In Violence Work Micol Seigel offers a new theorization of the quintessential incarnation of state power: the police. Foregrounding the interdependence of policing, the state, and global capital, Seigel redefines policing as “violence work,” showing how it is shaped by its role of channeling state violence. She traces this dynamic by examining the formation, demise, and aftermath of the U.S. State Department's Office of Public Safety (OPS), which between 1962 and 1974 specialized in training police forces internationally. Officially a civilian agency, the OPS grew and operated in military and counterinsurgency realms in ways that transgressed the borders that are meant to contain the police within civilian, public, and local spheres. Tracing the career paths of OPS agents after their agency closed, Seigel shows how police practices writ large are rooted in violence—especially against people of color, the poor, and working people—and how understanding police as a civilian, public, and local institution legitimizes state violence while preserving the myth of state benevolence. "An exceptionally sophisticated exploration of the nature of policing in relation to 'violence work.' . . . Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, and faculty."   -- D. O. Friedrichs ― Choice "[ Violence Work ] reveals a great deal about what we do and do not know about state-sponsored violence as well as how best to get there. . . . Seigel portrays state repression in a relatively new light, leading to refreshing insights about theory, data sources, and unexamined hypotheses. The book kills fascists because if you follow the logic contained within it, you are led directly to perpetrators of violence, as well as the varying types of institutions in which they are found." -- Christian Davenport ― Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics “ Violence Work  is an eye-opening, detailed and timely book that, for its historical approach, is an unusual appraisal of police legitimacy, which may not only to attract the attention of scholars and students of political science and criminal justice but also of policymakers, especially in this time of discussion of dismantling and defunding the police.” -- Nusret M. Sahin ― Ethnic and Racial Studies “By looking at the short life and extended afterlife of the Office of Public Safety, Micol Seigel identifies how policing has always violated the ‘mythic borders’ that define it—between civilian and military forces, the state and market, and the local and global. Violence Work addresses urgent questions regarding contemporary policing and its supposedly increasing militarization, excessive brutality (with impunity), relation to corporate capital, and spread beyond local and national borders. It is required reading for anyone interested in state violence.” -- A. Naomi Paik, author of ― Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II Micol Seigel is Professor of American Studies and History at Indiana University, Bloomington and the author of Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States , also published by Duke University Press. Violence Work State Power and the Limits of Police By Micol Seigel Duke University Press Copyright © 2018 Duke University Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4780-0017-4 Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, INTRODUCTION Policing and State Power, ONE The Office of Public Safety, the LEAA, and US Police, TWO Civilian or Military? Distinction by Design, THREE "Industrial Security" in Alaska: The Great Public-Private Divide, FOUR Corporate States and Government Markets for Saudi Arabian Oil, FIVE Professors for Police: The Growth of Criminal Justice Education, SIX Exiles at Home: A Refugee Structure of Feeling, CONCLUSION Reckoning with Police Lethality, APPENDIX, ABBREVIATIONS, NOTES, BIBLIOGRAPHY, INDEX, CHAPTER 1 The Office of Public Safety, the LEAA, and US Police In September of 1967, Otto Kerner brought an important witness to testify to the presidential commission he chaired, the US National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. The witness was Byron Engle, then director of the Office of Public Safety, a federal agency established in the early 1960s to provide allied foreign nations with training for their police. "Mr. Engle," Kerner explained to his colleagues, "will talk about the lessons learned from civil disorders in both this country and abroad, and the fundamental basic principles which apply internationally." Kerner and his commission were charged with understanding the causes of the terrible urban disturbances of the mid-1960s, and preventing their recurrence. Crucial to their conceptualization of both the problem and the solution was, as Kerner signaled, a convergence of foreign and domestic spheres, with the hinge provided by a border-breaching body of police. There is a great deal worth drawing out from this snapshot of a US national policy discussio