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Mannheim Centre Seminar Series

Seminar series

 

200x200 Tony Cheng

The Policing Machine: Enforcement, Endorsements, and the Illusion of Public Input

Hosted by the Mannheim Centre and the Phelan United States Centre 

Tuesday 21 May 2024, 6.30pm-8.00pm, MAR.1.08, Marshall Building, LSE

The past few years have seen Americans express passionate demands for police transformation. But even as discussion of no-knock warrants, chokeholds, and body cameras has exploded, any changes to police procedures have only led to the same outcomes. Despite calls for increased accountability, police departments have successfully stonewalled change.  

In The Policing Machine, Tony Cheng reveals the stages of that resistance, offering a close look at the deep engagement strategies that NYPD precincts have developed with only subsets of the community in order to counter any truly meaningful, democratic oversight. Cheng spent nearly two years in an unprecedented effort to understand the who and how of police-community relationship building in New York City, documenting the many ways the police strategically distributed power and privilege within the community to increase their own public legitimacy without sacrificing their organizational independence. By setting up community councils that are conveniently run by police allies, handing out favors to local churches that will promote the police to their parishioners, and offering additional support to institutions friendly to the police, the NYPD, like police departments all over the country, cultivates political capital through a strategic politics that involves distributing public resources, offering regulatory leniency, and deploying coercive force. The fundamental challenge with police-community relationships, Cheng shows, is not to build them. It is that they already exist and are motivated by a machinery designed to stymie reform.

Speaker: Dr. Tony Cheng (@tonykcheng) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Duke University. Dr. Cheng studies how the way state power is legitimized shapes inequalities within communities. His book “The Policing Machine: Enforcement, Endorsements, & the Illusion of Public Input” (2024, University of Chicago Press) is about how police resist institutional reforms by cultivating political capital from the community constituents they empower.

Chair: Dr Johann Koehler, (@KoehlerJA) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Policy, LSE. His chief interests lie in the origins, applications, and limitations of the movement to pin criminal justice to robust science — what in some circles is called ‘evidence-based’ justice reform.

The Phelan United States Centre (@LSE_US) at LSE is a hub for global expertise, analysis and commentary on America. 

 

This seminar is free and open to all. Entry is on a first come, first served basis. 

 

 

Seminar series archive

2023/24

DIGIQUEER CRIMINOLOGY AND ADDRESSING THE RISE OF ANTI-LGBTQ+ HATE
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology and the Department of Methodology on 4 October 2023
Speaker: Dr Justin Ellis, Senior Lecturer, Newcastle School of Law & Justice, University of Newcastle, Australia

Two Centuries of Criminology at the Metropolitan Police: 1829-2023. How policing made democracy possible.
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 8 November 2023
Speaker: Professor Lawrence Sherman, Chief Scientific Officer, Metropolitan Police


 

2022/23

ADHD and the Criminal Justice System
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 14 June 2023
Speaker: Professor Lorana Bartels (ANU)


Working towards justice for women; Retrospective and Forward views from the former Victims Commissioner
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 8 March 2023
Speaker: Vera Baird, Visiting Professor in Practice, Mannheim Centre for Criminology


Servitude for a time: From the permanent slavery of the “unfree” to the slavery pro tempore of the free
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 26 October 2022
Speaker: Professor Dario Melossi (University of Bologna)

 


 

2021/22


Orderly Britain: How we solve our everyday problems from dog fouling to double parking
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 8 June 2022
Speaker: Tim Newburn (LSE) 


Forensic Psychologists: Prisons, Power, and Vulnerability
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 25 May 2022
Speaker: Jason Warr (De Montfort University) 


Policing the ‘savage horde’: Settler masculinities and racist violence in the U.S. Mexico borderlands
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 11 May 2022
Speaker: Margarita Aragon (Birkbeck, University of London)


Social proximity, trust, and resilience: What network data tell us about drug markets and enforcement
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 9 March 2022
Speaker: Giulia Berlusconi (Surrey University) 


Prisoner Re-Entry and Neoliberalism
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 1 February 2022
Speaker: Alessandro De Giorgi (San Jose State University, California) 


From criminals to slaves: 'Modern' slavery, county lines, and the cultural politics of victimhood in post-colonial Britain
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 8 December 2021
Speaker: Insa Koch (LSE)


The comparative political economy of punishment in Latin America
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 10 November 2021
Speaker: Manuel Iturralde (Universidad de los Andes)


