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Stuart Schrader

@stschrader1 · Twitter · 2024-10-13 12:05 UTC

In my new article “Cop Cities Mock Cities,” out yesterday in @LAReviewofBooks, I step back and ask how we got to the point that 70 police training facilities are planned. When it comes to contemp urban political economy, what does the cop city represent? https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/cop-cities-mock-cities

These mock cities have long genealogies, implicating a vast imperial war-making apparatus, but they also can tell us something about the structure of feeling that governs policing, its fantasy of control without commitment. As sites of urban development, these mock cities also represent a hesitant orientation toward the city as such, substituting a confrontation with its reality with a realistic fantasy.
Each individual Cop City (uppercase) is a particular site-specific investment vehicle for local redevelopment backed by a unique growth coalition. Taken together, however, they embody a pattern. The cop city (lowercase) is a generalized orientation to urban risk management that relies on the claim that well-trained police can predict, pacify, and control-and that policing alone will suffice.