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IMPERIAL POLICING launch event at Walls Turned Sideways with the authors, Emmanuel Andre, and Sherrif Polk

October 25, 2024 @ 6:00 pm 8:00 pm CST

Andy Clarno, Janaé Bonsu-Love, Enrique Alvear Moreno, Lydia Dana, Michael De Anda Muñiz, Ilā Ravichandran and Haley Volpintesta will join Walls Turned Sideways to celebrate the launch of their new book, Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago, at 6:00 p.m. on Friday, October 25. They will be joined in conversation by Emmanuel Andre from the Cook County Public Defender’s Office and Sherrif Polk from Circles & Ciphers.

This event is free and open to the public. Masks required and provided.


Imperial Policing examines the role of local law enforcement, federal immigration authorities, and national security agencies in upholding Chicago’s highly unequal social order. Analyzing the weaponization of data and the coordination between local and national agencies to suppress communities of color and undermine social movements, the Policing in Chicago Research Group offers a critical perspective on the abolition of imperial policing, both in Chicago and around the globe.

“The Policing in Chicago Research Group exemplifies how abolitionist practitioners can and must strive to create autonomous collective approaches to research and praxis. Crucially, Imperial Policing models a form of scholarship that decenters ‘the academy’ and exposes the repressive tendencies of its supervisory apparatus: universities, liberal foundations, and the state. Chapter by chapter, this book radically deepens abolitionist analyses of U.S. domestic warfare, reminding us once again that to police Chicago is to police the world (and vice versa).”—Dylan Rodríguez, author of White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide

Imperial Policing is an intellectual, methodological, and political tour de force in abolitionist sociology. With historical depth, empirical richness, and theoretical heft, it interrogates a critical but still underexamined feature of contemporary carceral politics and state repression: the racialized production and mobilization of data. A must-read for scholars and activists alike!”—Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, author of Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change

Walls Turned Sideways

2717 W. Madison St.
Chicago, Illinois 60612 United States
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