My sister-in-law has been a lifelong fan of Sean Combs (Puff Daddy as was – Diddy if you will). In March 2024, the redoubtable icon of hip hop found himself, not for the first time, at the receiving end of some unwanted criminal justice attention. The scrolling public watched as searches were carried out in the various properties owned by him across the United States. When my sister-in-law saw the footage – aerial shots of police, guns drawn, pulling up in some mean-looking armoured vehicles – she expressed the view that surely whatever he was accused of must have been pretty damn serious. Why else the firepower? The only explanation was that Diddy was into some bad stuff and posed a serious risk to any law enforcement officer trying to bring him in. Now, as it turns out, many of the charges brought against him were pretty damn serious (the March raid was on foot of a federal sex trafficking investigation), but regardless of whatever Puff Daddy did or didn’t do (a sentence I never thought I would write), scholars of policing know that in the United States today persons suspected of even minor infractions can face a dawn raid. How did this happen, what does it have to do with Ireland, and how might a researcher’s identity play a role in the work they do?
There is no such thing as overkill in American policing. Professor Julian Go breaks it to the reader in the opening sentence of his new book: ‘The militarization of policing is by now complete.’ In Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US, Go adds a final volume to his trilogy of historical sociologies of American empire. One of his longstanding arguments has been, essentially, ‘Exceptionalism begone’. The idea of ‘American Exceptionalism’, that the ‘land of the free’ stands alone in its historical emergence and contemporary position, has been pervasive. Go has maintained throughout that the claim of exceptionalism is certainly not warranted when it comes to matters of empire. Was the United States ever even an empire? For many scholars, the answer had been an emphatic ‘No’, a mindset Go suggests was useful in preserving the lie of America as awesome power wielded responsibly. Refusing to see international exploits as imperialism maintained the moral authority of the world’s policeman. This was perhaps especially important for the country that had turned to Britain after the Second World War and instructed them to let go their empire.
Policing Empires looks at the practices and ideologies of policing, focusing on the US and Britain, where the idea of ‘policing by consent’ has morphed into militarisation and the remaking of the citizen as the enemy. Recent examples on the policing of protest, both in the US and in the UK, offer convincing examples of occasions when police powers would seem to have been deployed aggressively, unnecessarily and disproportionately. It was the policing of protests at Standing Rock and Ferguson in the US which sparked Go’s interest in the subject. By the time the book was being promoted, our screens were instead broadcasting images of the policing of US college protests. As I was writing this piece, a handful of American cities were facing the most literal manifestation of this trend, with Trump deploying actual military to ‘police’ the streets of Washington DC and Los Angeles, with potentially more to follow. Tales of police heavy-handedness in the US and Britain remain shocking, even as they are no longer surprising. Where did this police militarisation come from, and why?
First, Go argues that what we’re seeing isn’t new. Although a degree of presentism finds some escalation post-9/11, Go suggests that militarisation was baked in at the origins of the modern police in the nineteenth century. The establishment of Sir Robert Peel’s London Metropolitan Police was just the first wave, with each subsequent wave made possible by the imperial boomerang – a process which exported militarised tactics, weaponry and knowledge from the peripheries to the metropolitan centre to be used against a racialised Other. The racialised Other at the dawn of the London Met? The Irish. (On which more below.)
Scholars and activists have considered how the terminology of the ‘War on Drugs/Crime/Terror’ has become an important discursive frame for understanding the ways in which the state criminal justice agents operate – branding something as a war allows certain rights to be curtailed in pursuit of ultimate victory. Once deployed for a specific purpose, these tactics can morph and migrate to the realm of everyday policing. Policing Empires traces ‘imperial feedback’ to investigate how police brought the war home, bringing tools from the colonial arsenal to the imperial centre.
Ireland matters in this history of police militarisation. We must go back to the 1798 rebellion. (Who knew that in considering the policing of college protests in the US, we would also be considering the consequences of French support for the United Irishmen uprising?) In a few sentences, the intervention of the French in 1798 had brought the enemy a bit too close for comfort for London. In the wake of the rebellion, and following the Act of Union, Ireland became a laboratory for a new form of policing, characterised by a centralised and (somewhat) professionalised force. Before Peel tried his new police force out on the Londoners, he tried it out on the Irish.
