Upstream - [TEASER] The Imperial Boomerang w/ Julian Go

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

This is a free preview of the episode "The Imperial Boomerang w/ Julian Go." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber you will have access to bi-weekly episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. The imperial boomerang, colonial feedback, fascism returning home. These are all phrases that convey the same basic idea—that the mechanisms of repression that originate in the colonies will, inevitably, return back home to the core where they will be utilized against not only marginalized populations here, but against the entire population as a whole. The boomerang exists in many different forms, but the form that we’ll be focusing on today is the form of police militarization. And we’ve brought on a terrific guest to walk us through how it all works. Julian Go is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and author of the book Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US, published by Oxford University Press. In this conversation, we explore the history of civil police forces starting with the Metropolitan Police Force of London back in the early 19th century. We explore the colonial roots of this historic force and how its architects were inspired by military tactics, tools, and technologies from England’s colonies in Ireland and elsewhere. We explore how racialized subjects were criminalized at home and treated as colonized subjects were abroad, how different waves of police militarization in the US mirrored various colonial wars and occupations through the past few centuries, and how the most recent wave of militarization is just one flow of a continuously rising tide of colonial repression boomeranging back home, the only differences being the subjects targeted and the specific tactics and tools utilized to shut down dissent and criminalize a racialized subproletariat that capitalism both relies on and simultaneously disdains. Further resources: Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US, by Julian Go Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe #CareNotCops Related episodes: Abolish the Police (Documentary) The End of Policing with Alex Vitale Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism w/ Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante Our ongoing series on Palestine Black Scare / Red Scare with Charisse Burden-Stelly Stop Cop City with Keyanna Jones and Matthew Johnson Artwork: Berwyn Mure Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode. Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making Upstream possible. We genuinely couldn't do this without you. Your support allows us to create bonus content like this and provide most of our content for free so we can continue to offer political education media to the public and help to build our movement. media to the public and in the imperial peripheries coming back to the United States itself to be used on citizens. And so this is this boomerang effect that I'm talking about. And I find it a useful and important term for realizing how, you know, what happens over there in the colony or in the periphery, whether it be in the colonial Philippines or even Vietnam in the 1960s or today in Iraq or Palestine,

what happens there is not separate from what happens here. These forms of violence and repression and coercion that are developed elsewhere come back also here to impact everybody. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond.

The Imperial Boomerang. Colonial Feedback. Fascism Returning Home. These are all phrases that convey the same basic idea that the mechanisms of repression that originate in the colonies will, inevitably, return back home to the core where they will be utilized against not only marginalized populations here, but against the entire population as a whole. The boomering exists in many forms, but the form we'll be focusing on today is the form

of police militarization. And we've brought on a terrific guest to walk us through how it all works. Julian Goh is professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and author of the book Policing Empires, Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US, published by Oxford University Press. In this conversation, we explore the history of civil police forces, starting with the Metropolitan Police Force of London back in the early 19th century. We explore the colonial roots of this historic force, and how its architects were inspired by military tactics,

tools, and technologies from England's colonies in Ireland and elsewhere. We explore how racialized subjects were criminalized at home and treated as colonized subjects were abroad, how different waves of police militarization in the U.S. have mirrored various colonial wars and occupations throughout the past few centuries, and how the most recent wave of militarization is just one flow of a continuously rising tide of colonial repression boomeranging back home. The only differences being the subjects targeted and the specific tactics and tools utilized to shut down dissent and criminalize a racialized

subproletariat that capitalism both relies on and simultaneously disdains. And now here's Robert in conversation with Julian Goh. All right, Julian, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. Of course. And so to start, I'm wondering if maybe you could just briefly introduce yourself for our listeners and maybe tell us a little bit about how you came to do the work that you do. So I am a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago

and I've been a professor for about 20 years now, 25 years, 25 years yes, and you know I'm a sociologist but I'm also a historical sociologist and a theorist, which means that I'm very interested in various kinds of theory, post-colonial theory, Marxist theory, critical theory, but also as a historical sociologist, I'm very interested in the past, but also how the past continues to shape the present. And so this most recent work of mine is exactly about that. It's about how how can we make sense of militarization, police militarization today in the United States. And the other case I look at is Britain. And to answer that question, I go back in time and I look in the past and and to see what's happened in the past to essentially answer the question how did we get here and the here I'm talking

about is really and this is how I kind of came to this project really is this fact of militarized police repression and brutality that of course we've seen since George Floyd and and that in 2020 really alerted us to this. But for me, it kind of began earlier actually with Ferguson and Standing Rock and noticing for me how militarized the police are. I actually am not a policing scholar. As a historical sociologist, most of my work had been in studying US imperialism, overseas colonialism by the US and Britain. But what I was observing, what was going on on all of our TV screens and social media in Ferguson, I was reminded of not

only the police repression and images that I'd seen from the 60s in Watts and other areas of the United States. I was also reminded of my own work on colonialism, where there's always been repressive forces like militarized policing and where the police and military actually work very closely together and where the whole logic of colonial rule is exactly about coercion and violence and repression. And you know we operate from this assumption that the Metropole, you know, us living here in the United States is different from the colonies either the colonies today or the colonies in the past. And one of the

things that I started to see when you start thinking about it and witnessing the way in which the police in the United States are so militarized is a kind of the beginnings of an obliteration between that presumed line between sort of the metropole and the colony. And so I really got interested in this. I was really curious about how we got here.

