The goal of this chapter is to introduce systemic racism and critical race theory. It begins with the story of Breonna Taylor, a successful health-care professional and twenty-six-year-old Black woman who was killed in her home in Louisville, Kentucky, by plainclothes White police officers in 2020. It galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement against systemic racism, the approach to racism that recognizes that all institutions and persons play a role in it, including us. This chapter reviews the history of police violence in the US, the defining features of systemic racism and popular myths about it, and some major themes in critical race theory, a framework that can help us see why race and racism were invented and why they persist despite reform. Colorblind racial ideology, multiculturalism, and anti-racism are discussed as strategies that deal with racism. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project. It ends with a discussion of anti-racism, police violence, and justice for Breonna Taylor.

Police killings of Black Americans are influenced not only by specific law enforcement situations but also by corruption – where corruption in a state is more extensive, police killings are more frequent. State-level factors may seem remote from local policing, but in fact the constitutional and political connections are strong and deep-rooted. Police killings of Black Americans also reflect contrasts in the states’ political cultures and aspects of communities’ racial composition. Median income levels and the economic gaps between Black and White populations also influence the patterns of police killings. Lobbying activities, political party competition, and police unionism contribute to overall levels of accountability. These diverse and often deep-rooted influences, many of them linked to the expectations communities have of their police and the attitudes of police toward their work and the surrounding communities, show that dealing with the problem of police killings of Black Americans will require fundamental changes of many sorts.

Chapter 6 elucidates why structural reform has remained off the table in São Paulo since Brazil’s transition to democracy. It focuses on three specific events since the 1980s, instances when reform seemed imminent but ultimately fell short. Two instances were selected due to being repeatedly identified in interviews as especially salient cases of egregious police violence that led to calls for reform; the third instance, meanwhile, was an ultimately failed effort by a sitting governor to enact police reform. Chapter 6 presents a comparative sequential analysis of these sets of events to demonstrate how the state’s Military Police exerted pressure to limit policy options and how fragmented preferences and the absence of political competition led political leaders to conclude that structural police reforms would not be electorally advantageous. Considering the cases as sequences of events that fail to bring about comprehensive structural reforms helps to elucidate the police’s remarkable continuity in São Paulo State. This comparative sequential analysis demonstrates how long-term institutional persistence has been driven by the absence of an electoral counterweight to the structural power of the police due to enduring fragmentation of societal preferences and weak political competition in the state.

Chapter 3 probes why São Paulo State’s police have yet to undergo comprehensive structural reform in the decades since Brazil’s democratic transition. Brazil’s transition entailed considerable military reforms in accordance with democratic principles but no comparable effort to reform the country’s police forces. I illustrate how the state’s Military Police leveraged its control over coercion to cultivate structural power vis-à-vis civilian political leaders, through both the selective provision of security in politically beneficial ways and the strategic withdrawal of service. The chapter describes how the Military Police succeeded in constraining policy options available to politicians, and how politicians benefited from accommodating the police. These conditions raised the threshold for police reform in São Paulo over the last three decades, favoring institutional persistence despite the prevalence of widespread extrajudicial killings. I show how the fragmentation of societal preferences over policing and security - rooted in differences in citizens’ experiences with police along lines of race, class, and geography - has yielded little electoral incentive for politicians to enact reform. Instead, a large segment of São Paulo’s citizens demanding weakened legal restrictions on the police’s use of coercion with little external accountability have provided a constituency for politicians favoring authoritarian coercion.