Let’s take a brief excursion through knowledge hierarchies.
Why is it that a book about Ireland’s criminal justice landscape must have ‘Ireland’ in the title, while a book of similar scope on England or the United States does not need a geographic identifier. It’s either Prisons in Ireland, or, if we’re in England, it may simply be Prisons. Like Cher or Madonna, there is no further information required. No particularity, just generality. The idea that what we know about a few prisons in one part of England can translate and is of global interest and relevance whereas a piece of writing on Ireland may be more suited to a parochial Irish studies journal.
We know that there are knowledge hierarchies in terms of what counts as social scientific knowledge and who gets to produce this. Social knowledge does not fall from the sky (you do not lick it off a stone). Authors whose ‘identity’ is visible may be viewed as biased and parochial. Meanwhile, the free-floating omniscient knowers of Anglo-American academia are free to write about anything, and to retain an objectivity that can discern a universal truth.
Anglo-American, here, is a term that is hiding a lot – one of the things it is hiding, sandwiched in the sea between two empires, is Ireland. (It is instructive to consider that one of the earliest pieces of social scientific knowledge on Ireland was produced by the Harvard anthropologists Arensberg and Kimball in the 1930s.) Ireland features as more than a bit player in Go’s book because Ireland, as it turns out, is pivotal in understanding how modern states police their citizens.
Irish scholars obviously already know this. Because of its slightly left of metropole positioning, Irish academia has always had to do a bit of reading from margin to centre to see itself. I’ve taught ‘Intro to Criminal Justice’ to first year university students for long enough to know Ireland’s part in the story of policing.
In Policing Empires, it’s almost jarring to read a major text which brings in Ireland, despite the book emanating from elsewhere (Go is a professor at the University of Chicago, and the book is published by Oxford University Press). Policing Empires is not, therefore, necessarily about Ireland; Ireland is just part of the story. By looking beyond the nation-state and seeing empire’s interconnected web of transnational and transhistorical flows, Go breaks the trap of methodological nationalism.
As well as exploring the creation of a police force in nineteenth century Ireland, he also considers the policing of Northern Ireland during the Troubles. In the preface, he notes his own family history, recalling his previous writing, which looked at the idea of ‘mesearch’. The accusation of ‘mesearch’ can be a rough one – it is levelled at academics whose research frame is judged to be insufficiently separate from their own identity. Think of the new wave of autoethnography, for example, or the autofiction of Karl Ove Knausgård. At its heart, the criticism is that the academic is riding roughshod over scientific integrity and forsaking impartiality. Instead, one must remain the ‘unmoved mover’, observing dispassionately and rationally, and aligning with the holy grail of objectivity.
In this vein, and beginning in on my own biography, I am from Northern Ireland, and more specifically, from the Protestant community in Northern Ireland, born and reared within a light-touch Unionist family. This is the ‘water’. Zadie Smith, in her essay ‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men’, quotes David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon commencement speech:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’
Being able to see the water is the thing.
The water here is the historical contingency and hierarchically structured nature of identity. That’s not the be all and end all, but it is something.
So, with that in mind, when it came to the book’s treatment of Northern Ireland, I was ready to nod along in agreement with the tale that I expected to read. And the story was to go something like this: when the Troubles kicked off the British army was deployed. They came with counter-insurgency tactics imported from Britain’s far-flung colonies, tactics that were brought home to the UK, to Northern Ireland, where they were reworked and deployed against a new suspect population.
It says a lot about my biases, because imagine my surprise when this passage brought me up short:
[The book] is also about imperial assemblages of power, the effects of which have been felt at the periphery of empire – from Madras and Ulster to Jamaica, Singapore, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
Ulster? I was the imperial periphery! Me, the British passport-wielding (cultural) Northern Protestant? The call was coming from inside the house. It made me think of the existential difficulties, when, as in the case of Northern Ireland, one section of the population thinks it lives in the imperial metropole, and another experiences life as a colonial subject.