Yeah, thank you so much for that. And one thing that I really appreciate in policing empires is just how granular you get with the history, right? And like you go into a lot of detail tracing police militarization right back to the beginning, really, of the first municipal police force in London, and also really demonstrating in a lot of detail, just like how the line between the metropole and the periphery, how porous and blurred that line is. And of course, we're seeing right now, of course, what could be described as an escalation of maybe the fascistic or overly militarized elements

of policing and the blurring of that distinction right now is quite like in our faces, but it's also very much a part of a continued cycle that has been going back for centuries. And we'll get into all of that in more detail soon enough, but before we do, maybe I'd also just love it if you could talk a little bit about what personally brought you to this question of like police militarization, right? Like, what was it about that question that struck you and led you to sort of write Policing Empires?

Yeah, so as I said, part of it was really just my almost an intellectual fascination and also a political fascination with what was going on obviously, what we had and what we see and what I saw were police dressed up in military gear using military grade weapons, MRAPs and so on, facing down US citizens, treating them as if they're enemies of war, while those citizens are the ones paying the taxes for those forces. And this was one of the things that sort of reminded me of an almost, well, as you say, a fascistic and for me, definitely a colonialist kind of structure. And that resonated with me also on a kind of a personal level, because one of the reasons I'd become interested in studying and becoming a historical sociologist and looking in US imperialism is because of my background. My parents came to the US from the Philippines, the Philippines of course being one of America's largest former colonies, conquered by the

American military and basically for over a century ruled both formally as a colony and informally the United States long supporting, for example, dictatorial regimes. And one of the things that the United States did after colonial rule to maintain power was to prop up not only the Philippine military in the region and Southeast area region, but also to prop up dictators and authoritarians, not least the dictator Fernandez and Marcos. And my parents had been persecuted by Marcos. My father's family was sort of on the target of Fernandes and Marcos, and my parents had been persecuted by Marcos. My father's family was sort of on the target of the Marcos regime. My father actually came to the US in the 60s as a doctor to sort of train, and he was planning on going back. But by the time

it came to leaving the US, Marcos had taken taken power and he was enacting a kind of brutal police state, an authoritarian regime backed by the United States, and so my father couldn't go back. So there's a kind of deep personal history here that also connects to my interest in policing. And so all of these things came together. I really just wanted to do the research and dig deeper into what was happening. And of course, one of the privileges of being an academic is that I had time and resources to actually look into this and dig deeper into the historical record.

Got it. Yeah, thank you so much. And I do really think it's always helpful to hear a little bit about what drew an author to the topic personally. And I think that's always just kind of, you know, a fascinating insight and part of the overall story. All right, so let's get into the nuts and bolts of policing empires. And what I would say maybe one of the main theses or at least a major takeaway for me from the book is how the militarization of the police is really not some aberration right from the original intent of policing. It's not gonna be a surprise to most people listening that the police are quite dramatically militarized right like it doesn't take very much attention to notice that. But the interesting thing is so going back in time.

Your book demonstrates that this has kind of always been the case. And so my first question for you is this question of whether policing began as a militarized institution, as a militarized project, which goes against what the traditional story suggests? That's a great question. And there are a couple things here that are puzzling that are also sort of behind my book and behind my interest. One is we all kind of recognize that the police are militarized. And by militarization, I not only mean the use of sort of arms and military type equipment, but also just sort of warlike attitude and organizational structure to the police and a whole sort of culture. So militarization as a term captures all of those things and definitely I think your listeners, it's hard to object to the notion that police today are militarized, but a couple things. One, it's really not supposed to be this way. The model of policing that we, you know,

theoretically uphold in the United States is called the civil police model, and you mentioned civil policing. And for those readers who don't know this history, it's really important to understand that this is a relatively new model of policing. It was born in England in the 19th century, and then it spread to the United States. And the model is this, and that is that police should be civilian under civilian control, and it should be more or less peaceful different from the military.

