In the early 20th century, police departments across America’s cities enhanced their infrastructural power by adopting various tactical, operational, and organizational innovations. Based upon a nested cross-city analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, including a negative binomial regression analysis of the determinants of militarization, this study reveals that these innovations constituted an early form of militarization resulting from imperial feedback. Local police borrowed tactics, techniques, and organizational templates from America’s imperial-military regime that had been developed to conquer and rule foreign populations. Imperial feedback occurred as a result of imperial importers, many of them veterans of America’s imperial-military apparatus, who constructed analogies between colonial subjects abroad and racialized minorities at home. The study identifies an early form of police militarization, reveals the imperial origins of police militarization, and offers a potentially transportable theory of imperial feedback that stands as one among other possible routes to police militarization.

中文翻译：

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美国警察的帝国起源：20 世纪初的军事化和帝国反馈

20 世纪初，美国各城市的警察部门通过采用各种战术、操作和组织创新来增强其基础设施力量。基于对定性和定量数据的嵌套跨城市分析，包括对军事化决定因素的负二项式回归分析，这项研究表明，这些创新构成了帝国反馈导致的军事化的早期形式。当地警察借鉴了美国帝国军事政权的战术、技术和组织模板，这些政权是为了征服和统治外国人口而发展起来的。帝国的反馈是帝国进口商的结果，其中许多是美国帝国军事机构的老手，谁在国外的殖民主体和国内的种族化少数群体之间建立了类比。该研究确定了警察军事化的一种早期形式，揭示了警察军事化的帝国起源，并提供了一种潜在的可移植的帝国反馈理论，作为其他可能的警察军事化途径之一。