In this paper, I trace the social life of law as it shapes—and is shaped by—quotidian motoring practices in urban India. While laws, rules, and codes that regulate humans and vehicles exist on paper, scholarship on how motorists and state actors understand, interpret, and enact these laws is still scant. In the backdrop of a continued public discourse around road safety, rule-disobedience, infrastructural aspirations, and class inequality in the country, how does law mediate driving (and riding, henceforth) in cities? Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, this paper analyses how motorists make sense of traffic law enforcement (with particular focus on speeding) and how these interpretations orient motorists vis-à-vis the everyday state and the city. The material, structural and infrastructural conditions of driving, I ultimately argue, produce situational and contingent relationships to traffic laws and to the state.

In 2013, counter-protests emerged in Japan in response to escalating far-right demonstrations featuring hate speech. Counter-protesters formed a movement described as “Liberal Antifa.” Many used Antifa symbols, yet the movement remained non-violent and distinct from the more militant Antifa in other Western countries. They verbally confronted far-right activists and used electronic noise, helping reduce far-right demonstrations. From the summer of 2025, their visibility once again increased through protests against the Sanseito. This paper examines how, despite these contributions, counter-protesters have been negatively framed across three layers: policing, news coverage, and activist discourse. Using forty-six qualitative interviews with forty protesters (2017–2023) and content analysis of activist publications and news reports, this study investigates the framing process and effects. It shows that these layers mutually reinforced negative portrayals, where policing with arrests on minor charges and media reliance on police press releases or sensationalism prioritised “law and order” over protest rights. Furthermore, activist discourse used historical analogies to delegitimise counter-protesters. This study elucidates the current dynamics of social control in Japan, including the blurring of boundaries between institutional media and online activist discourse, which leads to stigmatisation of counter-protesters.

The article examines the history of British private investigators. Historians and criminologists have shown how the police have never monopolized security or protection. The same can be said about investigation, although this is much less well understood. Private investigators have a key place in the social distribution of investigation, widely portrayed as both heroic uncoverers of the truth and as invasive “snoops.” Their work therefore opens wider questions about who should be able to know what about whom. This article focuses on the period between 1965 and 1975, which saw a range of criminal investigations, public inquiries, and press reports around private investigators, against the background of shifts in data technologies and cultures of “transparency.” This article asks why “invasions of privacy” by private investigators caused so much public concern in this period, but the attempts to restrict their activities largely petered out. It argues that the answer lies in uncertainties of the category of privacy and, more specifically, the unresolved role of the British state. In the context of changing relationships between the state, market, and the wider distribution of investigation, privacy protections did not meaningfully distinguish between who was accessing information and the reasons they were doing so. The article draws on sources including the evidence submitted to the 1972 Younger Committee on Privacy, the papers of the Director of Public Prosecutions, published memoirs, and local and national newspapers.

Queer people in the United States have been historically over-policed, in a long-standing history of criminalization and oppression by law enforcement. Despite scholars having extensively used administrative records of police stops to uncover racial disparities and bias in law enforcement practices, virtually no studies exist doing the same to examine the discriminatory policing of queerness—by itself, and in the intersection with race. In this article, I fill this gap by analyzing administrative records of ∼3,100,000 stops in the United States between 2018 and 2025, looking at whether civilians perceived as LGBTQ+ are disproportionately targeted by the police in post-stop decisions. Through multiple tests, I find consistent evidence that being queer is associated with a higher probability of being searched, arrested, and be victims of police use of force. Then, using an intersectional approach, I test whether the interaction of race with queerness worsens police discrimination. Results show that bias gets worse for racial minorities who are also LGBTQ+, indicating that a dynamic of intersectional, double disadvantage can be found in police discrimination. This research underscores the importance of applying an intersectional framework to police studies, and the ongoing role of policing in reproducing the marginalization of historically oppressed communities.