The people who created this civil police model were in England, the very first civil police department and in fact I would say the very first modern police department as we know it was born in 1829 in London. It was the London Metropolitan Police and it was created by this guy, Sir Robert Peel, and his colleagues. Peel was Home Secretary at the time. And one of the reasons for why he wanted to create this police force is because there actually hadn't been a proper police. Prior to that time, both in England and in the United States, you did not actually have

police departments. You had volunteer watches, you had constables. It was basically the idea that citizens should more or less handle crime themselves. And so there was no police department. And Peel created the first police department, the only Metropolitan Police. This was a uniform centralized, professionalized police agency, the first of its kind. And this model spread to the United States. But one of the reasons why Peel wanted to create this thing and create this civil police force is because to deal with civil disorder or major issues like strikes or protests and riots, before the police were formed in England, state

authorities had to rely on the army. They had to call in the British Army, they had to call in the military, and over time this became not only expensive, but it became politically problematic because the military and the army ended up killing protesters, for example. And Peel and others sort of came up with this idea that we need to have a civil police force

so that we don't have to call in the army. And Peel expressly said that this civil police force so that we don't have to call in the army. And Peel expressly said that this civil police force should be a force able to deal with crime and disorder so that we don't need to call in the army. Now what's puzzling is that in a sense, the civil police model was, because of this history I just said, is supposed to be non-militarized, but it actually was militarized from the beginning. And here I get to the second point. We use this term militarization, the press and people use it, but actually one of the things that I found out and what I argue in the book is that

militarization is a useful term to some degree, but it also covers up what's really going on, which is, I would say, a kind of coloniality to policing. In other words, what we call militarization is really just the appropriation and use of tools of coercion in the colonial site, in the metropolitan site. That is, Peel, for example, and when he created the so-called Civil Police, he actually had a very militarized vision that he had taken from the police forces in Ireland, in colonial Ireland, and forms of policing of slaves in the British Caribbean. And these are colonial forces, there's colonial policing which actually predates what we call policing. And Peel really just took the idea of a civil police in

London from these colonial forms. And so this is what I call a boomerang effect. That is, Peel created this London Metropolitan Police, but he modeled it after the Dublin Metropolitan Police, the Royal Irish Constabulary, or this colonial force that would become the Royal Irish Constabulary, these heavily armed, militarized, hierarchical structures. And Peel basically structured the London Metropolitan Police, according to that model. For example, we take it for granted today that police should be a military

hierarchy with sergeants and so on. But that was a decision. That was a choice that Peele made. And, and, and he did it by modeling, by copying essentially what had been going on in colonial Ireland, these colonial forces I mentioned. So, they named, for example, this military hierarchy, they named the sergeants in it as part of that hierarchy that was modeled directly after the military, more precisely

after these colonial forces. So from the very beginning, this is a long answer to your question, but I think it's a really important question. From the beginning, police forces have been militarized. In the United States, it's the same thing. But more precisely, from the beginning, police forces have been militarized by officials and police reformers copying colonial tools and using tools of coercion that have been developed in the colonies. So this is what I mean by this boomerang effect. We could talk more about that.

But the basic story is, militarization is not something that's happened in the United States since the 90s or even the 70s. This is from the beginning of policing itself. Baked into the DNA, so to speak. And I think it's really interesting too, one thing that I remember reading in the book is how, especially during the creation of this London Municipal Police Department, but I think this is a thread that goes through the entire history of policing, is the simultaneous PR campaign that comes along with that in order to mask the fact that the militarization and the sort of colonial sort of war like essence of the police was a foundation of it,

masking that and making it seem like it's a civil police force that's there to sort of protect and serve. So I think that's a really important aspect of it, too. And just a quick side note. So Sir Robert Peel, as you mentioned, so you mentioned this in the book, people referred to the police as Peleys, I think, back then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was watching a TV show recently, which is based off of a book, it's called Say Nothing. Yep. And it's based on a book about the troubles in Northern Ireland.

And there is a scene where they refer to the police as the Pele's and because I had read your book, I proudly turned to my partner and I was like, oh, and I like, yeah, that came from. So yeah, shout out. Thank you. Thank you for educating me on that. Yeah, well, no, actually, there's this TV, another TV show right now. I've been watching it. It's fascinating on prime called Blue Lights. And it's about the police in Belfast. And they're called also, you watch that show and they're all referred to as Peelies because you know, Peel himself actually was responsible for creating some of the colonial forces in Ireland, in colonial Ireland when he was basically governor of the colonies. And then he basically goes to London, becomes Home Secretary and brings back from Ireland these police forces.

So even in the early days in England, the London Metropolitan Police were also called the Peelers or the Peelies, but they were definitely called that in Ireland because they were seen as a tool of this colonial tyrant of Robert Peel. So yeah, this language that lingers about, I was just in Belfast recently, and the Peelers or Peelies to this history exactly that we're talking about. So it's really great that you made that connection. This was a clip from our Patreon episode with Julian Goh.

You can listen to the full episode by becoming an Upstream Podcast Patreon subscriber. As a Patreon subscriber, you will have access to bi-weekly episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You'll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Sign up and find out more at patreon.com forward slash Upstream podcast.