30864 - The Sociology of Policing: Violence, Power & the Future of Public Safety

Description

As prison populations skyrocketed in the 1980s and 1990s in the U.S., sociologists increasingly turned their attention to punishment, documenting the causes and consequences of mass incarceration. Yet the discipline paid little attention to police, the state agents who control entry into the criminal legal system. Since the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and the meteoric rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, however, a new cohort of sociologists have turned their attention to the distribution of state power through local, federal and border policing. In this book forum, we will bring together four new books on the sociology of policing in the U.S. to grapple with the current inequities and crises as well as consider how sociology can help us to both explain and challenge police power.

Michelle S. Phelps, The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America (Princeton University Press, 2024)
Michael Sierra-Arévalo, The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing (Columbia University Press, 2024)
Samantha J. Simon, Before the Badge: How Academy Training Shapes Police Violence (NYU Press, 2024)
Irene I. Vega, Bordering on Indifference: Race and Morality in Immigration Enforcement (Princeton University Press, 2025)

Sub Unit

• Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance / The Sociology of Policing: Violence, Power & the Future of Public Safety

Presider

• Tony Cheng, Duke University

Panelists

• Michelle S. Phelps, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

• Michael Sierra-Arévalo, University of Texas-Austin

• Samantha Jones Simon, University of Arizona

• Irene I. Vega, University of California-Irvine

Discussant

• Monica C. Bell, Yale University

Session Organizer

• Jennifer Carlson, Arizona State University-Tempe