Police reform has been a cornerstone of activism in Toronto for decades. Activists, organizations, and community groups have applied pressure to politicians, government officials, and other decision-making bodies specifically for them to intervene in a pattern of racialized violence on the part of the Toronto Police force. At the same time, external interventions of any kind have been vehemently resisted by Toronto Police and its Board of Commissioners. This paper will address the question: How does Toronto’s municipal government respond to demands to address racialized police violence in a city that is defined by its diversity and racially harmonious sensibilities? Through a detailed genealogy of Toronto government records and centering the killing of Albert Johnson as an “event,” this paper reveals how Toronto government policies and practices addressing racism and racialized violence in policing become the mechanisms through which to continuously obscure and protect such violence against public accountability and to recirculate Toronto as the city without racism. The paper concludes by drawing parallels to and thus complicating the idea of civilian oversight bodies as a potential solution to police racism, as advocated by politicians, government officials, activists, organizations, and community groups across Toronto and beyond.

Policing has become a popular topic of inquiry in social science literature, but much of this attention has been confined to traditional forms of policing, focusing on state and municipal police departments or, in the case of schools, have focused on disciplinary policies. In seeking to expand the contours of what the scholarly community defines as police, we focus our attention on the origins of K-12 school policing. Specifically, using a multi-modal historical approach, we provide a history of when and why police were stationed in schools in cities throughout the United States. Focusing on the sequencing of events, we show that when the dominant White status quo is challenged by the movement of Black people into formerly White dominated areas and demands are made for education equity from those groups, the state responds by bolstering fears of violence from Black youth and implementing punitive state structures in the form of placing police officers in schools.

Through a qualitative analysis of case studies from Boston in the 1970s and 1980s, this article explores how police officers exploited sex workers in pursuit of department goals and personal desires, all while attracting opposition from sex workers and their allies, who likened cops to pimps. Examining police-sex worker interactions documented in the commercial press, alternative media, appellate court rulings, and police documents, this article incorporates the police-as-pimp metaphor to elucidate the nature of police discretion in the context of sex work. When dealing with sex workers, officers proved willing to choose lawlessness if it helped them accomplish other personal and professional goals. Yet this article goes beyond condemning individual police officers as pimp like. Rather, the metaphor applies to entire law enforcement institutions, whose structures and norms facilitated state exploitation of sex workers.

Organizations are often drawn into the contested work of criminal law enforcement. Through compulsory process and mandatory reporting laws, governments routinely conscript organizations such as hospitals, banks, and schools into assisting in surveillance activities whose legitimacy is socially contested. In recent years, conscription has been particularly pronounced with online platform companies, whose extensive collections of user data make them frequent sources of information and evidence for law enforcement agencies. How do actors in platform companies navigate compliance with such contested laws? While neoinstitutional theories of law emphasize how perceived compliance can protect organizational legitimacy, this article shows how perceived compliance with contested laws can also undermine it. Drawing on in-depth interviews with legal and operations staff for platform companies and law enforcement agents, this article explains how perceived compliance with contested laws can give rise to a legitimacy dilemma that organizational actors manage through symbolic ambivalence: compliance practices that signal both an organization’s responsiveness to a law, as well as its independence from the aims, consequences, and institutions associated with the law. The article also suggests organizational and legal conditions that shape how platform actors engage in symbolic ambivalence. These findings extend neoinstitutional theory by showing that the relationship between perceived compliance and legitimacy is not straightforward, but contingent, and by explaining how organizational actors manage the legitimacy dilemma brought about by that contingency.

Comparing the coverage by The New York Times and two Black newspapers of four episodes of protests about police violence in New York in the late 1990s reveals key differences in the implicit political agendas of the two sources. The New York Times implicitly reinforced dominant political institutions and focused on short-term issues. It emphasized partisan politics as protest motivations, quoted police extensively and often printed material sympathetic to police, and typically portrayed protesters as angry or motivated by politics. Black newspapers emphasized collective resistance to long-term systemic problems with police, moral condemnation of police violence, the connection of current protests with past oppression and struggles, the involvement of youth, and Black immigrants’ growing awareness of anti-Blackness. The findings of this study explain how racialized collective memories and collective identities are formed, sustained, and/or erased in interaction with institutional politics in media discourse.