In my current research, I lead a small team working on the experiences of crime and security at the Northern Ireland border. Travelling the meanderings of this border, PhD researcher Danielle Jefferis and I are hearing first-hand accounts of how people were policed during the Troubles. One of the research sites we’re working in is south Armagh (or ‘South Armagh’, as you may know it), a majority Catholic area that was a locus of Republican activity.
In his book, Go writes about the innovation of the Met’s ‘Special Patrol Group’ and how it borrowed colonial counter-insurgency tactics from Northern Ireland to be used against a racialised domestic threat following the 1981 Brixton riot. One of these units existed in Northern Ireland also, the Ulster Special Patrol Group. One of the areas in which this group became notorious was south Armagh.
In recent years, it has become clear that members of this group were involved in a campaign of sectarian terror against Catholics, not sanctioned by the state, but about which the state had some knowledge. At present, there are ongoing investigations into the activities of the so-called Glenanne Gang and the matter of state collusion in the targeting of Catholics by members of the security forces where these individuals overlapped with Loyalist paramilitary groups. While we await the outcomes of various investigations, it is impossible to know how fully we will ever be able to disentangle these links, or along what timeline such information might finally be available. For now, certain conclusions would seem to present themselves. Not only was the police force in Northern Ireland a heavily militarised and often a sectarian force; not only was it augmented by the Ulster Defence Regiment and further reinforced by other regiments of the British army, but even within this already oppressive ethnonationalist framework, some individual members of these organisations worked independently to target and kill Catholics.
Fast-forward a few decades. In the course of our research, we spoke with two men from south Armagh about the changes in policing since the establishment of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) following the 1999 Patten Report. The two men told us about an experience they’d had. They had been visiting a graveyard to lay flowers and when they left the graveyard they noticed that, parked just in front of their car, was a PSNI car in which there sat two police officers. The two officers were taking a break and eating their lunch. Despite more than two decades having elapsed since the Patten reforms, these men were still not used to seeing police in the area, let alone two officers just sitting in their car, eating lunch. We asked them what they did, and they told us that they sat in their car, for half an hour, just watching and waiting to see what the police would do and, specifically, what the police would do to them. The police didn’t do anything. They finished their sandwiches and drove off.
The two men couldn’t quite get over it. So mundane was the whole experience. So mundane and so surreal. For them, this was the legacy of policing at the imperial periphery.
What am I trying to say? ‘Seeing’ history isn’t a weakness in research, or it shouldn’t be. It isn’t a failure of objectivity, it’s an expanded frame of reference. For some of us, it’s no harm to discover that the call is coming from inside the house. It should be our collective hope to acknowledge that we are shaped by history, but not trapped by it.
Meanwhile, where is Puff Daddy now? Well, in June 2025 he was convicted of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution but acquitted on the more serious charges. Since his arrest, many more Americans will have been subjected to a dawn raid without the publicity or financial firepower. As Michelle Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow, while SWAT raids used to be exceptional, from the 1980s they became the norm for even minor offences. Inevitably, these encounters have left people dead.
Back in Northern Ireland, there have been troubling accounts of police-public encounters also, such as the policing of the Black Lives Matters protests in Belfast and Derry in 2020 or claims of a differential policing approach to this year’s anti-immigration riots. Concerning details have also emerged about the surveillance of journalists working in Northern Ireland. For their efforts uncovering and publicising allegations of collusion in the 1994 Loughinisland massacre, journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey were, in 2018, subject to what they allege was a deeply troubling covert police investigation which resulted in their arrests. Birney and McCaffrey, who were ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing, continued to push back against the police action, including a recent case before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in London which saw many of their complaints upheld. As Julian Go writes, when the police are treating the citizen as the enemy, there are questions to answer.
28/10/2025
Lynsey Black is associate professor in Maynooth University’s School of Law and Criminology. Her first book, Gender and Punishment in Ireland: Women, Murder and the Death Penalty 1922-64, was published in 2022 by Manchester University Press. She is the recipient of a Research Ireland Starting Laureate for her current research, ‘Contested Space: Penal Nationalism and the Northern Ireland Border’.
