructed, terror and terrorism appear as ripened enough concepts for interactionist scrutiny. In general, interactionists have stressed that concepts applied to terrorism become useful to elites for promoting a master narrative along the lines that “free nations” must coordinate efforts and spend resources to defend against terrorist threats. We wish to extend this interactionist analysis in the following pages to provide a perspective on terrorist threats as evolving and emergent concepts, sensitive to historical and social changes. Drawing from a small number of Government and commercial print and online sources in order to identify patterns that emerge from the language, we reference terrorism handbooks starting from the 1970s to current, post “9/11” handbooks. We propose evolutionary timeframes demarcated by substantive events and changes in how we define, understand, and respond to an abstract threat made tangible and concrete. In effect, we suggest that such publications provide insight into how the dynamics of credibility associated with government, media, and “expert” assertions have framed public understandings of threat and danger. These handbooks serve as a heuristic model to draw general patterns and themes that demarcate significant time periods in our understanding of terrorism and responses to terrorism.

Purpose: To critically explore the implications of the August 2020, decision by Carleton University’s Institute for Criminology and Criminal Justice (ICCJ) to end to its intern program with the Ottawa police, the RCMP, Correctional Services Canada and Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre starting in Fall 2021.

Findings: In contrast to the negative reaction of Kevin Haggerty to this decision, the authors offer a strong but qualified endorsement of the ICCJ’s move to put an end to its internship with coercive institutions. The ICCJ strategically mobilized discourses of anti-Blackness and inclusion in response to the murder of George Floyd and the individual and communitarian traumas of Black, First Nations and Metis and students colour in its program. The ICCJ did not, however, substantively engage with the ways that criminology, sociology and the university are complicit through the legitimation practices and processes of ideology, professionalization and research in the ‘violence work’ of the state. The critique, ethics and logical conclusion of abolitionism are obfuscated.

Methodology/Approach: The authors explicitly draw on the Black Radical Tradition, Neo-Marxism and radical neo-Weberianism to sketch research possibilities that resist the university as a space of violence work, both in criminology and in the professionalization of policing.

Originality/Value: The debate between the ICCJ and Kevin Haggerty is an important opportunity to critically analyze the limits of critical criminology and lacunae of a debate about abolitionism, anti-criminology and university-state nexus as a site for the production of ideological and hardware violence work. Grounded in the Black Radical Tradition, neo-Marxism and radical neo-Weberianism, the authors sketch a framework for a research agenda toward the abolition of criminology.

The purpose of this paper is to examine and propose an extension of Lundman's theory. Lundman presented a theoretical framework that predicted the evolution of policing from an informal to a formal type. Essentially, he stated that the types of policing in society were determined by the patterns of solidarity, élite interests, and crimes rates/images of disorder. This research argued that the theory could be extended not only to predict the type of policing but also the quality and quantity of policing. Particularly, this research explored the relationships of the élite interest and the rates/images of criminality to policing practices by examining evidence from the research literature about India.

Research studies about Indian police practices were extracted from the major western criminology, criminal justice, and policing journals. Using content analyses, two propositions were analyzed. The first proposition was that the evidence from the literature would suggest that threats of the disadvantaged and marginalized groups against the dominant élite groups would influence the quality of policing. The second proposition was that the evidence from the literature would show that rates and images of criminality would influence the quantity of policing.

Very little quantitative literature exists to examine the propositions using meta‐analysis. The existing policing literature from India that was examined indicated support for the propositions.

As the literature was mostly anecdotal and normative, a more dynamic view of the relationships among the variables should be explored using the positivist approach.

Police characters are influenced by the social order. Systemic reforms often fail because of the obstacles presented by the social and political influences. Therefore, a larger social reform should be undertaken.