Internal security has been a governance priority under Xi Jinping. How does China’s budget reflect this prioritization? This research report presents updated data on China’s internal security spending, 1992–2022, revealing a mix of continuity and change. Domestic security expenditure continues to rise, more than doubling from 2012 to 2022, but has risen mostly in proportion to the People’s Republic of China’s overall expenditure. The balance between central and local expenditure has shifted further towards local spending, which, in the context of rising local fiscal constraint, may increase pressure on local public security bureaus. The Ministry of Public Security continues to receive the largest share of domestic security spending, while the proportion of internal security spending allocated to the People’s Armed Police (PAP) has decreased, probably reflecting the reorganization of the PAP in 2017–2018. Spending per capita and relative to GDP continues to be higher in locations that are politically sensitive, including Beijing, Tibet and Xinjiang.

Tens of millions of Americans are subject to drug and alcohol tests each year. How did this biochemical surveillance become so routine and normalized? This article examines the historical emergence, contestation, and gradual acceptance of the first biochemical surveillance technology, the drunkometer—the predecessor of the breathalyzer—which analyzed blood alcohol content in the breath. In the 1930s, public concerns over drunk driving grew alongside mistrust of rapidly expanding policing and security apparatuses. In this context, the drunkometer emerged as a seemingly commonsense solution to the problems of drunk driving and police mistrust, using a scientific technology to decenter law enforcement testimony and, in turn, streamline difficult cases. By examining contestations to the drunkometer in newspapers, court records, and other public documents, we detail how courts and the public gradually accepted the biochemical constitution of the body as the legitimate domain of authoritative institutions. We introduce the concept of “chemical citizenship” to analyze this authoritative institutional use of biochemical technologies to extract and deploy “the truth” about substance use as a mode of governing access to the rights and benefits of citizenship. We apply this concept to demonstrate how the drunkometer laid the foundation for contemporary drug testing.

This article examines the negotiation of ethnopolitical categories in wartime Nazi Germany by analyzing Gestapo investigations into accusations of “friendliness to Poland” against German citizens of Polish descent in the industrial Ruhr conurbation. By relying heavily on denunciations and informing, the Gestapo incentivized ordinary Germans in the Ruhr to identify perceived “dangerous outsiders” to the Volksgemeinschaft. Some therefore relied on longstanding anti-Polish tropes to frame accusations in the racial categories of the Nazi state. But while many such accusations alerted the Gestapo’s attention, they frequently masked a pursuit of personal issues and presented officers with significant investigatory difficulties. Unlike the generally brutal treatment of ethnolinguistic minorities in Nazi Germany, Gestapo officers often did not simply employ blanket repression in these cases. They frequently considered accused individuals’ socioeconomic productivity and “commitment” to Germany, characteristics that defendants stressed, thus highlighting the often contingent, unstable process of ethnic boundary formation in Nazi Germany.

Media attention to policing has brought a proliferation of narratives seeking to contextualize incidents of police violence. Here, we test whether exposure to such narratives shift Americans’ opinion or behavior. To do so, we first identify and track the media prevalence of two of these narratives: one focused on racial bias in policing and a second focused on the dangers of the profession. Despite the presence of these narratives in media, we find, experimentally, that public opinion about police violence is stable, regardless of the media narrative used. Finally, to better understand these null results, we use a content analysis of open-ended responses to uncover the demographic and ideological characteristics that are most more deterministic of their reactions to police violence. Altogether, these findings indicate attitudes about policing and planned political participation are ossified and unresponsive to media narratives.

This paper examines the consequences of post-release management programs, arguing that these initiatives extend penal power beyond formal sentencing through mechanisms such as surveillance, discretionary policing, and information sharing. While prolific offender programs are framed as risk-management strategies rather than punishment, they operate in ways that mirror carceral control, restricting autonomy and increasing individuals’ susceptibility to criminalization. Drawing on qualitative interviews with crime analysts and police officers, I analyze how the prolific label structures police interactions, justifies heightened scrutiny and reinforces recidivist assumptions that shape sentencing and enforcement decisions. The findings challenge clear-cut distinctions between carceral and non-carceral interventions, highlighting how penal control functions fluidly across legal and administrative domains. By linking empirical findings to broader theoretical discussions of punishment, surveillance, and risk governance, this study contributes to ongoing debates on the expansion of state power in contemporary criminal justice.