The neglected role of citizenship status and 'illegality' in intersectional analysis
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 6 October 2021
Speaker: Katja Franko (University of Oslo)


 

2022/21

 

Human Rights and Incarceration in Europe
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 16 June 2021
Speaker: Gaëtan Cliquennois (Nantes)


Children and young people in police custody 
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 12 May 2021
Speaker: Miranda Bevan (LSE)


Digital Technologies and Criminal Justice
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 24 March 2021
Speaker: Dr. Pamela Ugwudike (Southampton)


Where did pre-charge bail go? Explaining the rapid decline of a routine police power after the Policing and Crime Act 2017
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 24 February 2021
Speaker: Dr. Richard Martin (LSE)


The Construction of Guilt in China
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 27 January 2021
Speaker: Dr. Yu Mou (SOAS)


The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of the Modern Penal System, 1829-1913
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 9 December 2020
Speaker: Ashley Rubin (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa)


Roundtable Discussion on Defunding the Police
with Jonathan Simon (UC Berkeley), Jonathan Jackson (LSE),  and Derecka Purnell (human rights lawyer and columnist for The Guardian)
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 11 November 2020


Social Democratic Criminology
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 21 October 2020
Speaker: Robert Reiner (LSE)


 

2019/20

 

Living in hostile environments: Illegality assemblages and everyday experiences of ‘illegality’
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 12 February 2020
Speaker: Nando Sigona (University of Birmingham)


The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 22 January 2020
Speaker: Paul Rock (LSE)


Youth, Justice and Community: An Alternative Vision for Dealing with Youth Crime
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 11 December 2019
Speaker: Jo Phoenix (Open University)


The Pleasure of Punishment
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 13 November 2019
Speaker: Magnus Hoernqvist (Stockholm University/Mannheim Centre Visiting Fellow)


Book launch and symposium (co-organised with the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London): The Politics of the Police, 5th Edition
(by Ben Bowling, Robert Reiner and Jim Sheptycki)
Chair: Betsy Stanko; Commentaries: Alison Wakefield (Portsmouth), Jenny Fleming (Southampton) and Ben Bradford (UCL) 
Hosted by the Mannheim Centre for Criminology on 16 October 2019


 

2018/19

12 June 2019
Challenges, Innovation and Reform in the Policing of Drugs
Panel with Matt Bacon (University of Sheffield), Jack Spicer (University of the West of England) and Niamh Eastwood (Release)

29 May 2019
Contemporary Crime Control in Historical Context:
From the ‘New Police’ to the ‘Transformation of Policing’?
David Churchill (University of Leeds)

20 March 2019
The Prison Boundary: Between Society and Carceral Space
Jennifer Turner (University of Liverpool)

20 February 2019
Hate Crime and the Legal Process
Abenaa Owusu-Bempah (LSE) and Susann Wiedlitzka (University of Sussex)

16 January 2019
Reading Pictures: Art History and the Sociology of Punishment
Eamonn Carrabine (University of Essex)

28 November 2018
Taking Stock of Research on Policing and the Police
Panel with Jennifer Brown (LSE), Penny Dick (University of Sheffield)
and Nigel Fielding (University of Surrey)

31 October 2018
‘Betwixt and Between’: The Evolution of Parole as a Public Policy Concern in England and Wales
Thomas Guiney (LSE), with a response from Nick Hardwick (Royal Holloway, University of London)

26 September 2018
Atmospheres of Crime and Justice
Alison Young (Melbourne)


 

 

2017-18

11 October 2017
The Promise of Ethnography: Gangs, Active Offenders and Policy
Scott Decker (Arizona)

8 November 2017
Law, 'Truth' and Criminal Injustice: Case-Studies in Gender and Punishment
Anette Ballinger (Keele)

6 December 2017
Political Violence: A Typology 
Vincenzo Ruggiero (Middlesex)

10 January 2018
Desistance
Beth Weaver (Strathclyde)

28 February 2018
The Prison Boundary: Between Society and Carceral Space
Jen Turner (Liverpool)

21 March 2018
Transforming Justice: Modernisation in the Lower Criminal Courts
Jenni Ward (Middlesex)

16 May 2018
Panel on ‘Deep Imprisonment' with  Ben Crewe (Cambridge), Alison Liebling (Cambridge), Yvonne Jewkes (Kent)

6 June 2018
The Paradox of Punishment: an Anthropology of Crime, Politics and Welfare at the UK's Margins
Insa Koch (LSE)