From: Law & Society Review
Book Review – Five years since the summer of 2020, when millions of people worldwide took to the streets calling for an end to police violence, law enforcement budgets and surveillance capacities continue to expand. How do police departments resist massive public pressures for institutional change? This question motivates Tony Cheng’s new book, The Policing Machine, which takes readers through his two-year-long ethnography examining how the New York Police Department (NYPD) engaged community councils, clergy councils, and a network of activists in two Brooklyn precincts to manage their organizational legitimacy. Cheng’s analysis marshals an extraordinary array of public sources including, for instance, Twitter data and records he obtained through Freedom of Information Law requests for sound permits and police complaints to triangulate his observations and interviews from meetings and events.