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I am pleased to announce the publication of Fire the Cops!, a collection of articles on policing I’ve written over the past ten years, since the first publication of Our Enemies in Blue.

Individual chapters examine the relationship between violence and legitimacy (and crises of legitimacy), the cops’ class position and their interactions with the Occupy movement and the Wisconsin public employee strike, political repression and domestic counterinsurgency, and the tension between demands for accountability and the struggle for abolition. Illustrating the text are beautiful photographs by Bette Lee.

Fire the Cops! can be read as a supplement to Our Enemies in Blue, or on its own, as a series of attempts to apply historical lessons to events as they unfold.

The book costs $20, and if you order directly from me (that is, not from the publisher or though Amazon), I’ll send you both Fire the Cops and Our Enemies in Blue for $30.

UPDATE 12/9/14: OUR ENEMIES IN BLUE IS NOW OUT OF STOCK AND OUT OF PRINT.  You can still order Fire the Cops! from me for $20.

Just send me a check, your mailing address, and a note as to whether you’d like the books signed: Kristian Williams, PO Box 11112, Portland OR 97211

I have a short essay on Hooded Utilitarian about Red Dawn — the original and the remake.  In it, I argue that the politics of the films are more complicated than they first appear, and I ask how it is that we come to interpret political propaganda.

Meanwhile, I’ve written a more straightforward review of the recent World War 3 Illustrated collection.  It appeared in the Progressive Populist last month.

And I’ve written a couple short news notices for DCSC.ws.  One provides an overview of the July-August Monthly Review, on “surveillance capitalism.”  The other points to the Edge City Collective‘s analysis of the geography of repression in Ferguson.

In These Times recently hosted a discussion on police brutality, the Ferguson riots, and the possibilities — and limits — of police reform.  I took part, alongside Frank Chapman, an organizer with the National Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression, Frederick Collins, a Chicago cop and mayoral candidate, and Jessica Stites, ITT‘s web editor and facilitator for the conversation.

The ITT piece follows a similar discussion I was part of on the Marc Steiner Show, and an interview I did with KBOO, both last month.

I gave a couple of interviews on the recent events in Ferguson, and the myriad issues it raised: police violence, racial profiling, zero-tolerance policing, militarization, crowd control, and the various forms resistance can take.

The first was a roundtable discussion on the Marc Steiner Show in Baltimore.  The other guests were a retired cop and a community activist.  The conversation didn’t go the way I expected, in part because no one tried to defend the police, and in part because I was outflanked from the left.

The second was a one-on-one interview with KBOO’s Bill Resnick in Portland.  Among other things we talked about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s essay in Time, “The Coming Race War Won’t be about Race.”  The interview is titled “Our Enemies in Ferguson,” which I think is pretty clever.