Policing the State, Second Edition

The manner in which Kathryn Johnston died so tragically at the hands of Atlanta narcotics police on the evening of November 21, 2006, anticipates and informs a number of very contemporary--and extremely volatile--issues that have become closely associated with the name of Ferguson, Missouri. As the "Black Lives Matter" movement makes clear, the issues center primarily around the relationship between racial identity and lethal police violence in the United States today. In this Second Edition of Policing the State, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. attempts to situate both "Ferguson" and "Black Lives Matter" within a relatively narrow historical frame of the two years since Policing the State was first published, as well as a longer history of the emergence of a more violent policing regime and an ever-more intensely carceral society that came on the scene quite suddenly in the United States in the mid-to-late 1980s.

Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. is the inaugural holder of the William M. Suttles Chair in Religious Studies at Georgia State University. The author of seven previous books on various themes in religious history, ethics, and politics, his latest book is Winckelmann and the Vatican's First Profane Museum (2011). He published a previous book with Wipf & Stock in 2008, titled God Gardened East: A Gardener's Meditation on the Dynamics of Genesis.