Studies of the effects of the police on crime suggest that a 1 per cent increase in local police numbers will reduce local crime by 0.5 per cent. As for the effect of crime on the wellbeing of residents, a leading British study estimated that a 0.5 per cent fall in crime would increase average life satisfaction by 0.0011 points (out of 10). In this chapter we combine these findings, calculating the BCR for one more police officer, using the Treasury approach, which values one extra point of wellbeing for one year at £15,258. The result is a healthy BCR of 12:1.

In Chapter 8, the ease of weaponizing technology is discussed, using the example of machine learning and general AI. The examination applies the lens of technological determinism to the growth of public–private efforts to develop AI that can harm and kill humans. Examples are provided of promising litigation in the US that would allow for attaching civil and criminal liability to human actors responsible for the conduct of AI.

The third arrest was of Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh), since Ducroux’s address book led police directly to him. Nguyen’s arrest was critical not only because police were getting closer and closer to the FEB network in Shanghai (he reported directly to Rudnik), but because his incarceration by British police in Hong Kong demonstrated so clearly the vitriolic anti-communism of the imperial powers (especially Britain and France). Nguyen’s arrest also provided an example of the ways Soviet networks functioned to free important agents.

This chapter moves the argument forward by detailing two local protective mechanisms that primarily protect communities through ties to state agents: disrupting operations and reducing targets. Disrupting operations encompasses activities that make it more difficult for state agents to deploy discretionary violence. This intervention ranged in practice from relatively quiet outreach to local police officials to more contentious efforts to provide sanctuary to individuals in grave danger. Efforts at target reduction involve limiting the prevalence and salience of communities susceptible to populist violence (in this case, drug users). In the Philippines, parish-based drug rehabilitation programs, usually in partnership with local state officials, were the most common form of target reduction. After using the parish-based survey to chart the overall distribution of these activities, the authors empirically substantiate their operation through qualitative and quantitative evidence, including parish interviews, experimental evidence from a sample of plausible Philippine police personnel, and survey evidence of ordinary Filipinos.

In the Philippines, the Catholic Church’s high levels of “moral authority” facilitated its local protective interventions. This chapter tests the generalizability of community protection to Brazil and the US, unique cases that nonetheless share key characteristics of populist state violence with Duterte’s Philippines. However, original data analysis replicating, as closely as possible, the analysis in the Philippines does not reveal strong protective effects. Neither is police violence in Rio de Janeiro related to the location of Catholic infrastructure, nor does clergy inclusion in police reform build support among American audiences. The chapter then explains this divergence with the Philippines by turning to lower levels of “moral authority” for religious leaders in Brazil and the US. Crucially, moral authority in those two cases is tied to powerful social cleavages (socioeconomics and race in Brazil, and partisanship in the US). In such environments, religious leaders may possess opportunities for narrower intervention, but will struggle to generate broader community protection.

Organizations can behave narcissistically and criminally. Fraternities support a culture that encourages members to cheat and engage in predatory sexual behavior. White supremacist groups engage in retaliatory acts against minorities, Jews, immigrants, and others. Law enforcement agencies, while not narcissistic by nature, attract individuals who hold minorities in contempt. The border crisis led to contracts with Southwest Key Programs, whose staff sexually abused immigrant children.

Distilling an extensive literature on the First and Second Great Reform Acts, Chapter 3 argues how the Whig view of the period – a view that still largely informs political science research today – overstates both the progressive ideology of reformers and the democratizing effects of the two bills. It also includes two periods that are difficult to fit into a reformist narrative and are subsequently downplayed in most accounts of the English democratization. The first is the several decades of political reaction marked by the crushing of the Luddite movement (1811–1813), the massacre at Peterloo (1819), and the passing of the Six Acts (1819). The second is the repression of the Chartist movement between 1834 and 1848. Both episodes reveal how the British state generally responded to mass protests demanding political change. Rather than conceding to the demands of would-be revolutionaries, the state developed its coercive forces – most notably the police and the Home Office – to meet the new challenge. Even after the Second Great Reform Bill of 1867, political elites still felt they had largely dodged democracy.

Using a sensational case of murder from 1899 as a lens, this chapter explores how little the Belgian capital’s authorities really knew about and how little they actively engaged with what they referred to as la pédérastie. It shows that the police lacked both the mandate and the means to focus on something they clearly deemed a minor nuisance. Unlike in Britain and Germany, homosexual relations between consenting adults in private were not illegal. Unlike in France, where the legal situation was similar, Belgium’s more decentralized make-up impeded the formation of effective and efficient law enforcement authorities even in big cities. No unit epitomized the growing pains of an underfinanced police force in a booming city more than the vice brigade. Policing sex in public was difficult and unrewarding. As the records of dismissed cases reveal, the police and the courts regularly found themselves instrumentalized in the settling of personal scores and they were often forced to retreat in frustration over mutual or unverifiable accusations. Most exasperating of all was the insurmountable wall of secrecy, solidarity, bribery, and obstructionism they faced when dealing with the queer world.

Chapter 3 shows that although urban denizens increasingly sought to prevent loss, possessions still went missing on London’s streets. In response, Londoners established and developed systems of reclamation. Institutions such as the Goldsmiths’ Company and the Bank of England were important in developing systems for dealing with lost plate and bank notes. However, alongside these systems, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, the capital’s residents also benefited from the great age of print culture. Londoners printed handbills and had them pasted up around the city, but a big change took place with the onset of newspaper publications. Newspapers such as the London Gazette and daily newspapers such as the Daily Courant included advertisements for lost watches, strayed dogs and servants who had runaway. As the chapter shows, the efficacy of such notices was at times bolstered by thief-takers, but as the century rolled on, the advertisement themselves became more popular. The chapter shows how urban denizens often sought to simply reclaim their possessions rather than pursuing the prosecution of the thieves who so often ‘found’ them.

For most of the period from the end of the Ancien Régime to 1818, there was a form of state censorship of the stage: a bureaucratic censorship process. This chapter stretches as far back as 1402 to understand the culminative measures that shaped a play’s path on the eve of the Revolution – in both Paris and the provinces – before analysing the numerous and, at times, conflicting Revolutionary orders relating theatre surveillance. It argues that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (August 1789) transformed such censorship from a necessary part of the creative process to a coercive force. It also demonstrates that although the Revolution is remembered for the ‘freedom of the theatres’ with the law of 13 January 1791, bureaucratic censorship was swiftly reintroduced, and the process was expanded during the Revolutionary decade and solidified further under Napoleon and the Restoration.